DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

The formation and consolidation of the bureaucratic caste headed by Stalin found its principal reflection in the political field, in the suppression of workers' democracy. Since it owned no means of production, the Stalinist bureaucracy would have lost its privileged access to consumer goods if the functionaries of the socialist state were subject to the democratic control of the working class. The new political regime established by the Stalinist bureaucracy most closely resembled that placed in power in capitalist countries by victorious fascist movements — a politically atomised population ruled over by a ruthless bureaucratic dictatorship masquerading behind social demagogy and the ceremonial trappings of representative ``democracy.'' To settle internal disputes within its own ranks, the ruling caste of bureaucrats created an ``infallible'' supreme arbiter as unchallengeable as themselves.

The political counter-revolution carried out by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the 1920s and '30s did not overcome the resistance of the Soviet working class to the point where private property was restored in the means of production. To the contrary, in order to expand its consumption privileges the Stalinist bureaucracy centralised the social surplus product in its own hands through the forced collectivisation of peasant farming, the nationalisation of all retail trade and light industry, and the subordination of production to a super-centralised system of bureaucratic planning.

Although the rise and consolidation of the Stalinist dictatorship in the USSR was the product of a political counter-revolution, the bureaucratic caste introduced reactionary tendencies in all fields of social life, including in the economy, in the social position of women, in the relations between nationalities, and in science and culture:

• Economy: The entire economy of the transition period between capitalism and socialism is characterised by the contradiction between socialised relations of production and the survival of capitalist norms of distribution. The bureaucratic ruling caste accentuated this contradiction by the enormous expansion of its consumer privileges and of social inequality; by introducing enormous disproportions between the development of production of producer goods and the whole sector (agricultural and industrial) producing consumer goods; by destroying workers' control over production and subordinating economic planning and management to the omnipotence, arbitrariness and greed for consumer privileges of individual bureaucrats (including factory managers).
• Women: The Bolshevik government instituted a series of deep-going reforms aimed at uprooting the oppression of women, including the liberalisation of divorce laws, legalisation of abortion and the establishment of community kitchens and nurseries in order to free women from domestic servitude in the individual family unit. The Stalinist bureaucracy reversed these reforms: marriage and divorce laws were tightened up; abortion was again made illegal; the socialisation of domestic services was abandoned in favour of a revival of the cult of the family and women's traditional role as mother and homemaker.
• Relations between nationalities: One of the great strengths of the Bolsheviks was their appeal to the oppressed nationalities within the tsarist empire. Under Lenin's leadership, the Bolshevik government gave unconditional support to the right of the non-Russian nationalities to self-determination and promoted a voluntary union of Soviet republics. Lenin insisted that this federation should not limit itself to formal equality between the various national republics, but take affirmative action to develop the economies and culture of the oppressed nations in order to close the historical gap between them and the former oppressor Russian nation. The Stalinist bureaucracy abandoned the Bolsheviks' policy on national self-determination and voluntary federation. It centralised control of the USSR in the hands of the Russian-dominated bureaucracy in Moscow, promoted a resurgence of Great Russian nationalism, attempted to forcibly Russify the non-Russian nationalities, and accentuated the historical gap between the European republics, particularly Russia, and the republics of Central Asia and Transcaucasia. During and after World War II it forcibly incorporated the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia into the USSR, deported whole nationalities within the USSR from their homelands to remote territories, and subjected the newly formed socialist states in Eastern Europe to Moscow's political control. The Soviet bureaucracy used its armed forces to crush pro-socialist workers' uprisings in eastern Germany (1953), Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).
• Science and culture: Under the early Soviet government there was a flowering of innovation and debate in the realms of literature, art and architecture, of theatre and cinema, of psychology and psychiatry, of economic analysis and historiography that has had no equal before or since. With the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy, cultural and artistic innovation and debate was suppressed. All literary and artistic production was forced to conform to the dictates of ``socialist realism,'' that is, to the bureaucracy's romanticised image of social life under its rule. Free theoretical discussions in all the fields of social science were suppressed, and even research in some areas of natural science was obstructed or even prohibited, as in the case of genetics. The history of the party and of the revolution was systematically falsified and periodically rewritten. Marxist theory, instead of being a guide to revolutionary action, was transformed into a state ``religion,'' with an apparatus of official ideologists scholastically culling the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin to select quotations with which to justify the bureaucracy's pragmatic policies.

Under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy there was an enormous gap between the official view of life, in which socialism had supposedly triumphed, and the realities of daily life for the great majority — permanent shortages of consumer goods and lengthy queues, and continual humiliation at the hands of arrogant and unremovable officials. Nevertheless, while working people were deprived of political freedoms and access to consumer goods taken for granted by workers in advanced capitalist countries, they enjoyed important social gains flowing from the abolition of capitalism and the functioning of the nationalised, planned economy: guaranteed full employment; free medical and dental care; free education; nominal subsidised prices for housing, transportation, and basic foods.

In the wake of the Soviet Union's victory over German and Japanese imperialism in World War II new socialist states were created in Eastern Europe, China and North Korea. But due to the Stalinist nature of their leaderships, privileged bureaucratic castes consolidated power in these newly formed socialist states and blocked the formation of a system of workers' democracy from their inception. In Vietnam and Cuba socialist states came into being in the late 1950s and early 1960s, respectively, that were under revolutionary leaderships. While bureaucratic deformations developed in these two socialist states due to the relative backwardness of their economies and to the influence of the Stalinist regimes upon them, they have not led to the usurpation of political power by a bureaucratic caste.

While the nationalised, planned economies provided the means for a rapid process of industrialisation and urbanisation of the Stalinised socialist states, all of which had been relatively backward countries before the overthrow of capitalism, this process of extensive growth of the productive forces was accomplished at the cost of tremendous and unnecessary waste of economic, social and natural resources.

Without a deepening of the workers' socialist consciousness and their active involvement in economic planning and management there is no way to produce quality goods in the transition from capitalism to socialism. But bureaucratic planning and management methods destroyed rather than encouraged working-class initiative, and undermined socialist attitudes to work. Thus, bureaucratic planning and management methods increasingly came into conflict with the task of modernising production in industry and agriculture to produce high quality goods, leading to a slowing down of economic growth, a deepening social crisis, and an erosion of confidence in the effectiveness of the nationalised, planned economy within the population as a whole.

In the face of this accelerating crisis, the bureaucracy sought to preserve its privileges by introducing more and more capitalist features into the nationalised, planned economy: organisation of the economy on the basis of profitability of individual enterprises; tying of incomes (of factory managers and even of workers) to enterprise profitability; a wholesale market for exchange of producer goods between state enterprises; autonomy of enterprise decision-making in matters of price, investment, and orientation of production; selling of shares in state enterprises through stockmarkets; auctioning off of state enterprises to private buyers. The bureaucratic caste thus began to dismantle the nationalised, planned economy, to wipe out the socio-economic foundations of the socialist state, and to prepare the way for a restoration of capitalism. Increasing elements of the bureaucracy sought through corruption, black-marketeering and embezzlement of state property to accumulate capital in their hands and, in open alliance with imperialism, set out to transform themselves into a new capitalist ruling class.

Stalinism was not a distorted, bureaucratic form of ``socialism,'' but rather a stage on the road to capitalist restoration. The Stalinist bureaucracy was a petty-bourgeois social stratum with interests hostile and opposed to those of the working class. It was bourgeois in its attitudes and aspirations, and was the chief transmission belt into the socialist states of capitalist ideological values: contempt for workers; desire for private enrichment; servility toward established authorities; racism and national chauvinism; reactionary views on women and the family; fear of unfettered debate; anti-internationalism; and even open anti-communism. It preserved socialised property only to the extent that it feared that the economic chaos and decline in living standards resulting from its abolition would lead to a revolt by the working class against the bureaucracy's monopoly of political power.

The longer it preserved itself in power the more the bureaucracy undermined any identification of the workers with the nationalised, planned economy, and thus weakened their ability to resist its inevitable attempt to transform itself into a new capitalist ruling class. However, once the bureaucracy made an open turn toward restoring capitalism it began to create the social conditions in which the working class could start to overcome its political atomisation and develop independent organisations of struggle.

In the course of struggles to defend their social and democratic rights, the workers can rapidly regain an understanding of the need to defend socialised property forms. However, the indispensable condition for a successful defence and revival of socialised property is the revolutionary overthrow of the political rule of the petty-bourgeois bureaucratic stratum and the establishment of a workers' democracy. This cannot be accomplished without the leadership of the most politically conscious and experienced workers, organised into a mass revolutionary party built upon Leninist lines.

The experience of Stalinism demonstrates that workers' democracy is not merely one ``model'' of political organisation of post-capitalist society; it represents the only effective means to consolidate working-class rule and to build socialism.