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The pilots who weathered the storm
In the first of a series of critical responses to The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism, recently published by Phoenix Press and Workers’ Liberty, Alan Johnson (senior lecturer in Social Sciences at Edge Hill University College) argues that the book can play an invaluable role in restoring democracy to the heart of Marxism and help lay to rest the theoretical confusions of post-Trotsky Trotskyism. Alan Johnson is writing a political biography of Hal Draper.
“However well-intentioned Marxists are nowadays about the need to value democracy the latter simply cannot play a significant theoretical role in the class analysis of politics.” (Gregor McLennan, 1989:114).
“The iron dictatorship exercised by the Stalinist police administrative apparatus over the Soviet proletariat was not incompatible with the preservation of the proletarian nature of the state itself — any more than... the fascist dictatorship exercised over the bourgeois class were with the preservation of the nature of the capitalist state.” (Perry Anderson, 1983).
“Stalinism is a social system based on the state ownership of the decisive means of production and the uncontrolled domination of the state machine by the bureaucracy, not by the working people. The state owns industry and an uncontrolled bureaucracy ‘owns’ the state. Socialism, on the other hand, is the collective ownership of the decisive means of production under the democratic control of the working people themselves. The vast difference is the existence of democracy for the mass of people.
“This is so because of the very nature of the working class as a class. Unlike the bourgeoisie, which is by nature a property owning class, it does not develop its economic and social power within the womb of the old society. The bourgeoisie could do this under feudalism because its social power is expressed in the first place through its ownership of the private property on which the wealth of society rests. The working class, which owns no property, can ‘own’ and control the means of production only through a political intermediary, the state. And it can ‘own’ and control the state only through democratic participation. Without democracy statification points not to socialism but to what we know as Stalinism. Democracy, therefore, is not merely of sentimental or moral value for the Marxists, nor is it merely a preference. It designates the only way in which the rule of the working class can exist in political actuality.” (Hal Draper, 1950:242).
Can Marxism be democratic ? Can Marxists be democrats? Few today would disagree with Vasily Grossman’s novel and meditation on Stalin’s Gulag, Forever Flowing, in which lurking somewhere behind the, “crazed eyes; smashed kidneys; a skull pierced by a bullet; rotting infected, gangrenous toes; and scurvy racked corpses in log-cabin, dugout morgues,” stands the figure of Marx. (1986:69). Should we not then double, treble the guard over Marx’s tomb, never mind Stalin’s ? These questions would trouble Marxists more if we took measure of how comprehensively anti-Stalinist Marxism was pulled into the orbit of Stalinism itself. The Fate of the Russian Revolution critically reappropriates the writings of one tradition which did nurture Marxism’s democratic roots in the face of Stalinism: the Workers Party-Independent Socialist League (1940-1958).
Sean Matgamna’s introductory essay contains a clear and provocative critical analysis of Trotsky’s evolving views about the fate of the revolution from his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929, to his murder at the hands of a GPU agent in 1940. Matgamna argues there are “two Trotskys” to be found in these writings, producing two very different Trotskyisms after 1940 the WP-ISL being a development of one strand of Trotsky’s thought. For Matgamna the WP-ISL is, “the lineal defence, elaboration and continuation of Trotsky’ s ideas, that is of unfalsified Marxism, as they really were and as they really were developing at Trotsky’s death. These writings are a precious part of the heritage of revolutionary socialism: in the post-Stalinist world they are no small part of the seed from which an unfalsified socialism will be reborn.” (p.147).
To root democracy as theoretically and practically indispensable to Marxism and the socialist project the WP-ISL had first to break from some of the defining theoretical assumptions of the mainstream Trotskyist tradition. The debate on the “Russian Question” in the American Trotskyist movement in 1939-40 produced, on the part of the minority who opposed Trotsky, and who would go on to form the Workers Party, one of the most important bodies of writing in twentieth century Marxism. “The Dead Sea Scrolls of twentieth century Marxism,” Matgamna claims. We can now do these people the honour of critically reading their arguments directly and not through the distorting myths and slanders thrown up by the orthodox Trotskyist tradition at the time. This process is well advanced in America, thanks to the work of Peter Drucker and others. British readers whose knowledge of the “Shachtmanites” is limited to In Defence of Marxism will be surprised at what they find if they can put down the pearls and garlic and look.
The “Russian Question” and Democratic Marxism: Trotsky’s Shirt of Nessus In 1941 Joseph Carter pointed out that the dispute within American Trotskyism about the fate of the Russian Revolution, “has already revealed confusion and uncertainty on fundamental concepts of Marxism which far transcends in importance the ‘Russian question’ itself’.” (1941:216). One fundamental concept at stake was democracy: could a workers’ state exist without workers ’ political power? Or was the nationalisation of property a sufficient condition for the establishment of a workers’ state? The differing answers given would divide anti-Stalinist Marxism for the next half century.
Trotsky initially held that the meaning and significance of a “nationalised economy” derived from the fact that the working class held political power. Or, at least, from the fact that the “locum” of workers’ power was, for now, a genuine workers’ party. The state remained a “workers’ state” because of, “the rule of the Party, the internal cohesion of the proletarian vanguard, the conscious discipline of the administrators, trade union functionaries, members of the shop nuclei, etc.” For Trotsky analogies with the bourgeois revolution could be misleading because:
“...in general the productive forces, upon a basis of private property and competition, have been working out their own destiny. In contrast to this the property relations which issued from the socialist revolution are indivisibly bound up with the new state as their repository. The predominance of socialist over petty-bourgeois tendencies is guaranteed not by the automatism of economy — we are still far from that — but by political measures taken by the dictatorship. The character of the economy as a whole thus depends upon the character of the state power” (Trotsky, in 1998:550, emphasis added).
As long as there was hope that the working class could bring the bureaucracy under its control again — this was a reform perspective — it was still reasonable to call the USSR, in this strictly limited sense, a “workers’ state”. The “locum” was a temporary layer, balancing between the class forces which would settle the fate of the revolution. For Trotsky only two possibilities were admitted, either backwards to the restoration of private property or forwards to the restoration of proletarian political power and socialism. The possibility of a exploitative class society based on collectivised property was accepted theoretically but effectively denied by Trotsky as a practical possibility.
In fact, as Joseph Carter pointed out:
“Trotsky’s prognoses were refuted by history...Contrary to Trotsky’s predictions the destruction of the Bolshevik Party did not mean the end of state property and planning; Russia did not travel the road of Thermidorean, capitalist restoration. On the contrary, the Stalinist counter-revolution took a new hitherto unknown path, the road of bureaucratic absolutism.” (1941: 217).
Later, when faced with a strengthening of state property and the destruction of the political power of the working class, Trotsky faced a dilemma:
“...either to maintain his old criteria and affirm that Russia is no longer a ‘workers’ state’ or to revise completely the Marxist conception of the workers’ state. He chose the latter course and thereby abandoned the Marxist view... He now affirmed that it was the state-owned character of property which determined the socialist character of property which determined the socialist character of the economy and the proletarian nature of the state.” (Carter, 1941:217).
In other words, Trotsky reversed the relationship of politics and economics in his theory. Now, because property was nationalised, and because nationalised property was inherently progressive, the state remained a workers’ state, progressive against capitalism, to be unconditionally defended in war. The working class, fantastically, remained the ruling class, but its rule was expressed through, congealed in, the nationalised property. This was a theoretical disaster of the first magnitude. As Matgamna has it, Trotsky had put on his own Shirt of Nessus. In the legend the shirt was soaked by Deineira with the poisonous blood of the centaur Nessus and placed on the back of her husband Heracles, causing his death. So excruciating was the pain the shirt caused him, Heracles had himself burnt on a funeral pyre. Matgamna argues that the result of Trotsky’s new theory was a self-immolation until all that was left was a wizened “critic” of Stalinism, fundamentally on its side and in its orbit. The problem was, argues Matgamna:
“...in its fully extended form the doctrine of the ‘locum’ implied that the workers could rule as abstract historical subjects, in “high theory”, even where as living people, in practice, they were beasts of burden exploited by a privileged autocracy.” (Matgamna, 1998:110). <SNIP>