DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

Liberal opponents of revolutionary Marxism argue that the rise of Stalinist totalitarianism in Soviet Russia was the result of the use of revolutionary methods to solve Russia's social problems. Others, including ``left'' Social Democrats and anarchists, attribute the rise of Stalinism to Lenin's concept of a revolutionary centralist organisation of the working-class vanguard. They claim that the Bolsheviks' efforts to build such a party to lead the workers' revolution inevitably resulted in a paternalistic, manipulative and bureaucratic relationship between the party and the masses. This in turn led to the monopolisation of power by one party and that, they argue, was the cause of Stalinist totalitarianism. Such arguments are unhistorical and idealist — they ignore the real causes of Stalinism, which were due to the isolation of the first workers' revolution in a backward, predominantly peasant country.

The 1917 Russian Revolution was one of the most profound and sustained mass mobilisations in history, marked particularly by the mobilisations and democratic self-organisation of the working class. The Russian Revolution was the product of a deep-going social crisis resulting from the contradiction between the objective demands of capitalist development in Russia (which in the industrial sphere had already reached the stage of imperialist, monopoly capitalism) and the survivals of Russia's feudal past, particularly in agriculture (where millions of land-hungry peasants were exploited by a hereditary landowning nobility) and in the political superstructure (which was dominated by the landed nobility headed by an absolutist monarchy). The revolutionary explosion in 1917 was triggered by the deprivations imposed on the Russian working class by the inter-imperialist war of 1914-18, itself the inevitable explosion of the objectively socialised productive forces against the fetters of capitalist private property and national frontiers.

The Russian industrial and commercial capitalists, and their political representatives, as well as the petty-bourgeois reformist parties (the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries), proved incapable of resolving Russia's social problems. Only the Bolshevik party consistently defended and championed the interests of the Russian working people.

On November 7, 1917 (October 25 in the old Russian calendar) the Russian workers, led by the Bolshevik party, overthrew the unelected landlord-capitalist Provisional Government and transferred all power to the soviets (councils) of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies. These elected councils represented the highest form of institutionalised democracy the world has seen. Through the soviets, and the workers' and peasants' government elected by them, the Russian workers and peasants swept away the tsarist state machine, granted the oppressed nationalities the right to self-determination, distributed land to the peasantry, established legal equality for women, and introduced workers' control over capitalist industry.

Given the general poverty and backwardness of the country, the Bolshevik leaders understood that it was impossible for the Russian working class to directly hold power for a prolonged period, let alone build a viable socialist economy, if the revolution remained isolated in a hostile capitalist world. They recognised that the long-term survival and further development of the Russian Revolution depended upon aid from victorious workers' revolutions in the more economically advanced countries of Western Europe and North America. They saw the socialist revolution as an international process — a process they sought to assist through their initiative in organising the Communist (Third) International.

Inspired by the example of the Russian Revolution, there were big workers' upsurges in the major capitalist countries of western and central Europe at the end of World War I, which brought the workers to the threshold of victory in Germany, Italy and Hungary. However, these revolutionary upsurges were defeated due to the still remaining strength of imperialism (which was able to grant concessions to the masses — eight-hour working day, universal suffrage, etc.), the class-collaborationist policies of the Social Democratic parties, and the inexperience of the newly formed Communist parties. Through these defeats, the socialist revolution was isolated within a backward country. Imperialism, and its Social Democratic allies, were thus mainly responsible for laying the social basis for the subsequent rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

The catastrophic decline of the productive forces in Russia due to the three-year-long civil war unleashed by the landlords and capitalists after the revolution, combined with direct imperialist military intervention and economic blockade, led to conditions of extreme material scarcity, famine, industrial and financial breakdown. The same factors led to a qualitative weakening of the already small working class in the cities, which had become dispersed as a result of the collapse of industry. In addition, large numbers of the most politically conscious elements of the working class either died in the civil war or left the factories to be incorporated into the Red Army and the state administrative apparatus.

In the life-and-death struggle against foreign invaders, domestic counter-revolutionary armies, and economic sabotage by capitalist managers and technicians, the Bolsheviks were forced to move much more quickly than they had originally intended to nationalise industry, in order to bring it under the control of the workers' state. While the extensive nationalisations deprived the capitalists of bases for counter-revolutionary activity and enabled the Russian workers to equip and supply the Red Army, many factories ceased to function due to the workers' lack of managerial expertise and technical skills. The decline in industrial output brought about a corresponding decline in agricultural production by the peasants, who were unable to find industrial goods to exchange for their crops.

In order to revive the economy at the end of the civil war, the Bolshevik party (now renamed the Communist party) was forced to allow a restoration of capitalist relations in agriculture and retail trade, and a partial restoration of capitalism in wholesale trade and industry (leasing of smaller enterprises to private investors, competition for profit between state-owned enterprises). Under this retreat, known as the New Economic Policy, while waiting for aid from victorious workers' revolutions in the West, the Soviet socialist state was to regulate the partially restored capitalist economy and direct it toward the gradual building up of a socialised, planned economy. However, in order to do this, the Bolsheviks were forced to rely on the administrative expertise of former capitalist managers and tsarist officials. Hostile to the revolution, these administrators from the old regime could only be induced to work for the socialist state by granting them high salaries and privileged access to consumer goods and services. The administrative apparatus of the socialist state thus rapidly became dominated by a bureaucratic stratum.

At the start of the NEP, a certain economic revival began. However, its immediate beneficiaries were the small peasant proprietors, private traders and small factory owners. The demobilisation of the Red Army and the slow revival of the large state-owned enterprises (which lacked the necessary injections of large investment funds for repair and renovation of expensive machinery) led to massive unemployment in the cities. The continuing shortages of goods, including essentials such as food, clothing and fuel, undermined the morale and the ability of the workers to devote attention and energy to complex political questions. This decline in the social weight and political activity of the working class deprived the democratic instruments through which the workers could have exercised control over the state bureaucracy (the soviets, the factory committees, the trade unions, and, above all, the Communist party itself) of an active and militant base of support.

Within the Communist party, a section of its leaders and cadres increasingly adapted to the petty-bourgeois outlook and authoritarian methods of the state bureaucracy. This section of the party found its leader in Joseph Stalin, the head of the party's administrative apparatus. Stalin used his administrative post as general secretary (which gave him authority over personnel assignments within the party and state apparatuses) to appoint those who would obediently serve the secretarial apparatus to leading posts throughout the party. With the exception of Lenin, the other Bolshevik leaders initially failed to recognise the danger Stalin's apparatus faction posed to the revolution, and in one way or another became complicit in its rise to power. The Stalinist faction sabotaged the measures that Lenin advocated to protect the Communist party from bureaucratic degeneration, and then, after Lenin's death, implemented policies that accelerated this process.

The Communist Left Opposition, formed at the end of 1923, took up Lenin's struggle against the rising Stalinist bureaucracy. But in the given conditions of the Soviet Union, the working class and its revolutionary vanguard were unable to block the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy's hold over the Communist party.

The rising Stalinist bureaucracy, lacking any confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the workers in the capitalist countries, sought to make a virtue out of the Soviet Union's isolation. This was the meaning of its theory of ``socialism in one country.'' As the Stalinist bureaucracy gained control over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it used the CPSU's weight and prestige within the Comintern to convert its member parties into tools of the Kremlin's diplomacy, seeking class-collaborationist deals with imperialism. This in turn led to further defeats of the international revolution, prolonged the isolation of the USSR, and reinforced the conditions favouring bureaucratisation.

In order to maintain and expand its material privileges, the Stalinist bureaucracy increasingly restricted the democratic rights of workers. Since its ability to expand its privileged access to consumer goods depended on its monopoly of political power, the bureaucracy suppressed both soviet democracy and the internal democratic life of the Communist party. The soviets were transformed into ceremonial assemblies that rubber-stamped the bureaucracy's policies. Most of the leaders and cadres of the Communist party who had served under Lenin's leadership were expelled, jailed and eventually executed. The Communist party was destroyed as a revolutionary organisation of the working-class vanguard. It was converted into an administrative machine, a ``jobs trust'' of the privileged middle-class layers in the bureaucratic apparatuses of the state, economic enterprises, trade unions, and the party itself, which remained ``Communist'' and a ``party'' in name only.

These were the causes of the Stalinist bureaucracy's usurpation of the exercise of political power by the Russian workers, of the gradual merger of the party apparatus, the governmental apparatus, and the apparatus of economic management into a crystallised bureaucratic ruling caste, conscious that its interests were opposed to workers' democracy.

Far from being the result of Lenin's conception of the revolutionary party, the usurpation of power by the Stalinist bureaucracy was the result, in the extreme conditions facing an isolated socialist state in a backward country, of the disappearance of a decisive component of this concept — the presence of a broad layer of worker cadres, schooled in Marxist politics and supported by a politically active working class.