Socialism and Stalinism / Competition - book

Socialism and Stalinism

Che Guevara’s been dead forty years. He was maybe the most radical; the most to be admired in what some still call ‘Stalinism’.

But how much did the Left lose when he was executed, what losses were endured when no end of ‘Stalinist’ liberation movements & parties slowly strangled themselves and what damage was done when various ‘socialist’ states - generally ruled by homburg wearing geriatrics - expired during the night from their own decrepitude?

Stalinism

First - on terms. It’s traditional amongst Trots to describe all those in membership (or close to) the ‘official’ communist parties - those that were in fraternal relations with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as led by Stalin - and those latter descendents or splits by parties from this tendency (and which still kept much of the politics, even if only to bury them deep) - as ‘Stalinists’.

So today this terminology may be still be used about those expressing widely differing politics - from the Parti Communiste Français to the rulers of China to Naxalite guerrillas in India.

Even just in Britain, the term Stalinist was and still could be used about some collaborationist, drippy, reformist feminist separatist from the ‘Eurocommunist’ end of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) right through to a member of the ‘Tankie’ faction of that organisation - the sort of person who didn’t think Beria went far enough in the 30s purges of oppositionists (including Trotskyists) in the USSR.

It may still be appropriate to use the word ‘Stalinist’ about some historical figures or in referring to the very few who really do argue for the politics of Uncle Joe today.

Stalinism is also, perhaps with a small ‘s’, used to describe undemocratic manoeuvres of Left parties. Be it meeting packing, political slurring or the spreading of disinformation, the Stalinist left in Britain once certainly excelled at this practice e.g. Trotskyists = fascist collaborators. But I’ve no doubt, that given a bigger stage, some of today’s Trots would also excel in ensuring compliance with their line in ways which would get more and more degenerate as their influence grew.

So I much now prefer the term ‘official communist’ to ‘Stalinist’. With their Left influence near dead in the UK, these ‘official communists’, such as those in the Communist Party of Britain are now no more than just Left reformists anyway - no worse and sometimes even better than not dissimilar thinkers to them in the Labour and nearby Left.

Cuba

I’ve yet to see a good Marxist analysis of present day Cuba. Everything I’ve ever read, including from Trots, bases its view on present day Cuba on the events of 50 years ago e.g. because it was a peasant supported guerrilla army that seized power, with relatively little involvement from workers, it could never have developed into socialist regime.

Whilst all that may be true, I’d be interested to know a lot more about, for example, what would happen to you if you tried to organise a political party there now that was in favour of communism - in defence of the Revolution but in opposition to the current regime. I suspect you’d end up in a prison cell.

But that’s not to say that Cuba’s all bad. I’d defend the revolution against its overturn but I suspect the most progressive elements of it died long before its true hero did.

When Che Guevara was captured In Bolivia and was awaiting execution, he was asked by one of his tormentors whether he was Argentinean or Cuban? The way I remember his answer (or possibly a myth that was later created?) is that he replied along the lines of 'I’m Argentinean, Algerian, American, Australian etc etc, you understand?'

Would that I’d have the wit to think of such a correct reply at such a time. I’d rather spend an hour reading about the ‘Stalinist’ Che than spend a few minutes in the company of some ‘Trotskyists’ of my acquaintance. He was someone to be admired.

Trotskyism

Trotskyists supported the ‘defence of the deformed workers state’ i.e. the Soviet Union. The USSR was a healthy workers state at the start but became deformed at some time in the 20s. We’d also support the defence of ‘degenerated workers states’ - that is those countries that became ‘workers states’, but in a stillborn manner, in the period after World War II and which included all of the Eastern bloc, China, Indochina, Cuba and, according to some, a few other places such as Syria (and Burma?). But in all these countries we thought a revolution was needed - a political revolution to otherthrow the rulers - who were a caste, not a class (they couldn’t pass on inheritances, etc) - rather than a social revolution.

There was a fault line between those of the ‘The USSR etc. is state capitalist’ view - and whose best known proponent in Britain was the SWP with their slogan 'Neither Washington or Moscow’ - and other Trots. It’s also why that tendency wrongly didn’t support North Korea (and its official communist allies) in the Korean War, although it doesn’t explain why they then (correctly) later supported North Vietnam in the Vietnam War. This division is sometimes defined as that between ‘Orthodox Trotskyism’ and ‘State Capitalist Trotskyism’. There are also a few ostensible Trots who subscribe to different formulations.

(Orthodox) Trotskyists would defend all workers states to the hilt against attempts to restore capitalism and so would support them, unconditionally, in any wars against capitalist countries, regardless of cause, or even would support them in dealing with internal elements that supported the return of capitalism (even if the demands of such oppositionists - such as for national self determination - were formally justified).

I do still hold to those views - I was convinced at the time, and remain convinced by the arguments made by those such as Trotsky in his ‘In Defence of Marxism’ (even though that text was written before World War II). But this argument is now just academic, save for a couple of places. And despite being reflected and distorted through no end of crazy mirrors, I think today’s Cuba and probably North Korea (despite being a monarchy!) still meet the criteria - as would anywhere else where capitalism hasn’t been restored (although I think there probably aren’t any other such states).

I remember the way that we’d look with contempt at the politically naïf amongst us - or close to us - who’d sometimes politely query the uncompromising line of ‘Defend the Soviet Union’ that was one of the main points in the programme of ‘Classfighter’ - the youth movement of Socialist Organiser and Workers Power in the 80s. Thinking of it now, I’m reminded of the not too dissimilar way that immature school student members of the NF would flick Nazi salutes at all and sundry, just to give the appearance of being uncompromisingly hardcore. I’m sure you’d have been considered suspect by them even for suggesting you’d be interested in an explanation for their conduct and is was the same for us about that particular slogan.

Events intervene

But events can stretch or even break what looks good on paper. The above was the policy - but could it always be held to? In the eyes of the Spartacists, who are correctly accused of Stalinophilia by most other ostensible Trotskyists, I was on the “side of the CIA and the Madonna” in supporting Solidarity in Poland in its actions against that country’s regime. Likewise I would’ve supported the uprisings against the Stalinist regimes that occurred in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. These movements were originally workers movements, despite the misreporting of, for example, the Hungarian events as being purely nationalistic. It wasn’t written in stone that Solidarity would help restore capitalism to Poland and that its leaders, like Wałęsa would play the reactionary role that they later did. It was right - and consistent with Trotskyism - to support them.

When the Stalinist Left mattered

Some of my convincing, about these arguments about the nature of the workers states, was supplied by the empirical evidence before my eyes. Whole swathes of the planet were liberated by these regimes - Cuba, in particular, committed large resources to fight the troops of the apartheid regime in southern Africa. No end of national liberation movements, and ruling classes in developing countries whose policies put them in the crosshairs of the major capitalist countries, benefited from the largess of the Soviet Union and its allies.

Nonetheless I have always concluded that the prime motivations - the reasons why the Eastern bloc correctly supported Nasser during the Suez War or various Palestinian guerrillas in their actions against Israel - were near always because of the geopolitical advantages in doing so for Moscow and the rest - and rarely because of the progressive nature of that which they supported. There is some grit in the smoothness of this argument - what could the Cubans have gained in Africa? - but I think it’s generally true.

Guerrillaism

I wouldn’t be as hard on guerrillaism as many other Trotskyists. Without the guerrillaism of the IRA and the INLA, Catholics in Northern Ireland may still just be organising petitions and peace marches protesting against their latest clubbing by the RUC. Ian Smith could still be lording it over Rhodesia. Indeed sometimes not more that guerrilla formations bore major fruit - such as in the despatch of the British colonial rulers from Aden. But like all cross class liberation movements, these forces are bound to unravel once the immediate objective is realised - the removal of the Brits, French etc and those who have taken power then need to decide how Algeria or Angola or wherever is to be run.

Life under ‘socialism’

It was always wrong that somebody couldn’t have easily just got up and relocated from Karl Marx Stadt in the German Democratic Republic to Köln in the Federal Republic. The building of the Wall through the middle of Berlin was a demonstration both of the weakness of the GDR and also its anti-democratic tendencies.

But ‘socialist’ countries were also never fairly judged by the standards applying elsewhere. I don’t know if you’d have been shot at if you’d been seen by border guards attempting to skip over the border, say between Austria and Italy, before Schengen, but I’m pretty sure that if you’d been, say a British or American nuclear scientist, with access to military secrets, and you’d announced your intention to give it all up and go and live in a Russian Orthodox monastery in Crimea during the period of the Cold War - you’d instead have ended up being framed for something, or been killed - you'd have never got to leave the West.

There’s no denying that near all in the workers states voted to move westwards - politically and sometimes literally - once they had the chance, such as from East to West Germany. If we’re socialists, we pride ourselves on being the best democrats and supporting the rights of workers to change their society. It’s when they clearly also want to overthrow ‘socialism’ as they will have seen it, or reintroduce capitalism, as it actually was - such as in the dying days of the Soviet Union - that holes in orthodox Trotskyism theory start opening. I don’t have any Polyfilla to fill in that particular question.

Gravediggers

Neither as the makers of shoddy consumer goods nor as places that promoted free expression did the Stalinist regimes excel. But it was as the gravediggers of revolutions that they did beat all comers.

These actions included telling the Greek communists (at the end of World War II) to submit instead of going for it; the collaborationist policies of the postwar French and Italian official communists and the inability to either move beyond supporting guerrillaism (amongst what were usually splits from official communism) or, conversely, the inability to support the same guerrillaism (as one of a few tactics) by the official communists in the same country.

Maybe above all it was simply the murderous turning on revolutionaries, even on their own side - such as during the Spanish Civil War - that shows how distant from Marxism were the policies of that branch of ‘communism’.

Official communism in Britain - from rabid reformists to poodle pups

I saw the tail end of the above tendency. CPGB members at union meetings and elsewhere would happily combine, even with the Right, in order to defeat the ‘ultraleft’ Trots and all in a futile hope of building broad ‘across class’ coalitions. Their former magazine, ‘Marxism Today’, was the epitome of the defeat of Leftism. In its pages they’d scrabble around in a vain attempt to try and stitch up some sort of popular front with which to move Britain even just slightly towards the Left - this got no traction except with a few media types. It was no great step for Sue Slipman OBE, a former president of the National Union of Students to move quickly from being a member of the Executive Committee of the CPGB to joining the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s.

Two-way traffic

Whilst some official communists were recruited to the ranks of Trotskyism, after the hard face of their master was occasionally exposed - such as in the brutal crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 - the traffic was more in the other direction. This pressure to drop revolution, and move instead to the militant sounding Left reformism of the ‘official communists’, has always caused damage amongst Trots. It’s always an easier option to capitulate. Pablo and more wrongly bought the idea that tension with the ruling castes of what was the Soviet Bloc meant that some of these official communist parties could move in the direction of socialism. What was probably once the largest Trotskyist party in the West, the SWP (US), passed over into official communism and that explains their current day praisesinging for ‘socialism’ in Cuba.

This pole of attraction is now all but gone but that still doesn’t stop the weaker Trots moving toward the hole in the ground that it left behind. So Alan Woods, leader of Socialist Appeal / International Marxist Tendency, and a former leader of Militant writes this week that, “We have no doubt that had (Che Guevara) lived he would have moved towards Trotskyism and in fact he was already doing so before his life was cut short.”

In fact these words (which remind me very much of how the SWP US claim that Malcolm X was moving towards them before his assassination) demonstrate instead the continuing uncomfortable position of Trotskyists. We’re hanging on by our fingertips to the undercarriage of the Left whilst being severely battered by every bump in the road. This leads to the flakier end of the movement rashly letting go, whence they’re crushed by the following truck - the one driven by Chávez, in the case of Woods.

A gamble untaken

I’d be interested to know how Stalin personally set on the course that he did. His early Bolshevik career included some work that is still well regarded by Marxists, such as on nationalism, and his early activities including time spent expropriating banks for the party. But individuals don’t make history. It’s events that made Stalin, not vice versa. The Soviet Union was, early on, faced with a harsh choice - it could go all out to spread revolution throughout the world or it could play it safe. If it went for broke it’d either be successful - and its communism would remain healthy - or the capitalist world would combine and commit everything and manage to destroy this mortal threat to them. Stalin and co. decided not to gamble. They raised the drawbridge and engaged in a futile attempt to build socialism in one country. Whilst the former course could have led to the early extinguishing of socialism, the latter just delayed the inevitable demise of their regime for 70 years.

But the making of that decision probably wasn’t the most significant moment in helping capitalism survive. Capitalism had been overthrown in Russia - the imperative was to spread it quickly, particularly to another major country. I know such a view could be criticised as being terribly determinist but if ever I was asked the question ‘Communism, where (and why) did it all go wrong? I’d answer like this. I’d reply on the ‘why’ - There is a necessity of ideological purity. The correct line is important above all else - small differences in actions now can have fundamental impacts in the long term, as the slow death of Stalinism demonstrated (the fact that it is near impossible to sometimes work out the correct line is perhaps our most fundamental problem). But on the ‘where’ - I’d say this would’ve been in a room in Berlin. It would’ve been where some Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (or predecessor party) faction was meeting on some date in the period after the end of World War I.

And in that room they made whatever wrong decisions that meant there was to be no German socialist revolution. When I work out the address, I'll erect a plaque. Amongst the sauerkraut, a few squabbling comrades determined the course of the rest of the 20th century. If only Che Guevara or, a lot better, some Trots had been at that meeting - then maybe the Daily Worker would be selling a lot more than the Daily Mail.

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Competition - book

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