On Trotskyism- Problems of theory and history

Kostas Mavrakis

BUILDING THE PARTY

As we have already pointed out, in his earlier polemical writings against Lenin, Trotsky shared the sociological viewpoint of Axelrod, Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg.(31) He was inclined to think that the revolutionary party was identical with the conscious elements of the proletariat and ultimately with the class as such. He thought that the latter would be led to make the revolution by virtue of the laws which govern the development of social contradictions. The conditions of its existence would constrain the proletariat to pursue its objective interests consciously. Thus the role of the party would be limited to 'shortening the road and making it easier', from 'objective fact' to 'its objective consciousness'.(32) Even so, the vocation of the party was to coincide with the class. This is why Trotsky, in agreement with the Mensheviks, thought that one could be a member of the party without militating in it. Thus he opposed the 'substitutionism' of Lenin who, he argued, sought to substitute the party for the class, the Central Committee for the party and the dictator for the Central Committee. In fact, what he took exception to in Lenin was his distinction between the party and the class and the accordance of a leading function to the former. Overestimating 'the spontaneity' or 'self-activity' of the masses and correspondingly underestimating the role of leadership, he had no choice but to reject as well Lenin's thesis that scientific socialism, elaborated by intellectuals who are of bourgeois origin but have adopted a proletarian class position, is brought into the proletariat 'from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers'.(33) Left to itself, the working class can neither go beyond the level of economic demands nor achieve a revolutionary class consciousness.

Lenin was right, but he laid too much stress on a partial truth. In the context of his polemic with the Economists he had been led to 'bend the stick' the other way in order to straighten it again. He acknowledged it himself at the end of the 2nd Party Congress (1903), thus correcting certain possibly unilateral formulations in 'What is To Be Done?', particularly the famous quotation from Kautsky.(34)

In his pamphlet 'Briefly about the Disagreements in the Party', published in May 1905, Stalin emphasised another aspect of the reality taken as given in 'What is To Be Done?' He wrote: 'Here is what Lenin says: The working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism, but the more widespread (and continuously revived in its most diverse forms) bourgeois ideology spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class still more.'(35) Stalin went even further since he acknowledged that in the long run the spontaneous movement of the proletariat would achieve revolution even without social democracy.(36) Clearly, this is a scholastic hypothesis. In fact, the existence of a proletarian movement always encourages the appearance of Marxist intellectuals. Dialectical and historical materialism would not have been possible without such a movement.

Stalin returned to this question in a vigorously polemical article published on 15 August 1905 in 'Proletariatis Brdzola'. Lenin summed up the central part by noting the author's 'excellent presentation of the celebrated question of the "introduction of consciousness from without"'. Stalin showed that (a) socialist consciousness corresponds to the class position of the proletariat, (b) only social-democratic intellectuals 'possess the necessary means and leisure', for the scientific elaboration of this consciousness, (c) this consciousness is introduced into the working-class movement from without by these intellectuals and the Social-Democratic Party, and (d) when making its propaganda, the party meets with 'an instinctive striving towards socialism' among the proletariat.(37)

In all his later writings in the polemic against the Economists, Lenin constantly emphasised not the (real) spontaneous tendency of the proletariat to submit to the dominant bourgeois ideology when the latter is not fought by revolutionary Marxists, but its (just as real) spontaneous tendency to appropriate socialist theory and to embark on revolutionary action on its own initiative.

As soon as the 1905 revolution broke out, Lenin emphasised 'the amazingly rapid shift of the movement from the purely economic to the political ground . . . notwithstanding the fact that conscious Social-Democratic influence is lacking or is but slightly evident'. He exalted the proletarian revolutionary instinct which was breaking through 'all obstacles' such as the 'backwardness of some of the leaders'.(38) He regarded it as highly significant that the Moscow workers in December 1905 were more advanced than 'the conscious element' represented by the social-democrats. They knew by themselves what had to be done. For Lenin:(39)

This is the greatest historic gain in the Russian revolution . . . the proletariat sensed sooner than its leaders the change in the objective conditions of the struggle and the need for a transition from the strike to an uprising. As is always the case, practice marched ahead of theory.

At the same time, Lenin went so far as to say that 'The working class is instinctively, spontaneously social-democratic'.(40)

Logically, our ossified Marxist-Leninists who swear only by 'What Is To Be Done?' (of which they remember only the famous quotation from Kautsky) should tax Lenin and Stalin themselves with 'spontaneism'. That would be enjoyable. Unfortunately, they read very little more than a few texts, and always the same ones.
Let us recall that after the May-June 1968 movement in France, the Trotskyists and ossified Marxist-Leninists attacked Mao's mass line and those who wished to apply it in their practice, dubbing the latter with the ridiculous nickname 'Mao-spontex'. They spoke of the inability of the working class, if left by itself, to go beyond trade-union consciousness. According to them, to elaborate the line by gathering the correct ideas of the masses in struggles in which one is a participant before leading them signifies bowing before the necessarily bourgeois (!) spontaneity of the proletariat. It is spontaneism, economism and reformism' As for them, they reckon that communist intellectuals should elaborate the line and programme from books (Marxist classics, collections of statistics, etc) and then call on the masses to follow this self-appointed vanguard.

For forty years the Trotskyist sects (falling into the opposite mistake to that of Trotsky in 1904) have embodied the very essence of this sort of vanguard, the idea of which was so discredited during and after the movement of May-June that Ernest Mandel felt the need to take the precaution against the accusation of conceiving the party in terms of this model. 'There is no self-proclaimed vanguard', he tells us, because 'the vanguard must win recognition as a vanguard'.(41) We would retort, but yes, M. Mandel, there is a self-proclaimed vanguard. In 1939, while he recognised that the Fourth International was not linked to the masses, Trotsky consoled himself, nevertheless, by saying, 'We who are the vanguard of the vanguard'.(42) At any rate, the theoretician of the Fourth International stands on awkward ground. This vanguard must exist before being recognised, otherwise how could it win its recognition? A few pages later Mandel confirms our interpretation of his thought: 'The proletarian army will never reach its historic objectives if the necessary education, schooling and testing of a proletarian vanguard in the working out and agitational application of the revolutionary programme in struggle has not taken place before the outbreak of the broadest mass struggles.'(43)

One could not be clearer. The constitution of the vanguard and the elaboration of the programme must 'take place before' mass struggles and develop outside these struggles. The same applies to the education, training and testing of this curious 'vanguard'. Leaders and programme are thus to be bestowed on the people who would only have 'to recognise' them.

We should have to concede the correctness of Mandel and before him, Trotsky, if it were possible to deduce the laws of the revolution in a given country from general truths about its character (democratic or socialist) and its ultimate end, if it were possible to elaborate strategy and tactics from such deductions - that is, in the end, on the basis of bookish learning - if we could know the conjuncture of the class struggle and answer the question, 'Who are our friends and who are our enemies?' from given statistics based on class being and the mere objective interests of some social category, if we could elaborate, lastly, outside of and in place of the masses, the detailed plan of the transformations to be carried out in all the spheres of social life.(44)

Now 'the concrete analysis of a concrete situation is the living soul, the very essence of Marxism'. The carrying out of this analysis requires consideration of the class position (and not just the class being) of the different social strata, paying particular attention to the attitude of intermediary, wavering elements because victory cannot be won if the Left does not win over the Centre. It must also be based not only on the objective needs of the masses as we conceive them, perhaps wrongly, but also on their wishes, which is impossible without investigation and the latter presupposes links with the masses. If the answer to all these concrete questions about alliances, slogans, etc., could be provided by theory, then programme and line could be elaborated in an armchair. Lenin did not think so. To those who criticised him for not having defined 'a priori' the strategic line and particular tactics, he replied: 'As if one can set out to make a great revolution and know beforehand how it is to be completed' Such knowledge cannot be derived from books and our decision could spring only from the experience of the masses.'(45)

The programme makers would also do well to reflect on the words which Mao Tse-tung spoke to the plenary session of the Central Committee on 30 January 1962:(46)

[']Until the period of resistance against Japan, we could not determine the general Party line or entire set of specific policies in accordance with the situation. Until the necessary kingdom of the democratic revolution of that time was recognised by us, we could not have freedom'.

Later, Mao related his conversation in 1960 with Edgar Snow: Snow 'wanted me to talk about the long-term plans for China. I said: "I don't know". He said: "You're being too cautious". I said: "It's not caution, I just don't know, I don't have the experience" (of the construction of socialism).'(47)

As Marxists, Lenin and Mao knew that practice comes first, theory after, even if the latter contributes later to illuminate practice. That is why Marx said 'One step of real movement is worth a dozen programmes'. The insurrection of Paris workers in June 1848 and the Paris Commune owed practically nothing to Marxism, whereas the latter owes much to them: to the former, the theory of the uninterrupted revolution and the interpenetration of the democratic stage and the socialist stage; to the latter, the concrete forms of smashing the state apparatus and of the dictatorship of the proletariat.(48)

The Soviets were not inscribed in the programme of the Bolshevik Party and the latter had not launched them as a slogan. This historic initiative came from the masses alone. It was they who invented this form of organisation and power. Lenin declared on this subject:(49)

Had not the popular creative spirit of the Russian revolution . . . given rise to the Soviets as early as February 1917, they could not under any circumstances have assumed power in October . . . It was the creative spirit of the people, which had passed through the bitter experience of 1905 and had been made wise by it, that gave rise to this form of proletarian power.

We can now understand why in 1921 Lenin considered the translation of 'What Is To Be Done?' as 'undesirable'. He demanded that it should at least be accompanied by 'a good commentary', 'to avoid false applications'. In a new preface as early as 1907 Lenin pointed out that this text of 1902 contained expressions that were 'more or less awkward or imprecise' and that it should not be detached from 'the determined situation which gave birth to it'.(50)

Stalin was a better Leninist than certain of today's anti-spontaneists when he wrote as follows: 'Lenin taught us not only to teach the masses but also to learn from them . . . The ordinary people are often far closer to the truth than certain higher echelons.' Michael Lowy knows this passage from Stalin as well as those we have quoted above but he is careful not to note it. On the other hand, he quotes another one (p. 190) and harps on it with the purpose of setting Stalin against Lenin. It concerns a leaflet in which Stalin wrote 'Let us hold out our hands and gather around the party committees! We must not forget for one instant that only the party committees can provide us with proper leadership, that they alone know how to light up the road to "the promised land", the socialist world.' Whatever Lowy thinks, there is no contradiction here. One can and must insist both on the masses' historical initiative and on the party's leadership. This is what Lenin did, because both are necessary for the victory of the revolution.

True Leninists accept with Mao that correct ideas in politics come from the practice of the masses in struggle illuminated by the beacon of the general principles of Marxism-Leninism borne by the party.

One must study with the problems to be solved in mind. This is a condition for fruitful study. If practice is not combined with study, theory cannot be truly assimilated. The Marxist classics, statistical data from bourgeois economics and sociology are not enough to understand the concrete problems which the class struggle poses on the different fronts in which it proceeds. Books are not useless but practice must be the basis.

'Our principal method is to learn to make war by making it', we are told by Mao Tse-tung, who is adopting a truth already stated by Lenin in his 'Philosophical Notebooks': 'In order to understand, it is necessary to begin empirically, to study, to rise from empiricism to the universal. In order to learn to swim, it is necessary to get into the water.'(51) It is by making the revolution that we succeed in establishing its laws after a great number of mistakes and defeats.

'If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself,' Mao teaches us.(52) To know society it is necessary to change it by participating in the revolutionary struggle of the masses. An important moment in this practice is the investigation. In his 'Preface and Postscript to Rural Surveys', Mao declares: 'Investigation is especially necessary for those who know theory but do not know the actual conditions, for otherwise they will not be able to link theory with practice . . . No investigation, no right to speak.'(53) It is clear that the investigation in question has nothing in common with the investigations of bourgeois sociology with their vaunted impartiality. The militant is objective to the exact extent of his partiality in favour of the people.

An investigation cannot be undertaken unless one is linked to the masses, in their camp. In order to discover the masses' state of mind one should not make a survey but talk to the well-informed representatives of these masses without hiding one's views - quite the opposite. Mao made anti-religious propaganda while investigating the peasants' attachment to superstitious practices. There is no investigation without practice. Reality is discovered by transforming it. When Mao visited Hunan in January 1927, he was a revolutionary who fearlessly championed the Peasant Leagues despite the reticent, not to say hostile attitude of the leaders of his party. At the same time, he was inspired with the desire to learn from the masses, to become their humble pupil. He knew how to listen and did not set himself up as a giver of lessons. 'It has to be understood that the masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge.'(54)

The mass line is at once both a method of leadership and a method of knowledge since 'without a really concrete knowledge of the actual conditions of the classes in . . . society, there can be no really good leadership'.(55) But only on condition that it is not debased by summing it up in a simplistic formula such as 'correct ideas come from the masses' (they come from practice, particularly that of the class struggle) which certain people take to mean: the ideas of the masses are always correct. Of course, there is always something correct even in the false ideas of the masses, but if one does not make this distinction, if one does not build on what is correct to combat what is false, one will fall into the 'tailism' which Mao denounced in a speech at a conference of cadres in Shansi-Suiyuan. In it he criticised the apparently left-wing policy adopted by Liu Shao-chi during the agrarian reform. Under the pretext of 'Doing everything as the masses want it done', Liu Shao-chi had gone ahead with a strictly egalitarian division of the land and capital goods, forgetting that the sole target of the agrarian reform should be the system of feudal exploitation. Mao reminded him that 'the Party must lead the masses to carry out all their correct ideas in the light of the circumstances and educate them to correct any wrong ideas they may entertain' (56)

They are falsifying Mao's teaching who claim support from it for a denial of the necessity for a vanguard, or 'leading core of the whole people' in Mao's formula, which seems preferable to us because the core is in the people instead of being ahead and outside of it.

In contrast to what the ossified Marxist-Leninists think, a revolutionary movement can be correctly oriented even if it does not have a Marxist Party at its head. We have cited the example of the rising in June 1848 and of the Commune and we could add that of Cuba. Mao says that 'they (the poor peasants) have never been wrong on the general direction of the revolution'.(57) It is true, nevertheless, that in the absence of a Communist Party, the peasant revolution would have come to a halt in the best of cases in the bourgeois-democratic stage (agrarian reform) and would not have finally suppressed exploitation and oppression in the countryside. Without the leadership of the revolutionary proletarian Communist Party armed with Marxism-Leninism, the thought of Mao Tse-tung, the proletariat will not be able to liberate itself and in so doing the whole of humanity; it will not be able to pursue its struggle in a consistent way; that is, to the end, namely the abolition of classes and the establishment of a communist society.

Those who invoke the example of Cuba to combat this truth proceed from the postulate that that country is a dictatorship of the proletariat which is constructing socialism. Nothing is less certain. According to Bettelheim, the transformation that has taken place in Cuba is not a 'true revolution' any more than those which have occurred in Guinea, Egypt, or Algeria. Neither Cuba nor any of these countries has really escaped imperialist (or social-imperialist) domination. For that, it would have been necessary for the proletariat to have taken power and set off on the socialist road, which it has not done.(58) Let us assume that it has, however, for the sake of the argument. Let us also assume that no involution will occur in the future, that the left of the party leads the masses in their struggle against the bureaucratised leaders who are taking the capitalist road and that the construction of socialism is thus being carried through to the end. In this case, one will be able to conclude that the party in power (whatever its origins and the serious mistakes it has committed) will be transformed through the struggle into a true proletarian communist party. This is almost a tautology.

On 18 September 1968, the 'People's Daily' published an article(59) entitled 'Compass for the victory of the revolutionary people of all countries', on the occasion of the Sixth Anniversary of Chairman Mao's most important inscription for 'Japanese worker friends': 'The Japanese Revolution will undoubtedly be victorious, provided the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism is really integrated with the concrete practice of the Japanese revolution'. The editorial in the 'People's Daily' declared:

The party of the proletariat in all countries must firmly adhere to the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism and at the same time, proceeding from life itself, maintain close contact with the masses, constantly sum up the experience of mass struggles and independently formulate and carry out policies and tactics suited to the conditions of each country.

For those in Western Europe who quote the thought of Mao Tse-tung as their authority, the problem is posed precisely in these terms: to proceed from reality or from books? To make use of the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism in order to know reality through practice ('the struggle') or to use 'reality' in order to illustrate by examples the truths of Marxism-Leninism and have the illusion of posing concrete problems? There are certain people in France but also in Belgium, Italy and Germany who wish to proceed from 'What Is To Be Done?' and not from reality.

The conclusion to the same article says, 'It is our firm conviction that a truly revolutionary Japanese party armed with Marxism-Leninism is sure to come into being in the flames of revolutionary struggle.'

The party will be born in the flames of the revolutionary struggle, not in the cigarette smoke of a room used for meetings by a few young or not so young petty bourgeois eager to proclaim themselves the party.

We know how the ossified Marxists answer. They answer in an ossified way: the Chinese Communist Party was founded in this way by a dozen intellectuals representing fifty-seven members. This is to forget a 'detail': at that time in China there was neither a bourgeois-'worker's' party nor reformist trade unions misleading the majority of the working class. It will be accepted that this detail is important. In the meantime it is necessary to understand exactly what was this party founded in 1921. Half of the founder members reneged, the anarchist tendency was very strong among them, and of those who did not degenerate Mao said, 'We were just a bunch of eager young men who wanted to make a revolution.' He emphasised, moreover, that these eager young men were 'blind' and remained so 'until the period of the war of resistance to Japan'. 'If somebody says that there was a comrade, for example, any comrade in the Central Committee< or I myself, who completely recognised the laws of the Chinese Revolution in the beginning, he would be boasting, don't you believe him for it didn't happen.'(60)

It matters little that there are only a few Maoists at the beginning. They grow stronger if they actually work to fuse with the working class, if they participate in its struggles and do not restrict their activity to setting up and distributing a journal. On the other hand, it is very important that, in the present conditions, they do not claim to be the 'true' Communist Party and do not launch grandiloquent appeals destined to disappear into thin air when everyone knows that they do not represent anything very much, otherwise the workers will not take them seriously. Having been 'had' twice by traditional workers' organisations, the workers demand that the Maoists prove themselves before giving them their confidence. In other words, for the Maoist organisation to be able to present itself as the leading core of the people, it is necessary for it really to be such, for the conscious workers (especially they) will not allow themselves to be taken in. This presupposes that certain conditions are met.

1. proletarianisation of the organisation and its leadership;
2. roots in the working class attested by effective ability to lead its struggles;
3. roots in all the other classes and strata of the people with the ability to mobilise them and to unify their struggles into a revolutionary perspective as a criterion;
4. unification of all proletarian revolutionaries and all true Maoists, that is, of all those who can be united.

Such an organisation will be able to lead the united front of all revolutionary classes and strata. It will have determined on the basis of practice the character of the present stage, the principal contradiction, the general political line and the system of particular lines. It will have helped the masses to elaborate particular programmes on the different aspects of their condition (work, security, housing, transport, etc.) and will synthesise them in a programme for a people's regime. It will be capable of combining legal and illegal, and open and clandestine work. It will have at its disposal an armed organisation, however embryonic.

The people will then flex 'the three magic arms' guaranteeing it victory: the party, the united front, the army. This stage was only reached in China in 1937.

It is clear that the building of the party is a continuous creation, as is the elaboration of the programme, as can be seen from the constant changes which Lenin made to it.(61) Its official date of birth is a question of 'revolutionary opportunity' which must be appraised on the basis of the concrete situation. In stating the conditions pointed out above we were thinking above all of France and Italy. The premature birth of the party, in other words, its emergence as a self-proclaimed vanguard immediately claiming recognition of its status by fraternal parties and counting more on their aid than on its own forces, threatens to backfire by depreciating in the eyes of the masses the idea of a Maoist-Marxist-Leninist Party and by making more difficult the broad alliance of all those who appeal to the authority of the thought of Mao Tse-tung.

On the other hand, the protracted building of a party presenting the characteristics we have pointed out sanctions more flexibility in the choice (or abandonment) of different forms of organisation, more effectively liberates initiative from below, and ensures the selection of cadres only on the basis of their success in practice. By combining legal and illegal methods, by setting when necessary the violence of the people against the violence of authority, one educates the militants, attracts the most combative workers and rejects petty bourgeois individualists and careerists. The elimination of poisoned blood and the infusion of fresh blood develop the organisation on a healthy proletarian basis, offering every guarantee against the dangers of sclerosis, opportunist degeneration and bureaucratism.

THE TROTSKYIST CRITIQUE OF THE BUREAUCRACY

Reading the pamphlet, 'De la bureaucratie', by E. Germain (alias Ernest Mandel), we note that, in the chapter deceptively called 'La théorie trotskyste de la dégénerescence de l'Etat ouvrier soviétique' (Trotsky's theory of the degeneration of the Soviet Workers' State), the concepts of 'Thermidor' and 'Bonapartism' which are nonetheless the foundation of this theory are spirited away. In their place, we find a definition of the bureaucracy which can be summarised as follows: an organisation necessitates leaders, an apparatus and permanent officials and suddenly we have 'budding bureaucrats'. Such is the genus. The specific difference is this: of all the leaders, those are thorough-going bureaucrats whom E. Germain dislikes. Other criteria are vaguely mentioned but this one is the most certain. Compared with the unstable equilibrium of Trotsky's theoretical constructions this idea of bureaucracy has three advantages and one disadvantage: it is simple, pliable and irrefutable but it serves no purpose - or rather it serves all purposes, which comes to the same thing.

It is true, nevertheless, that Germain resurrects an old idea of Trotsky's which the latter had gone beyond in his own way. This is the characterisation of the Leninist idea of a party governed by democratic centralism as 'substitutionist': '(Lenin's) methods . . . lead the Party organisation to substitute itself for the Party (in the vague and Menshevik sense of the term); then the Central Committee for the organisation, and finally, a single dictator to substitute himself for the Central Committee.'(62)

Trotsky accused Lenin of distrusting the working class. He reckoned that it was able to intervene as such in the political arena and could not tolerate the leadership of a united and centralised party acting as its agent or 'locum tenens'.(63).

This denunciation of 'substitutionism' (libellous in regard to Lenin) has had threefold descendents: those who thought that the proletariat was incapable of becoming the dominant class adopted theories of the 'new class' of the Burnham or Djilas type; those who thought the opposite formed certain anarcho-Trotskyist 'workers'-council' currents; the intermediate position, that of the Trotskyists, was that bureaucracy is certainly inherent in the division between leaders and led but that there is a means by which its effects can be attenuated, namely worker's democracy; that is, as we have seen, the legitimation of factions which reproduce the same division! However, Trotsky was not satisfied with such an elementary analysis of the bureaucratic phenomenon but had attempted to discover its social basis, to explain it in an outwardly Marxist manner in terms of the class struggle. Until Germain came along and turned the 'science' upside-down, Trotskyists described the dictatorship of the proletariat under Stalin as a workers' state led by a Bonapartist bureaucracy. This amounted to a rejection of the Marxist-Leninist point of view according to which bureaucracy always serves and is monitored by the dominant class. Here is how Henri Weber, following Trotsky, justified this position in a pamphlet entitled 'Mouvement ouvrier, Stalinisme et bureaucracie': 'Nevertheless, it can happen that the State bureaucracy rises above classes, erects itself into an autonomous power and temporarily installs its own unmonitored power exercised through the providential intermediary of some all-powerful man.'(64)

At first sight, this thesis is in conformity with Marx's analysis in the 18th Brumaire, in which he says, 'Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent'.(65) In fact, if the state seems to be independent, that means that it is not so. With regard to 'the bureaucratic caste' which ruled Germany in 1872, Engels tells us in 'The Housing Question' that the state seems to float above classes and to represent the interests of the whole society but that 'In reality, however, the State as it exists in Germany is likewise the necessary product of the social basis out of which it has developed'.(66)

Coming back to the question of Bonapartism in 'The Civil War in France', Marx tells us:(67)

The State power, apparently soaring high above society, was at the same time itself the greatest scandal of that society . . . Imperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and ultimate form of the State power . . . which fully grown bourgeois society had finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labour by capital.

It is clear that, for Marx, the function of the Bonapartist state was to exercise the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and to serve the interests of this class. Whereas, according to Trotsky, although the Stalinist Bonapartist regime is 'the historic weapon of the working class', it oppresses the latter, robs it on behalf of a privileged minority, organises production in the interests of this minority and follows a counter-revolutionary policy on the international plane.

The analogy which Trotsky set up between the 'Stalinist workers' state' and the Empire is artificial and even absurd, moreover, for the nature of the state apparatus varies radically according to the historically determined social formations in which it functions as an instrument for the perpetuation of the social relations, for the domination and repression of one class by another. Marx had already ridiculed this way of masking contemporary realities behind 'superficial historical analogies' which 'forget principles':(68) With so complete a difference between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and modern class struggles, the political figures produced by them can likewise have not more in common with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury and the High Priest Samuel.
Apparently Trotsky was unable to think through current problems except by means of 'superficial historical analogies'.

Even when he applied it to bourgeois regimes, Trotsky used the term Bonapartism wrongly. In this category he included not only fascism but also the governments which he called 'proto-fascist', like those of 'Doumergue and Flandin in France'.(69)

When the Mensheviks called NEP a 'Soviet Thermidor' in 1921, he acquiesced and even claimed the credit. The comparison is absurd. Once in power, it is normal for the bourgeoisie to wish to bring the revolution to a halt in order to enjoy its victories in peace. The Thermidorians represented the 'nouveaux riches', the speculators and the acquirers of national wealth who did not want any new upheavals. The October Revolution, on the contrary, was the revolution of the proletariat not of the Nepmen and the kulaks. By making temporary concessions to them the proletariat 'reculait pour mieux sauter'. NEP was not the consolidation of the gains of a class of exploiters. It was, quite the contrary, a withdrawal permitting the consolidation of the power of the proletariat, the most exploited class, whose emancipation liberates the whole of humanity. Later and up to 1935, Trotsky ceaselessly warned of the danger of a Thermidor while denying (against certain of his supporters) that it had already taken place. Trotsky and his friends analysed the political struggles throughout this period by drawing on this analogy. Until 1928 Trotsky saw Bukharin and Rykov as Thermidorians. In his 'Letter to Friends' in October 1928, he considered the possibility that the Thermidorian stage could be skipped. The USSR could pass directly to an 18th Brumaire with Voroshilov and Budenny in Napoleon's boots! He also considered the possibility of a restoration of capitalism for which Stalin was preparing the way: 'The film of the revolution is running backwards and Stalin's part in it is that of Kerensky in reverse.'

He wrote this just as Stalin was preparing to launch the collectivisation campaign and the Five-Year Plans. A poor show for a prophet (armed or not)!

In 1929, in a polemic with some groupuscules claiming his authority, he defined Thermidor as a counter-revolution necessitating a civil war. He came to the conclusion that, real as this danger was, it had not yet materialised.(70) In fact, at this time, he thought that 'Thermidor . . . indicated a transfer of power to another class'.(71)

A few years later, he had to make a 'painful revision' of all his past ideas. He then decided that Thermidor had taken place as early as 1923 when Stalin defeated the left Opposition; Stalin's government having taken on a Bonapartist character, the Soviet Union lived under a consulate. Such is the analysis presented in the pamphlet, 'The Workers' State and the Question of Thermidor and Bonapartism' in 1935.

Trotsky thus recognised that the USSR had been living under a Thermidorian regime for twelve years without his noticing it.

These speculations on an inept historical comparison could only obscure the problems instead of posing them correctly, since they arose, as we have seen, from a fundamental theoretical mistake.(72)

Later, in his book 'In Defence of Marxism', Trotsky acknowledged that the notion of caste which he applied to the Soviet 'bureaucracy' did not have a scientific character and was only a historical analogy (another one!) helping him provisionally to supply 'the sociology of the present'. The term caste, he said, had a 'makeshift' character.(73)

Thirty years later, the Trotskyists are still using this unscientific and provisional 'concept' which designates neither a class nor an instrument of a class: 'Far from being its servant, bureaucracy has become mistress of the (entire) society'. They also describe the apparatuses of the social-democratic and revisionist parties as bureaucracies, here again without giving this word a class content; that is, without distinguishing between on the one hand the bureaucratic nature of these parties which lies in the fact that they represent bourgeois ideology and interests among the working class, and on the other hand, the bureaucratic deviations in a Marxist-Leninist party which reflect the class struggle in the party in which proletarian ideology must be ceaselessly consolidated.(74) H. Weber sees in working-class bureaucracy 'a (privileged) sub-group of the proletariat assuming the leadership of trade-union and political struggles' (p. 8). In order to speak of bureaucracy, Weber adopts a functionalist point of view, not the point of view of Marxist class analysis.

Ultimately bureaucracy would be the product of the division between leaders and led. Its existence would not therefore be linked to a determinate class: the bourgeoisie. Taken to its logical conclusion this line of argument would end up in either the Rizzi-Burnham school or that of Chaulieu and the anarcho-Trotskyists of 'Socialisme ou barbarie'.

The degeneration of Burnham and Chaulieu-Cardan illustrates that it is impossible for the Trotskyists to be rigorous about their concept of bureaucracy and to continue to invoke Marx and Lenin.

For Lenin, on the contrary, bureaucracy and the tendencies towards bureaucratism are rooted in capitalism and in the bourgeois and petty bourgeois mentality. 'There is a petty bourgeois tendency to transform the members of the Soviets into "parliamentarians" or else into bureaucrats.'(75)

How can this tendency be fought? 'Those of us who are doomed to remain at work in the centre will continue the task of improving the apparatus and purging it of bureaucracy . . . the greatest assistance in this task is coming, and will come, from the localities'.(76)

We see that Lenin talked about purging bureaucracy without suppressing the apparatus and this by virtue of the link with the masses: 'The fight against the bureaucratic distortion of the Soviet form of organisation is assured by the firmness of the connection between the Soviets and "the people", meaning by that the workers and the exploited people.'(77) Bureaucratism has a class nature which had a threefold origin in Lenin's day:

1. the maintenance of Tsarist bureaucrats in the state administration as specialists necessary for their 'administrative knowledge';

2. the ideological survivals of capitalism (bureaucratic by nature) among the masses and even the leaders, even the revolutionaries;

3. the fact that economic and administrative functions in the first stages of the construction of socialism remain tied to the heritage of the previous society and induce a corresponding ideology, leads to a bureaucratic style of work among cadres.

The struggle against bureaucratism is thus a struggle between proletarian ideology and bourgeois or petty bourgeois ideology. It is a class struggle. To lead it to a successful conclusion, the initiative of the masses must be freed so that they can educate themselves on the political and technical level, so that they can do without bourgeois specialists and so that 'the working class exercises leadership in everything'. 'It is important for us to draw literally all working people into the government of the state. It is a task of tremendous difficulty. But socialism cannot be implemented by a minority, by the party. It can be implemented only by tens of millions when they have learned to do it themselves.'(78)

The process of revisionist degeneration and of the restoration of capitalism, the principal agents of which are the bureaucratic cadres 'who take the capitalist road' has its structural roots in the discrepancy between the possession of power by the working class and its actual ability to exercise it, particularly in the economic and cultural domains. To reduce this discrepancy it is necessary to conduct the class struggle under socialism, the most explosive form of which was the cultural revolution. Like Stalin, Trotsky failed to understand what this class struggle after the expropriation of the propertied classes might have been.

For Trotsky, the danger of the restoration of capitalism came from the contradiction between the forms of property and bourgeois norms of distribution granting extreme privileges to an upper stratum.(79) These norms themselves were caused by poverty and the necessity to resort to material incentives in order to develop industrial production ('primitive accumulation'). Now every inegalitarian distribution necessitates a policeman. 'Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and who has to wait'. In the eventuality that it would hold on to power, it would not fail to restore private ownership of the means of production for its own benefit.

'It is not enough to be the director of a trust; it is necessary to be a stockholder.'(80)
The preceding is summarised in Figure 1, in which the arrows symbolise relations of cause and effect.
It is true that material privileges contribute to the degeneration of the leaders (it is not the only cause) and to the perpetuation of a bourgeois mentality infected with egoism and careerism, even among the broad masses to whom the cadres give a bad example. Trotsky's mistake was to see in this alone the sole source of the tendencies to the restoration of capitalism, which he defined moreover as a violent revolution conferring on directors the status of stockholders.

In other words, he attributed an exclusive importance to the superstructural legal form of the relations of production, unaware of the problem of their content; he wrote for example, 'The October Revolution has been betrayed by the ruling stratum but not yet overthrown. It has a great power of resistance, coinciding with the established property relations.'(81)

We know today that the development of capitalism (in the USSR for example) is not reducible to a return to individual private ownership of the means of production. This may, perhaps, be its final
result - but it is only an inessential aspect at the moment. On the contrary, the Trotskyists today who adhere to the words of 'the master' describe the USSR as a Workers' State. They also use Trotsky's problematic with regard to China. Everything that Trotsky said concerning the USSR appears to them to apply 'a fortiori' to China. As the latter is even poorer than Russia, the tendency to primitive accumulation and therefore to 'robbing' the masses must be all the more strongly in evidence there. The same schema thus unfolds. Not only is this schema not in accordance with the facts but the concept of 'primitive socialist accumulation' on which it is based is not Marxist. We showed in Chapter 3 that the analogy thus established with capitalist primitive accumulation is meaningless since capital is a relation of production and not a thing, a certain quantity of money, machines or goods. This analogy helps, moreover, to falsify the problems and even, paradoxically, to justify certain of Stalin's mistakes, since he applied, in its essentials, Preobrazhensky's schema in the construction of the material basis of 'socialism' in the USSR. What the Trotskyists do not understand is that, to the extent that there is such a thing as 'primitive accumulation' it is not socialist.

We have seen what were the economic roots of bureaucracy according to Trotsky. Underdevelopment and scarcity made social inequalities necessary, all the more so since they engendered a strong tendency to primitive accumulation. The bureaucrats were those who knew who was to receive and who was to wait. They enforced the labour discipline necessary for an accelerated growth of production and they justified their privileges by exploiting the country's cultural backwardness.

The bureaucracy's political roots were the revolutionary ebb-tide in Europe after 1923; the weariness of a Russian working class decimated and dispersed after the civil war; finally, the specific corrupting effects of power.(82)

For all these reasons, Trotsky considered that the bureaucratic phenomenon was unavoidable to a certain extent. It derived, in fact, from 'the iron necessity to give birth to and support a privileged minority so long as it is impossible to guarantee genuine equality';(83) that is why:(84)
the tendencies of bureaucratism, which strangle the worker's movement in capitalist countries, would everywhere show themselves even after a proletarian revolution. But . . . the poorer the society which issues from a revolution, the sterner and more naked would be the expression of this 'law' and the more crude would be the forms assumed by bureaucratism.

What would a Marxist Party do if it succeeded in asserting itself? It 'would shuffle and cleanse the bureaucracy and place it under the control of the masses'.(85) Hence a few palliatives apart, the bureaucracy would continue to exist.

Trotsky defined the dictatorship of the proletariat at the economic, not at the political level: it would reside entirely in state control of the means of production. For him the construction of socialism is unrelated to the class struggle; it is solely a question of economic development. This emerges clearly from this passage in 'The Revolution Betrayed' among others: 'Soviet forms of property on a basis of the most modern achievement of American technique transplanted into all branches of economic life - that indeed would be the first stage of socialism'.(86)

This idea is based on a confusion between property relations and the relations of production.(87) The USSR is a 'Workers' State' in so far as the bureaucracy maintains the collective ownership of the means of production, 'the dictatorship of the proletariat has found its distorted but indubitable expression in the dictatorship of the bureaucracy'.(88) Trotsky accounted for this paradox by means of the comparison with Bonapartism. In 1929, he still thought (but not for much longer) that the peasantry would be the social basis of this Bonapartism as it had been for Napoleon III: 'The enriched muzhik or the muzhik who only seeks to get rich . . . is the natural agent of Bonapartist tendencies';(89) and also: 'The problem of Thermidor and of Bonapartism is in essence the problem of the kulak'.(90)

But the facts obstinately refuse to comply with his schemas. Trotsky characterised his own destiny very well when he wrote that 'a petit-bourgeois intellectual - alas' - uses as his "tools" fleeting observations and superficial generalisations - until major events club him on the head'.(91)

The expropriation of the kulaks and collectivisation clubbed him on the head and forced him to modify his analysis of 'Stalinist Bonapartism', which now became a reaction to the pressure of the surrounding peasants and the capitalist encirclement:(92)

The Soviet bureaucracy . . . was summoned to regulate the antagonism between the proletariat and the peasantry, between the workers' state and world imperialism . . . Stalin's 'personal regime' . . . is the product of the living struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the last instance . . . The objective function of 'the Saviour' is to safeguard new forms of ownership by usurping the political function of the dominant class.

Trotsky thus argued that the bureaucracy raised itself above the people by performing a balancing act between antagonistic classes 'in equilibrium'. Here again, we cannot ask Trotsky to be consistent. In some of his writings, he said that, faced with the bourgeois offensive, the proletariat was forced to relinquish power into the hands of the bureaucracy; in others, he argued that it was the bureaucracy itself which fostered the rise of the bourgeoisie. Similarly, Trotsky does not seem to have been sure whether the bureaucracy manoeuvred in the last instance to serve the proletariat or the bourgeoisie (there can be no doubt in the case of real Bonapartism). He acknowledged two 'variants':(93)

Upon the social foundations of the Soviet state, the economic and cultural uplift of the labouring masses must tend to undermine the very bases of bureaucratic domination. Clearly, in the light of this fortunate historical variant, the bureaucracy turns out to be only the instrument - a bad and expensive instrument - of the socialist state.

This thesis explains the naïve hopes placed by the Trotskyists of the Fourth International and by Isaac Deutscher in 'democratisation' after the 20th Congress. Higher living standards and a higher cultural level on the basis of 'the socialist relations of ownership', should surely guarantee the advance towards proletarian democracy and true socialism? The idea that Soviet culture was not perhaps completely proletarian, any more than the real relations of production, did not cross their minds.

In 'The Revolution Betrayed', Trotsky specified the other variant towards which he leaned more and more at the end of his life: if the revolutionary interest did not overthrow the bureaucracy then the counter-revolutionary interest would do it. If neither of them monopolised power, the bureaucracy itself would restore capitalism for its own benefit:(94)

It must inevitably in future stages seek support for itself in property relations . . . Privileges have only half their worth, if they cannot be transmitted to one's children. But the right of testament is inseparable from the right of property. It is not enough to be the director of a trust; it is necessary to be a stockholder.

However, in the same work, Trotsky maintained that the bureaucracy was 'the instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat' because 'it is compelled to defend state property as the source of its power and its income'.(95) Was it or was it not 'compelled'? Complete mystery remains. Whatever the case, it seems that a new slide in Trotsky's ideas took place a few years later, since he then declares that 'the overthrow of the bureaucracy is indispensable for the preservation of state property in the USSR'.(96) On the other hand, Trotsky insisted on talking about a 'Bonapartist oligarchy' and simultaneously a 'Stalinist counter-revolution'.(97) Bonapartism, whether in its classical form analysed by Marx or in its fascist form, eliminates the parties and the traditional political personnel of the bourgeoisie but governs by serving the interests of this class. In 'Stalinist Bonapartism', on the other hand, although it is 'the historic weapon of the working class', 'the dominant class' (sic), serves the interests of imperialism of which it is 'the most valuable agency'(98) and 'transforms the Soviet social order in the interests of a privileged minority'.(99) Understand who can!

Trotsky's frequent 'volte-faces' on the nature of the Soviet regime and his permanent conceptual wavering are explained by the fact that while he touched on (but did not see) real problems, he proved to be incapable of correctly formulating them in terms of specific contradictions in the transition to socialism. He confused the relations of production with their superstructural legal expression, property relations. Conflating the three instances of social formation (the economic, legal-political and ideological-theoretical levels), he defined the dictatorship of the proletariat by the state ownership of the means of production. In that case, the Asiatic mode of production of the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Peru etc, would have been socialist prototypes; modern Egypt would be a dictatorship of the proletariat.(100) Trotsky did not understand that in a country in which the state disposes of the means of production, the decisive question is to know who holds power. Confronted with the paradox of a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' in which the latter suffers the dictatorship, he extricated himself by resorting either to a medical metaphor which underlined the contingent character of the phenomenon (this dictatorship is 'very sick!')(101) or to the illegitimate historical analogy with Bonapartism which, on the contrary, linked it to a 'sociological law'.

Now under this latter regime, the state serves the bourgeoisie because it is dominant on the economic level. The proletariat, on the contrary, can only hold economic power on condition that it exercises political power. If it loses the latter, it loses everything.

The perfectly clear meaning of Lenin's texts on this subject has been obscured for half a century by Trotskyist, Stalinist and Khrushchevite ideologies. The Bolshevik leader had emphasised that the only differences between state capitalism in Germany and that set up in Russia in 1918 was that in the latter country, 'the workers hold state power'. According to him, if you combine state capitalism along German lines with 'the proletarian, Soviet state . . . you will get all the conditions necessary for socialism'.(102)

The tendencies to bureaucratism which appear within the proletarian state apparatus - that is, the tendencies of certain leaders to cut themselves off from the masses, to behave like despotic overlords, to award themselves privileges - reflects the persistent influence of bourgeois ideology which also tends to deflect the economic, educational and international policy of the socialist state. A struggle develops between the leaders who thus take the capitalist road and the consistent revolutionaries who wish to advance towards socialism, a struggle which is sometimes latent, sometimes overt and sometimes explosive. This struggle between the two lines, between the two roads, is pursued unceasingly throughout the period of the transition to socialism. The elements who, disguised as Marxist-Leninists, are taking the capitalist road may seize power at any moment, that is, deflect the party and the state in a non-proletarian direction. This deviation can become irreversible and lead to the restoration of capitalism. That is why the principal contradiction after the abolition of private ownership of the means of production is the contradiction between the revolutionary masses and the leaders taking the capitalist road.

If, from the principal aspect, the revolutionary masses become the secondary aspect of this contradiction, the class nature of the state changes, which entails the usurpation of power by a new bourgeoisie. The 20th Congress of the CPSU marked such a turning point, the causes of which obviously go back much further.

The great proletarian cultural revolution made it possible to resolve in practice and in theory the problem posed by the pursuit of the class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat by liberating the initiative of the masses through a broad democracy, so that they could follow affairs of state and overthrow the reactionary leaders. We know that the slogan of the last stage was 'The working class must exercise leadership in everything', in other words, not only in the factories (even this is impossible without struggles) but also in the educational institutions and party and government bodies.

It is now clear that the analysis of the Soviet regime developed by Trotsky and based on the concepts of 'bureaucratic centralism', 'Thermidor', and 'Bonapartism', cast no light at all on the struggle between the two lines and consequently failed to bring out the laws of development of a social formation in transition to socialism. Thus all his predictions have been contradicted by events, one after another. His successors have not been any luckier. They concentrated the full blast of their criticism on Stalin and put their hopes in Tito and Khrushchev, from whom bitter disappointments awaited them. They did not understand the cultural revolution in which the masses have been seen struggling against the bureaucrats, because it shattered their theoretical moulds into a thousand pieces.