The most complete expression of Stalinist theory (and of any theory) is its methodology. Methodology is the result of the complex interaction of social base, theoretical analysis and practical activity, and the struggle with rival forces and rival methodologies. As it matures, it is transformed from effect into cause and in the end it is inseparable from the activity, practical and theoretical, of those who develop it.
a. The methodology of Stalinism is a methodology foretold by Marx, a combination of uncritical positivism and uncritical idealism. Its roots in bourgeois philosophy we shall take up later. The uncritical positivism is its gross materialism, its quantitative theory and practice of accumulation; its uncritical idealism is its theory of the role of intellectuals, the Plan and the party.
For such a theory, serious theoretical analysis of social phenomena is impossible. It knows no other way of achieving its aims than the method of the decadent bourgeoisie, empiricism and violence. Its theory, from the theory of ineffective demand to its analysis of the Negro question in the United States, every move in Russia, is the result and expression of empiricism and then a search in the closet of Marxism for something that will fit. If nothing is found, a new garment is created, and the Marxist label attached.
Its most glaring failure is the analysis of its own and rival movements. The analysis is entirely subjective. Stalinism inherits from Lenin the theory that the Second International was the international based upon super-profits of monopoly capitalism. There for Stalinism analysis ceases. The Stalinists, in harmony with their whole analysis of Russian social relations, are simply the most honest, the most devoted, the most intelligent, enemies of capitalism and lovers of socialism. Leaders are sincere or they betray, due to malice, error, ill-intention, cowardice, bribery or corruption. Workers understand or they do not understand. As a rule, they do not understand, being corrupted by capitalist decay and the plots and deceptive propaganda of the bourgeoisie.
Every crime of Stalinism against Leninism - Popular Front, the Wallace movement, the refusal to orient toward the seizure of proletarian power - all have the one ideological base, the theory that the workers are incapable of understanding or acting. This is not mere hypocrisy. The Stalinist method is in origin and results truly capitalist, in the last stage of capitalism. In Russia and outside it is the same. Moscow trials, vilification of political opponents as thieves, agents provocateurs, etc., are part of the system. Stalinism aims at the subordination of the mass, its demoralization and confusion, the destruction of its capacity to think, its conversion into a large disciplined force able to trust no one or look anywhere else but to the party. Stalinism carries on a deafening agitation for mass action on separate issues which create no organic change in the qualitative relation of labor to capital. It seeks to substitute for the workers' accumulation of their historical experiences, immediate action on every occasion through committees organized and led by the party apparatus. It seeks to place the masses as much at the disposal of the party as the proletariat is at the disposal of capital.
b. The most striking opposition to this methodology is Leninism between 1914 and 1923. The gigantic labors of 1914-17 were aimed at finding a material base for the failure of the Social-Democracy to make any resistance to the imperialist war. Lenin began with an analysis of the specific stage of world capitalism, the basis of every Marxist methodology. In Imperialism he traced the specific mode of production, concentration, the role of colonies, the super-profits.1 These super-profits were the basis of the creation of a labor aristocracy, the specific labor organization of capitalism at a specific stage.
The very structure of imperialism was, as he endlessly repeated, a transition to something higher, a higher form. The proletariat was inherently revolutionary and its revolutionary struggle for democracy was intensified by the oppression and the organization imposed upon it by capitalism itself. This was the basis of the foundation of the Third International. Without this theory, he insisted, "not the slightest progress" could be made. He repudiated attributing political activity on any comprehensive scale to "malice" or "evil intention". Nor did he make speculations about consciousness. The actual movement to the seizure of power was one thing, but revolutionary consciousness and desires were the product of the stage of capitalism itself.
Today, where must a Leninist methodology begin?
The Fourth International as opposed to the Third can only be the product of a new stage of capitalism which has corrupted the International based upon a previous stage. This new stage we have analyzed as state-capitalism or statification of production. Without this, the International is as helpless as Lenin's Third would have been without his analysis of monopoly capitalism.
A correct methodology does not begin in a vacuum. It seeks in the Leninist analysis contained in Imperialism the tendencies which indicated the future developments, in this case, state-capitalism.2 Lenin, as Marxists always do, drew them sharply to their conclusion. The concrete facts lagged behind the theory. But because his method was irreproachable, he foresaw that in the coming period state-monopoly capitalism would end in "vast state-capitalist trusts and syndicates," that is to say, the centralizations of capital on a world scale. We live in that epoch today.
Upon these indications and using his method we seek the differences. Thus in the resolution of our co-thinkers submitted to the World Congress in 1948, The world Political Situation and the Fourth International, it was stated:
"Leninism in World War I analyzed the development of International capitalist monopolies which shared the world among themselves.
"In 1948 the movement to the centralization of capital has reached such gigantic proportions that only vast state-capitalist trusts and syndicates on a continental and inter-continental scale (Hitler's Europe, Stalinist domination of Europe and Eastern Asia, Marshall Plan, Molotov Plan, etc.) can attempt to control it. Combinations of individual capitalists from different states, organized in cartels for world combination of separate or related industries, now are - and cannot be otherwise than - a minor part of world economy.
"Leninism in World War I taught that the world was completely shared out, so that in the future only redivision was possible.
"In 1948 there is no question of division or redivision of the world-market. The question is posed in terms of complete mastery of the world by one of two great powers, Russia or the United States. "Leninism in world War I taught that the export of capital has become decisive as distinguished from the export of commodities, owing to the fact that capital in a few countries had become over-ripe and needed to seek a higher rate of profit in colonial countries.
"In 1948 finance capital does not export surplus capital to seek higher profit. World economy now patently suffers from a shortage of capital and an incapacity to create it in sufficient quantities to reconstruct Europe and to keep production expanding. The distinction is symbolized in the qualitative difference between the Dawes Plan and the Marshall Plan.
"Capital therefore tends toward centralization on a world scale. But the tendency toward centralization on a world scale and with it, the end of the world-market and of capitalist society, can be achieved only by force, i.e., the struggle for mastery between two great masses of capital, one under the control of the United States and the other under the control of Russia".3
It is here that everything begins.
The tendency is the tendency to centralization on a world scale.
The tendency to centralization on a world scale can only take place by conflict between two large masses of capital. No longer cartels and distant colonies but contiguous masses of capital must be accumulated, either directly as Hitler tried to do and Stalin is doing, or through control of the state power, as the United States aims to do in Europe.
It is this double tendency of attraction and repulsion which created the necessity of state-capitalism.
The state takes over the economy, both in preparation for resisting other economies and for allying itself to the other mass of capital to which it is attracted or forced. National capital must deal with national capital.
At the same time the falling rate of profit on a world scale creates tendencies within each individual economy, both in the bureaucratic economy and, opposed to it, in the mass movement of the proletariat which is characteristic of state-capitalism.
These are the specific conditions which produce the modern bureaucracy.
Upon this analysis our co-thinkers in Europe in their 1948 resolution wrote:
"In the epoch of World War II the labor bureaucracy has undergone a qualitative development. It is no longer the 'main social support' of the bourgeoisie. Such is the bankruptcy of bourgeois society that it can continue only because the labor bureaucracy has increasingly substituted itself for the bourgeoisie in the process of production itself and in the bureaucratic administration of the capitalist state. To a degree only haltingly and quite inadequately recognized by The Fourth International before the war and today, the bureaucratic leadership of the labor movement as embodied in the Communist Parties has long recognized the bankruptcy of bourgeois society, ground between the crisis in production and the growing revolt of the proletariat, the great masses of the people and the colonial masses. The bureaucracy of the Communist Parties of Europe, even before the war, sought and still seeks a new economic and social base for the maintenance and consolidation of its power over the proletariat. It is bourgeois to the core, in its terror of the proletarian revolution, in its inability to place the solution of the economic and political problems of society in the creative power of the proletariat, and in its fear of rival imperialisms. The mass of Russian capital, the Kremlin and the Stalinist Army serve it as a base from which it hopes to administer centralized European state-capitalism. With this in view it repudiates both the bourgeois national state and bourgeois private property. It is not in any sense social-patriotic. It collaborates with the bourgeoisie or attacks it, in peace or in war, governed entirely by its' immediate perspective of centralizing European capital under the aegis of Russian capital as the first stage in the struggle for world domination. In this sense its allegiance to the Kremlin is absolute. But it is essentially a product of the bankruptcy of private property and the national state on a world scale, on the one hand, and the revolutionary pressure of the masses, on the other hand".4
It was pointed out that the Second International today is far closer to the bureaucracy of the Third International than it is to classic Social-Democracy.
"As a result of the war, the Second International, though by tradition unsuited for the violent character of the modern class struggle, follows in essence the same basic orientation toward centralized capital. It is distinguished from the Third International by, in general, the loss of any real basis in the revolutionary proletariat, and its timidity in the face of the native bourgeoisie. In important elements it aims at the attachment of the national economy to the power of American capital. But not only in Eastern Europe where the immediate power of Russia is overwhelming, but even in Italy under the pressure of the masses and imminent economic bankruptcy, it is ready to unite with the Communist Party, i.e., attach itself to Russian capital".5
The resolution also analyzed the petty-bourgeoisie upon the basis of the analysis of state-capitalism:
"The labor bureaucracy of the Second International was always fortified by the petty-bourgeoisie. Today the enormous growth of bureaucracy in the administration of capital, in the unions with their constantly expanding functions, and above all in the government, has created a huge administrative caste without which the social and economic existence of capital on a world scale would be impossible. The process of fusion between the labor bureaucracy and this petty-bourgeois administrative caste has added a new quality to the alliance between them which characterizes the period of World War II. This force constitutes the real social agency of capitalism today. Like all phenomena, the role of this bodyguard of capital varies according to specific need, more precisely, the national stage of economic bankruptcy and the revolutionary pressure of the masses. Its economic ideas are based upon the administrative concept of 'planned economy.' Its chief task is the subordination or corruption and blunting of the revolutionary will of the proletariat. Its basic power rests upon its control of the labor movement in the process of production itself where it is best able to check the revolutionary proletariat and preserve bourgeois society".6
This is Leninism for our epoch: objective analysis of the specific stage of capitalist development, objective analysis of the social basis of the counter-revolutionary International, and opposed to it, of the revolutionary International.
What is the methodology of orthodox Trotskyism? It is to be judged by its results. It has never recognized the necessity for an analysis of the present stage of world economy. Because it never emancipated itself from the simple repetition of the facts of Lenin 's Imperialism, it can not get away from seeing Stalinism as reformism. Under these circumstances there is no escape whatever from subjectivism. It can offer no explanation as to why the Stalinists behave as they do. All it can attribute Stalinist practice to is evil, malice, or ill-intentions, stupidity and ignorance, supple spines, tools of the Kremlin. When it is recognized that the Stalinists are not only that, the result is Pablo.
The subjectivity of the Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism is rooted in the unrejected premise that the Stalinists are social-patriotic collaborators with their own bourgeoisie. Its catastrophic results can be seen in the manifesto of 1940 when Trotsky faced for a few short weeks the fact that the French Stalinists had displayed a "sudden defeatism". As long as Trotskyism believed that the Stalinists would collaborate with their bourgeoisie, it could reserve for itself the idea that there was a fundamental distinction between the two Internationals. Now that events have destroyed that belief, Trotskyism is reduced to epithets.
The Fourth International is unable in objective materialist terms to find the reasons for its own existence. If it had, its present crisis over Eastern Europe would never have arisen.
The documents of the Fourth International are there to prove this. It was founded upon the basis that the Communist International was unable to learn or be taught any more (this same idea is in the Transitional Program; see our quote, page 37), and that the proletariat from the experience of Germany would turn away from the Comintern and toward the Fourth International. New Internationals are not founded upon the basis of the inability of the old International to learn. This mode of reasoning led to the expectation that after defeat in Germany in 1933, the Communist International would decline. The analysis was purely subjective.
Actually, it was precisely the defeat in Germany in 1933 that strengthened Stalinism. It crystallized the conviction growing in Europe that the mass revolt of the proletariat and its control of industry in the Marxist and Leninist manner were a dream. It led to the conclusion that the model of proletariat organization had to be Stalinist, and that this was the only means whereby the capitalism of private property with its crises and Fascism could be opposed. It is this that had strengthened the elements in the labor movement and the petty-bourgeoisie to make Stalinism what it is.
But at the same time it is precisely the experiences which strengthened Stalinism which have created in the proletariat the tendencies to mass mobilization for total emancipation and the creation of a mass party which will run both industry and state. These in turn strengthen the dictatorial tendencies of Stalinism.
All this is based upon economic analysis, new stages, new social responses to state-capitalism. Otherwise you have to base your new International, this colossal conception, on the fact that the old International will not "learn". In that kind of reasoning, consciousness determines existence, the existence of an organization which is to lead the greatest overturn history knows.
The inability to analyze Stalinism in the light of Leninist analysis of the present stage of capitalism cripples orthodox Trotskyism at every turn. Its analysis leans heavily on the concept of Bonapartism.8 The concept not only illuminates nothing, it obscures the specific stage and disguises the definitive class antagonism. The Bonapartes did not know state-capitalism, the total plan, the modern mass parties. The plan, the party, the state are totally capitalistic. Nazi or Stalinist, they represent capital. The great modern mass parties are either instruments of capital or instruments of the proletarian revolution. There is not the slightest element of Bonapartism in them.
Orthodox Trotskyism can find no objective necessity for an imperialist war between Stalinist Russia and American imperialism. It is the only political tendency in the world which cannot recognize that the conflict is a struggle between two powers for world mastery. It is therefore reduced to substituting subjective agitation against war-mongers and profiteers, on the one hand, and attacks on Stalin for deals with imperialism, on the other.
Orthodox Trotskyism is unable because of its conception of state-property and its subjective analysis of the coming war to make the simplest distinction between the counter-revolutionary Third International and the revolutionary Fourth International: namely, that in war the former will be for one camp; the latter will be for the overthrow of both. The Fourth International today evades making this distinction by posing war as "an unlikely eventuality". Meanwhile, it puts forward both contradictory positions, alternately or simultaneously.
Orthodox Trotskyism can merely call for a revolution in Russia. Its theory affords no objective basis for it, none. It aimed to dig a gulf between the proletariat and the bureaucracy, analyzing the proletariat alone as organically attached to state-property. With the defense of state-property by the bureaucracy, the basic Trotskyist distinction is lost.
Orthodox Trotskyism finds some base for a Russian Revolution in the "socialist consciousness" of the workers, i.e., the memories of the October Revolution. This is totally false. The socialist consciousness of the proletariat is reinforced by the October Revolution, but it is based upon the growing revolt and the unity, organization and discipline which is the product of Russian production. So far is objective analysis lost that the impetus for the revolution of the Russian proletariat is now handed over entirely to agencies outside:
"A new revolutionary selection, carried by a new mass upsurge, which can only be the result of a powerful revolutionary wave outside of Russia, will alone be able to restore to the proletariat a clear consciousness of its historic mission". (Fourth International, June, 1948, p. 113).9
This is true only if you base your analysis upon consumption.
The Russian proletariat will have to overthrow the most powerful army, state and secret police the world has ever known, to take control of production. This orthodox Trotskyism calls a political revolution, and tries to teach the workers in other countries that they have a greater task before them.
The error is as old as the opposition to Leninism. It is economism. The economists of World War I refused to support the revolt of oppressed nations because this would destroy centralization of economic forces which was progressive. Lenin fought them tooth and nail as he had fought the economists of Russia two decades before. Revolutionary struggles produced by a world-wide stage of economic development cannot destroy that development. Orthodox Trotskyism has never ceased to see in the kulaks, in the destruction of the party, in primitive accumulation, in war, in the restoration of religion, the source of a return to private property in Russia. This is economism at its extreme. Private property has not been restored because the whole tendency of world economy is in exactly the opposite direction. The strength of state-property is in the increased centralization and the vastly increased and socialized proletariat. To pose the attack on the bureaucracy by the proletariat in wartime as endangering state-property and national independence is to attribute to the bureaucracy a responsibility for state-property and Russian independence greater than that of the proletariat. It is to say that even the revolutionary proletariat of Russia is incapable, without the bureaucracy, of defending Russia and preserving state-property. On this reasoning the October Revolution would never have taken place.
Our final example of the inability of the Trotskyist methodology which refuses to recognize state-capitalism is the present plight of Trotskyism on the specific theory of the permanent revolution itself in relation to the colonies.
The specific theory of the permanent revolution in relation to the colonies was based on:
1. monopoly capital exporting surplus capital to the colonial countries and industrializing them, the stage of capitalism analyzed by Lenin.
2. In this relation the native bourgeoisie would play a comprador role, collaborating with the imperialist powers.
3. The class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the foreign capitalists in the industrialized areas would give it the role of leader in the national struggle. The proletariat would lead the peasantry in the agrarian revolution and thereby split the petty-bourgeoisie from collaboration with the native bourgeoisie and foreign monopoly capital.
However, since the depression of 1929 and the emergence of state-capitalism on a world scale:
1. The struggle is not for redivision of colonies but for world mastery. World capitalism lives not by export of capital but by its centralization.
a. In the struggle for world mastery by large masses of centralized capitals, advanced countries formerly exporting capital to the colonies (France, England, Holland) are reduced to satellites of American capitalism, living on the Marshall Plan and desperate efforts to increase capital by import and further exploitation of the proletariat at home.
b. State loans made to the regimes of colonial countries are not used for the purpose of industrialization but for the maintenance of military outposts of the world struggle.
2. Under these conditions the continued destruction of the old feudal and handicraft economy in the country-side, going on for nearly a century, is not supplanted by any development of the industrial economy. The result is that the peasant revolts become a continuous phenomenon (uninterruptedly in China for over 20 years).
Under these changed conditions, the theory of orthodox Trotskyism about China that the peasant revolts were merely remnants of proletarian struggle and would arise only after new stimulation from the proletariat, has been outmoded by the new stage of world capitalism. These revolts, plus the world imperialist struggle, transform the national governments of the feudal landlords and native bourgeoisie, even with military support by American capitalism, into anachronisms with no perspective of national rule.
3. The new situation radicalized the urban petty-bourgeoisie. Instead of collaborating with the bankrupt bourgeoisie and remnants of foreign monopoly capital, many elements hostile to private property leave the cities to lead and control the peasant revolts. In fact, they become colonial representatives of Russian centralized capital, cadres of the Stalinist parties with relations to the revolting masses and to the power of Russia similar to those of the European Stalinists, modified but not essentially altered by their historical conditions.
4. Where, as in China, the urban petty-bourgeoisie comes to power at the head of the peasant revolt, it achieves the national independence, within the context of the international power of Stalinist Russia. Within this context, it will seek to:
a. expropriate the private property of the national bourgeoisie and foreign capital;
b. develop cadres of the petty-bourgeoisie to administer the one-party bureaucratic-administrative state of the Plan;
c. carry out thereby the intensified exploitation of the proletariat in production;
d. solve not one single problem of the agrarian revolution, which requires a complete reorganization of the economy on an international socialist basis.
In India, not the petty-bourgeoisie but Indian capital has been able to take advantage of the changed world conditions, and achieve the national independence. It is threatened by the Stalinist party which seeks to duplicate the triumph in China. The bankruptcy of the national economy lends strength to the Stalinists.
Such, in summary outline, is the analysis. Conflicts will arise, the Stalinists in the colonies may succeed or fail, completely or partially. Such is the new theoretical orientation required. Orthodox Trotskyism, on this fundamental question of its own past, here as elsewhere, is unable to solve one of the problems raised. It cannot analyze the new stage in world economy where centralization is so powerful that it achieves national independence in the colonies, using one class if another is not ready but thereby multiplying all the antagonisms and social crises.
1 V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, (1916).
2 Ibid.
3 'The world political situation and the Fourth International', resolution of the Johnson-Forest Tendency (SWP Minority) to the 2nd Congress of the Fourth International, 1948. A rival resolution, 'World Situation and the Tasks of the Fourth International', was also submitted to the Congress in the name of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. A slightly amended version of the latter resolution was adopted by the Congress.
4 The editor has been unable to identify the document that this quote is taken from.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 The quote, (in Part I., 1., of this document), is: "The definite passing over of the Comintern to the side of the bourgeois order ..". and "The Third International has taken to the road of reformism ... The Comintern's policy... demonstrates that the Comintern is likewise incapable of learning anything further or of changing".
8 See, e.g., Leon Trotsky 'The Workers' State, Thermidor and Bonapartism', New International, Vol. II No. 4, July 1935, pp. 116-122.
9The quote is from 'The Social Nature of the USSR' section of the Resolution on The USSR and Stalinism, adopted by the Second Congress of the Fourth International, in Paris, in April 1948.
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