The Revolution Betrayed
Work âAccording to Abilityâ and Personal Property
1. Work âaccording to abilityâ and personal property
On the 11th of June, 1936, the Central Executive Committee approved the draft of a new Soviet Constitution which, according to Stalinâs declaration, repeated daily by the whole press, will be âthe most democratic in the world.â To be sure, the manner in which the constitution was drawn up is enough to cause doubts as to this. Neither in the press nor at any meetings was a word ever spoken about this great reform. Moreover, as early as March 1, 1936, Stalin declared to the American interviewer, Roy Howard: âWe will doubtless adopt our new constitution at the end of this year.â Thus Stalin knew with complete accuracy just when this new constitution, about which the people at that moment knew nothing at all, would be adopted. It is impossible not to conclude that âthe most democratic constitution in the worldâ was worked out and introduced in a not quite perfectly democratic manner. To be sure, in June the draft was submitted to the âconsiderationâ of the people of the Soviet Union. It would be vain, however, to seek in this whole sixth part of the globe one Communist who would dare to criticize a creation of the Central Committee, or one non-party citizen who would reject a proposal from the ruling party. The discussion reduced itself to sending resolutions of gratitude to Stalin for the âhappy life.â The content and style of these greetings had been thoroughly worked out under the old constitution.
The first section, entitled Social Structure, concludes with these words: âIn the Soviet Union, the principle of socialism is realized: From each according to his abilities to each according to his work.â This inwardly contradictory, not to say nonsensical, formula has entered, believe it or not, from speeches and journalistic articles into the carefully deliberated text of the fundamental state law. It bears witness not only to a complete lowering of theoretical level in the lawgivers, but also to the lie with which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued. It is not difficult to guess the origin of the new âprinciple.â To characterize the Communist society, Marx employed the famous formula: âFrom each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.â The two parts of this formula are inseparable. âFrom each according to his abilities,â in the Communist, not the capitalist, sense, means: Work has now ceased to be an obligation, and has become an individual need; society has no further use for any compulsion. Only sick and abnormal persons will refuse to work. Working âaccording to their abilityâ â that is, in accord with their physical and psychic powers, without any violence to themselves â the members of the commune will, thanks to a high technique, sufficiently fill up the stores of society so that society can generously endow each and all âaccording to their needs,â without humiliating control. This two-sided but indivisible formula of communism thus assumes abundance, equality, an all-sided development of personality, and a high cultural discipline.
The Soviet state in all its relations is far closer to a backward capitalism than to communism. It cannot yet even think of endowing each âaccording to his needs.â But for this very reason it cannot permit its citizens to work âaccording to their abilities.â It finds itself obliged to keep in force the system of piecework payment, the principle of which may be expressed thus: âGet out of everybody as much as you can, and give him in exchange as little as possible.â To be sure, nobody in the Soviet Union works above his âabilitiesâ in the absolute sense of the word â that is, above his physical and psychic potential. But this is true also of capitalism. The most brutal as well as the most refined methods of exploitation run into limits set by nature. Even a mule under the whip works âaccording to his ability,â but from that it does not follow that the whip is a social principle for mules. Wage labor does not cease even under the Soviet regime to wear the humiliating label of slavery. Payment âaccording to workâ â in reality, payment to the advantage of âintellectualâ at the expense of physical, and especially unskilled, work â is a source of injustice, oppression and compulsions for the majority, privileges and a âhappy lifeâ for the few.
Instead of frankly acknowledging that bourgeois norms of labor and distribution still prevail in the Soviet Union, the authors of the constitution have cut this integral Communist principle in two halves, postponed the second half to an indefinite future, declared the first half already realized, mechanically hitched on to it the capitalist norm of piecework payment, named the whole thing âprinciple of Socialism,â and upon this falsification erected the structure of their constitution!
Of greatest practical significance in the economic sphere is undoubtedly Article X, which in contrast to most of the articles has quite clearly the task of guaranteeing, against invasion from the bureaucracy itself, the personal property of the citizens in their articles of domestic economy, consumption, comfort and daily life. With the exception of âdomestic economyâ, property of this kind, purged of the psychology of greed and envy which clings to it, will not only be preserved under communism but will receive an unheard of development. It is subject to doubt, to be sure, whether a man of high culture would want to burden himself with a rubbish of luxuries. But he would not renounce any one of the conquests of comfort. The first task of communism is to guarantee the comforts of life to all. In the Soviet Union, however, the question of personal property still wears a petty bourgeois and not a communist aspect. The personal property of the peasants and the not well-off city people is the target of outrageous arbitrary acts on the part of the bureaucracy, which on its lower steps frequently assures by such means its own relative comfort. A growth of the prosperity of the country now makes it possible to renounce these seizures of personal property, and even impels the government to protect personal accumulations as a stimulus to increase the productivity of labor. At the same time â and this is of no small importance a protection by law of the hut, cow and home-furnishings of the peasant, worker or clerical worker, also legalizes the town house of the bureaucrat, his summer home, his automobile and all the other âobjects of personal consumption and comfort,â appropriated by him on the basis of the âsocialistâ principle: âFrom each according to his abilities, to each according to his work.â The bureaucratâs automobile will certainly be protected by the new fundamental law more effectively than the peasantâs wagon.
2. The Soviets and Democracy
In the political sphere, the distinction of the new constitution from the old is its return from the Soviet system of election according to class and industrial groups, to the system of bourgeois democracy based upon the so-called âuniversal, equal and directâ vote of an atomized population. This is a matter, to put it briefly, of juridically liquidating the dictatorship of the proletariat. Where there are no capitalists, there is also no proletariat â say the creators of the new constitution â and consequently the state itself from being proletarian becomes national. This argument, with all its superficial lure, is either nineteen years late or many years in advance of its time. In expropriating the capitalists, the proletariat did actually enter upon its own liquidation as a class. But from liquidation in principle to actual dissolution in society is a road more prolonged, the longer the new state is compelled to carry out the rudimentary work of capitalism. The Soviet proletariat still exists as n class deeply distinct from the peasantry, the technical intelligentsia and the bureaucracy â and moreover as the sole class interested right up to the end in the victory of socialism. The new constitution wants to dissolve this class in âthe nationâ politically, long before it is economically dissolved in society.
To be sure, the reformers decided after some waverings to call the state, as formerly, Soviet. But that is only a crude political ruse dictated by the same considerations out of regard for which Napoleonâs empire continued to be called a republic. Soviets in their essence arc organs of class rule, and cannot be anything else. The democratically elected institutions of local self-administration are municipalities, dumas, zemstvos, anything you will, but not soviets. A general state Legislative Assembly on the basis of democratic formulas is a belated parliament (or rather its caricature), but by no means the highest organ of the Soviets. In trying to cover themselves with the historic authority of the Soviet system, the reformers merely show that the fundamentally new administration which they are giving to the state life dare not as yet come out under its own name.
Of itself, an equalization of the political rights of workers and peasants might not destroy the social nature of the state, if the influence of the proletariat upon the country were sufficiently guaranteed by the general state of economy and culture. The development of socialism certainly ought to proceed in that direction. But if the proletariat, while remaining a minority of the population, is really ceasing to need political ascendancy in order to guarantee a socialist course of social life, that means that the very need of state compulsion is reducing itself to nothing, giving place to cultural discipline.
The abolition of elective inequalities ought in that case to be preceded by a distinct and evident weakening of the compulsive functions of the state. Of this, however, there is not a word said either in the new constitution or, what is more important, in life.
To be sure, the new charter âguaranteesâ to the citizens the so-called âfreedomsâ of speech, press, assemblage and street processions. But each of these guarantees has the form either of a heavy muzzle or of shackles upon the hands and feet. Freedom of the press means a continuation of the fierce advance-censorship whose chains are held by the Secretariat of a Central Committee whom nobody has elected. Freedom of Byzantine flattery is thus, of course, fully âguaranteed.â Meanwhile, the innumerable articles, speeches, and letters of Lenin, ending in his âtestamentâ, will continue under the new constitution to be locked up merely because they rub the new leaders the wrong way. That being the case with Lenin, it is unnecessary to speak about other authors. The crude and ignorant command of science, literature and art will be wholly preserved. âFreedom of assemblageâ will mean, as formerly, the obligation of certain groups of the population to appear at meetings summoned by the authorities for the adoption of resolutions prepared in advance. Under the new constitution as under the old, hundreds of foreign communists, trusting in the Soviet âright of asylum,â will remain in prisons and concentration camps for crimes against the dogma of infallibility. In the matter of âfreedomâ, everything will remain as of old. Even the Soviet press does not try to sow any illusions about that. On the contrary, the chief goal of the new constitutional reform is declared to be a âfurther reinforcement of the dictatorship.â Whose dictatorship, and over whom?
As we have already heard, the ground for political equality was prepared by the abolition of class contradictions. It is no longer to be a class but a âpeopleâsâ dictatorship. But when the bearer of dictatorship becomes the people, freed from class contradictions, that can only mean the dissolution of the dictatorship in a socialist society â and, above all, the liquidation of the bureaucracy. Thus teaches the Marxian doctrine. Perhaps it has been mistaken? But the very authors of the constitution refer, although very cautiously, to the program of the party written by Lenin. Here is what the program really says: â... Deprivation of political rights, and all other limitations of freedom whatsoever, are necessary exclusively in the form of temporary measures ... In proportion as the objective possibility of the exploitation of man by man disappears, the necessity of these temporary measures will also disappear.â Abandonment of the âdeprivation of political rightsâ is thus inseparably bound up with the abolition of âall limitations of freedom whatsoever.â The arrival at a socialist society is characterized not only by the fact that the peasants are put on an equality with the workers, and that political rights are restored to the small percentage of citizens of bourgeois origin, but above all by the fact that real freedom is established for the whole 100 per cent of the population. With the liquidation of classes, not only the bureaucracy dies away, and not only the dictatorship, but the state itself. Let some imprudent person, however, try to utter even a hint in this direction: the GPU will find adequate grounds in the new constitution to send him to one of the innumerable concentration camps. Classes are abolished. Of Soviets there remains only the name. But the bureaucracy is still there. The equality of the rights of workers and peasants means, in reality, an equal lack of rights before the bureaucracy.
No less significant is the introduction of the secret ballot. If you take it on faith that the new political equality corresponds to an achieved social equality, then there remains a puzzling question: In that case why must voting henceforth be protected by secrecy? Whom exactly does the population of a socialist country fear, and from whose attempts must it be defended? The old Soviet constitution saw in open voting, as in the limitation of elective rights, a weapon of the revolutionary class against bourgeois and petty bourgeois enemies. We cannot assume that now the secret ballot is being introduced for the convenience of a counterrevolutionary minority. It is a question, evidently, of defending the rights of the people. But who is feared by a socialist people which has recently thrown off a tzar, a nobility and a bourgeoisie? The sycophants do not even give a thought to this question. Yet there is more in it than in all the writings of the Barbusses, the Louis Fischers, the Durantys, the Webbs, and the like of them.
In a capitalist society, the secret ballot is meant to defend the exploited from the terror of the exploiters. If the bourgeoisie finally adopted such a reform, obviously under pressure from the masses, it was only because it became interested in protecting its state at least partially from the demoralization introduced by itself. But in a socialist society there can be, it would seem, no terror of the exploiters. From whom is it necessary to defend the Soviet citizens? The answer is clear: from the bureaucracy. Stalin was frank enough to recognize this. To the question: Why are secret elections necessary? he answered verbatim: âBecause we intend to give the Soviet people full freedom to vote for those whom they want to elect.â Thus humanity learns from an authoritative source that today the âSoviet peopleâ cannot yet vote for those whom they want to elect. It would be hasty to conclude from this that the new constitution will really tender them this opportunity in the future. Just now, however, we are occupied with another side of this problem. Who, exactly, is this âweâ who can give or not give the people a free ballot? It is that same bureaucracy in whose name Stalin speaks and acts. This exposure of his applies to the ruling party exactly as it does to the state, for Stalin himself occupies the post of General Secretary of the Party with the help of a system which does not permit the members to elect those whom they want. The words âwe intend to give the Soviet peopleâ freedom of voting are incomparably more important than the old and new constitution taken together, for in this incautious phrase lies the actual constitution of the Soviet Union as it has been drawn up, not upon paper, but in the struggle of living forces.
3. Democracy and the Party
The promise to give the Soviet people freedom to vote âfor those whom they want to electâ is rather a poetic figure than a political formula. The Soviet people will have the right to choose their ârepresentativesâ only from among candidates whom the central and local leaders present to them under the flag of the party. To be sure, during the first period of the Soviet era the Bolshevik party also exercised a monopoly. But to identify these two phenomena would be to take appearance for reality. The prohibition of opposition parties was a temporary measure dictated by conditions of civil war, blockade, intervention and famine. The ruling party, representing in that period a genuine organization of the proletarian vanguard, was living a full-blooded inner life. A struggle of groups and factions to a certain degree replaced the struggle of parties. At present, when socialism has conquered âfinally and irrevocably,â the formation of factions is punished with concentration camp or firing squad. The prohibition of other parties, from being a temporary evil, has been erected into a principle. The right to occupy themselves with political questions has even been withdrawn from the Communist Youth, and that at the very moment of publication of the new constitution. Moreover, the citizens and citizenesses enjoy the franchise from the age of 18, but the age limit for Communist Youth existing until 1986 (23 years) is now wholly abolished. Politics is thus once for all declared the monopoly of an uncontrolled bureaucracy.
To a question from an American interviewer as to the role of the party in the new constitution, Stalin answered: âOnce there are no classes, once the barriers between classes are disappearing [âthere are no classes, the barriers between classes â which are not! â are disappearingâ â L.T.], there remains only something in the nature of a not at all fundamental difference between various little strata of the socialist society. There can be no nourishing soil for the creation of parties struggling among themselves. Where there are not several classes, there cannot be several parties, for a party is part of a class.â Every word is a mistake and some of them two! It appears from this that classes are homogeneous; that the boundaries of classes are outlined sharply and once for all; that the consciousness of a class strictly corresponds to its place in society. The Marxist teaching of the class nature of the party is thus turned into a caricature. The dynamic of political consciousness is excluded from the historical process in the interests of administrative order. In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by inner antagonisms, and arrive at the solution of common problems no otherwise than through an inner struggle of tendencies, groups and parties. It is possible, with certain qualifications, to concede that âa party is part of a class.â But since a class has many âpartsâ â some look forward and some back â one and the same class may create several parties. For the same reason one party may rest upon parts of different classes. An example of only one party corresponding to one class is not to be found in the whole course of political history â provided, of course, you do not take the police appearance for the reality.
In its social structure, the proletariat is the least heterogeneous class of capitalist society. Nevertheless, the presence of such âlittle strataâ as the workersâ aristocracy and the workersâ bureaucracy is sufficient to give rise to opportunistic parties, which are converted by the course of things into one of the weapons of bourgeois domination. Whether from the standpoint of Stalinist sociology, the difference between the workersâ aristocracy and the proletarian mass is âfundamentalâ or only âsomething in the nature ofâ matters not at all. It is from this difference that the necessity arose in its time for breaking with the Social Democracy and creating the Third International.
Even if in the Soviet society âthere are no classes,â nevertheless this society is at least incomparably more heterogeneous and complicated than the proletariat of capitalist countries, and consequently can furnish adequate nourishing soil for several parties. In making this imprudent excursion into the field of theory, Stalin proved a good deal more than he wanted to. From his reasonings it follows not only that there can be no different parties in the Soviet Union, but that there cannot even be one party. For where there are no classes, there is in general no place for politics. Nevertheless, from this law Stalin draws a âsociologicalâ conclusion in favor of the party of which he is the General Secretary.
Bukharin tries to approach the problem from another side. In the Soviet Union, he says, the question where to go â whether back to capitalism or forward to socialism â is no longer subject to discussion. Therefore, âpartisans of the hostile liquidated classes organized in parties cannot be permitted.â To say nothing of the fact that in a country of triumphant socialism partisans of capitalism would be merely ludicrous Don Quixotes incapable of creating a party, the existing political differences are far from comprised in the alternative: to socialism or to capitalism. There are other questions: How go toward socialism, with what tempo, etc. The choice of the road is no less important than the choice of the goal. Who is going to choose the road? If the nourishing soil for political parties has really disappeared, then there is no reason to forbid them. On the contrary, it is time, in accordance with the party program, to abolish âall limitations of freedom whatsoever.â
In trying to dispel the natural doubts of his American interviewer, Stalin advanced a new consideration: âLists of nominees will be presented not only by the Communist Party, but also by all kinds of non-party social organizations. And we have hundreds of them ... Each one of the little strata [of Soviet society] can have its special interests and reflect [express?] them through the existing innumerable social organizations.â This sophism is no better than the others. The Soviet âsocialâ organizations â trade union, co-operative, cultural, etc. do not in the least represent the interests of different âlittle strataâ, for they all have one and the same hierarchical structure. Even in those cases where they apparently represent mass organizations, as in the trade unions and co-operatives, the active role in them is played exclusively by representatives of the upper privileged groups, and the last word remains with the âpartyâ â that is, the bureaucracy. The constitution merely refers the elector from Pontius to Pilate.
The mechanics of this are expressed with complete precision in the very text of the fundamental law. Article 126, which is the axis of the constitution as a political system, âguarantees the rightâ to all male and female citizens to group themselves in trade unions, co-operatives, youth, sport, defensive, cultural, technical and scientific organizations. As to the party â that is, the concentration of power â there it is not a question of the right of all, but of the privilege of the minority. â... The most active and conscious [so considered, that is, from above â L.T.] citizens from the ranks of the working class and other strata of the toiling masses, are united in the Communist Party ... which constitutes the guiding nucleus of all organizations, both social and governmental.â This astoundingly candid formula, introduced into the text of the constitution itself, reveals the whole fictitiousness of the political role of those âsocial organizationsâ â subordinate branches of the bureaucratic firm.
But if there is not to be a struggle of parties, perhaps the different factions within the one party can reveal themselves at these democratic elections? To the question of a French journalist as to the groupings of the ruling party, Molotov answered: âIn the party ... attempts have been made to create special factions ... but it is already several years since the situation in this matter has fundamentally changed, and the Communist Party is actually a unit.â This is proven best of all by the continuous purgations and the concentration camps. After the commentary of Molotov, the mechanics of democracy are completely clear. âWhat remains of the October Revolution,â asks Victor Serge, âif every worker who permits himself to make a demand, or express a critical judgment, is subject to imprisonment? Oh, after that you can establish as many secret ballots as you please!â It is true: even Hitler did not infringe upon the secret ballot.
The reformers have dragged in theoretical arguments about the mutual relations of classes and parties by the hair. It is not a question of sociology, but of material interests. The ruling party which enjoys a monopoly in the Soviet Union is the political machine of the bureaucracy, which in reality has something to lose and nothing more to gain. It wishes to preserve the ânourishing soilâ for itself alone.
* *
In a country where the lava of revolution has not yet cooled, privileges burn those who possess them as a stolen gold watch burns an amateur thief. The ruling Soviet stratum has learned to fear the masses with a perfectly bourgeois fear. Stalin gives the growing special privileges of the upper circles a âtheoreticalâ justification with the help of the Communist International, and defends the Soviet aristocracy from popular discontent with the help of concentration camps. In order that this mechanism should keep on working, Stalin is compelled from time to time to take the side of âthe peopleâ against the bureaucracy â of course, with its tacit consent. He finds it useful to resort to the secret ballot in order at least partially to purge the state apparatus of the corruptions which are devouring it.
As early as 1928, Rakovsky wrote, discussing a number of cases of bureaucratic gangsterism which were coming to the surface: âThe most characteristic and most dangerous thing in this spreading wave of scandals is the passiveness of the masses, the Communist masses even more than the nonparty ... Owing to fear of those in power, or simply owing to political indifference, they have passed these things by without protest, or have limited themselves to mere grumbling.â During the eight years which have passed since that time, the situation has become incomparably worse. The decay of the political machine, exposing itself at every step, has begun to threaten the very existence of the state no longer now as an instrument for the socialist transformation of society, but as a source of power, income and privileges to the ruling stratum. Stalin was compelled to give a glimpse of this motive to the reform. âWe have not a few institutions,â he told Roy Howard, âwhich work badly ... The secret ballot in the Soviet Union will be a whip in the hands of the population against badly working organs of power.â A remarkable confession! After the bureaucracy has created a socialist society with its own hands, it feels the need ... of a whip! That is one of the motives of the constitutional reform. There is another no less important.
In abolishing the soviets, the new constitution dissolves the workers in the general mass of the population. Politically the soviets, to be sure, long ago lost their significance. But with the growth of new social antagonisms and the awakening of a new generation, they might again come to life. Most of all, of course, are to be feared the city soviets with the increasing participation of fresh and demanding communist youth. In the cities the contrast between luxury and want is too clear to the eyes. The first concern of the Soviet aristocracy is to get rid of worker and Red Army soviets. With the discontent of the scattered rural population it is much easier to deal. The collectivized peasants can even with some success be used against the city workers. This is not the first time that a bureaucratic reaction has relied upon the country in its struggle against the city.
Whatever in the new constitution is principled and significant, and really elevates it high above the most democratic constitutions of bourgeois countries, is merely a watered-down paraphrase of the fundamental documents of the October revolution. Whatever has to do with estimating the economic conquests, distorts reality with false perspective and braggadocio. And finally whatever concerns freedom and democracy is saturated through and through with the spirit of usurpation and cynicism.
Representing, as it does, an immense step back from socialist to bourgeois principles, the new constitution, cut and sewed to the measure of the ruling group, follows the same historic course as the abandonment of world revolution in favor of the League of Nations, the restoration of the bourgeois family, the substitution of the standing army for the militia, the resurrection of ranks and decorations, and the growth of inequality. By juridically reinforcing the absolutism of an âextra-classâ bureaucracy, the new constitution creates the political premises for the birth of a. new possessing class.
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The Revolution Betrayed
Bonapartism as a Regime of Crisis
The Struggle of the Bureaucracy with âthe Class Enemyâ
The Inevitability of a New Revolution
1. Bonapartism as a regime of crisis
The question we previously raised in the name of the reader: âHow could the ruling clique, with its innumerable mistakes, concentrate unlimited power in its hands?â â or, in other words: âHow explain the contradiction between the intellectual poverty of the Thermidorians and their material might?â â now permits a more concrete and categorical answer. The Soviet society is not harmonious. What is a sin for one class or stratum is a virtue for another. From the point of view of socialist forms of society, the policy of the bureaucracy is striking in its contradictions and inconsistencies. But the same policy appears very consistent from the standpoint of strengthening the power of the new commanding stratum.
The state support of the kulak (1923-28) contained a mortal danger for the socialist future. But then, with the help of the petty bourgeoisie the bureaucracy succeeded in binding the proletarian vanguard hand and foot, and suppressing the Bolshevik Opposition. This âmistakeâ from the point of view of socialism was a pure gain from the point of view of the bureaucracy. When the kulak began directly to threaten the bureaucracy itself, it turned its weapons against the kulak. The panic of aggression against the kulak, spreading also to the middle peasant, was no less costly to the economy than a foreign invasion. But the bureaucracy had defended its positions. Having barely succeeded in exterminating its former ally, it began with all its power to develop a new aristocracy. Thus undermining socialism? Of course but at the same time strengthening the commanding caste. The Soviet bureaucracy is like all ruling classes in that it is ready to shut its eyes to the crudest mistakes of its leaders in the sphere of general politics, provided in return they show an unconditional fidelity in the defense of its privileges. The more alarmed becomes the mood of the new lords of the situation, the higher the value they set upon ruthlessness against the least threat to their so justly earned rights. It is from this point of view that the caste of parvenus selects its leaders. Therein lies the secret of Stalinâs success.
The growth of power and independence in a bureaucracy, however, is not unlimited. There are historical factors stronger than marshals, and even than general secretaries. A rationalization of economy is unthinkable without accurate accounts. Accounts are irreconcilable with the caprices of a bureaucracy. Concern for the restoration of a stable ruble, which means a ruble independent of the âleadersâ, is imposed upon the bureaucracy by the fact that their autocratic rule is coming into greater and greater contradiction with the development of the productive forces of the country â just as absolute monarchy became in its time irreconcilable with the development of the bourgeois market. Money accounting, however, cannot fail to give a more open character to the struggle of the different strata for the distribution of the national income. The question of the wage-scale, almost a matter of indifference during the epoch of the food-card system, is now decisive for the workers, and with it the question of the trade unions. The designation of trade union officials from above is destined to meet more and more resistance. More than that, under piecework payment the worker is directly interested in a correct ordering of the factory management. The Stakhanovists are complaining more and more loudly of the faults of organization in production. Bureaucratic nepotism in the matter of appointing directors, engineers, etc., is becoming more and more intolerable. The co-operatives and the state trade are coming much more than formerly into dependence upon the buyer. The collective farms and the individual collective farmers are learning to translate their dealings with the state into the language of figures. They are growing unwilling to endure submissively the naming from above of leaders whose sole merit is frequently their closeness to the local bureaucratic clique. And, finally, the ruble promises to cast a light into that most mysterious region: the legal and illegal incomes of the bureaucracy. Thus, in a politically strangled country, money circulation becomes an important lever for the mobilization of oppositional forces, and foretells the beginning of the end of âenlightenedâ absolutism.
While the growth of industry and the bringing of agriculture into the sphere of state planning vastly complicates the tasks of leadership, bringing to the front the problem of quality, bureaucratism destroys the creative initiative and the feeling of responsibility without which there is not, and cannot be, qualitative progress. The ulcers of bureaucratism are perhaps not so obvious in the big industries, but they are devouring, together with the co-operativesâ the light and food-producing industries, the collective farms, the small local industries â that is, all those branches of economy which stand nearest to the people.
The progressive role of the Soviet bureaucracy coincides with the period devoted to introducing into the Soviet Union the most important elements of capitalist technique.
The rough work of borrowing, imitating, transplanting and grafting, was accomplished on the bases laid down by the revolution. There was, thus far, no question of any new word in the sphere of technique, science or art. It is possible to build gigantic factories according to a ready-made Western pattern by bureaucratic command â although, to be sure, at triple the normal cost. But the farther you go, the more the economy runs into the problem of quality, which slips out of the hands of a bureaucracy like a shadow. The Soviet products are as though branded with the gray label of indifference. Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative â conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.
Behind the question of quality stands a more complicated and grandiose problem which may be comprised in the concept of independent, technical and cultural creation. The ancient philosopher said that strife is the father of all things. No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible. To be sure, a revolutionary dictatorship means by its very essence strict limitations of freedom. But for that very reason epochs of revolution have never been directly favorable to cultural creation: they have only cleared the arena for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the more it ceases to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state. In that simple and unshakable historic law is contained the death sentence of the present political regime in the Soviet Union. Soviet democracy is not the demand of an abstract policy, still less an abstract moral. It has become a life-and-death need of the country.
If the new state had no other interests than the interests of society, the dying away of the function of compulsion would gradually acquire a painless character. But the state is not pure spirit. Specific functions have created specific organs. The bureaucracy taken as a whole is concerned not so much with its function as with the tribute which this function brings in. The commanding caste tries to strengthen and perpetuate the organs of compulsion. To make sure of its power and income, it spares nothing and nobody. The more the course of development goes against it, the more ruthless it becomes toward the advanced elements of the population. Like the Catholic Church it has put forward the dogma of infallibility in the period of its decline, but it has raised it to a height of which the Roman pope never dreamed.
The increasingly insistent deification of Stalin is, with all its elements of caricature, a necessary element of the regime. The bureaucracy has need of an inviolable superarbiter, a first consul if not an emperor, and it raises upon its shoulders him who best responds to its claim for lordship. That âstrength of characterâ of the leader which so enraptures the literary dilettantes of the West, is in reality the sum total of the collective pressure of a caste which will stop at nothing in defense of its position. Each one of them at his post is thinking: lâetat câest moi. In Stalin each one easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.
Caesarism, or its bourgeois form, Bonapartism, enters the scene in those moments of history when the sharp struggle of two camps raises the state power, so to speak, above the nation, and guarantees it, in appearance, a complete independence of classes in reality, only the freedom necessary for a defense of the privileged. The Stalin regime, rising above a politically atomized society, resting upon a police and officersâ corps, and allowing of no control whatever, is obviously a variation of Bonapartism â a Bonapartism of a new type not before seen in history.
Caesarism arose upon the basis of a slave society shaken by inward strife. Bonapartism is one of the political weapons of the capitalist regime in its critical period. Stalinism is a variety of the same system, but upon the basis of a workersâ state torn by the antagonism between an organized and armed Soviet aristocracy and the unarmed toiling masses.
As history testifies, Bonapartism gets along admirably with a universal, and even a secret, ballot. The democratic ritual of Bonapartism is the plebiscite. From time to time, the question is presented to the citizens: for or against the leader? And the voter feels the barrel of a revolver between his shoulders. Since the time of Napoleon III, who now seems a provincial dilettante, this technique has received an extraordinary development. The new Soviet constitution which establishes Bonapartism on a plebiscite basis is the veritable crown of the system.
In the last analysis, Soviet Bonapartism owes its birth to the belatedness of the world revolution. But in the capitalist countries the same cause gave rise to fascism. We thus arrive at the conclusion, unexpected at first glance, but in reality inevitable, that the crushing of Soviet democracy by an all-powerful bureaucracy and the extermination of bourgeois democracy by fascism were produced by one and the same cause: the dilatoriness of the world proletariat in solving the problems set for it by history. Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity. A victorious revolutionary movement in Europe would immediately shake not only fascism, but Soviet Bonapartism. In turning its back to the international revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy was, from its own point of view, right. It was merely obeying the voice of self-preservation.
2. The Struggle of the Bureaucracy with âthe Class Enemyâ
From the first days of the Soviet regime the counterweight to bureaucratism was the party. If the bureaucracy managed the state, still the party controlled the bureaucracy. Keenly vigilant lest inequality transcend the limits of what was necessary, the party was always in a state of open or disguised struggle with the bureaucracy. The historic role of Stalinâs faction was to destroy this duplication, subjecting the party to its own officialdom and merging the latter in the officialdom of the state. Thus was created the present totalitarian regime. It was his doing the bureaucracy this not unimportant service that guaranteed Stalinâs victory.
During the first ten years of its struggle, the Left Opposition did not abandon the program of ideological conquest of the party for that of conquest of power against the party. Its slogan was: reform, not revolution. The bureaucracy, however, even in those times, was ready for any revolution in order to defend itself against a democratic reform. In 1927, when the struggle reached an especially bitter stage, Stalin declared at a session of the Central Committee, addressing himself to the Opposition: âThose cadres can be removed only by civil war!â What was a threat in Stalinâs words became, thanks to a series of defeats of the European proletariat, a historic fact. The road of reform was turned into a road of revolution.
The continual purgations of the party and the Soviet organizations have the object of preventing the discontent of the masses from finding a coherent political expression. But repressions do not kill thought; they merely drive it underground. Wide circles of communists as well as nonparty citizens, keep up two systems of thought, one official and one secret. Spying and talebearing are corroding social relations throughout. The bureaucracy unfailingly represents its enemies as the enemies of socialism. With the help of judicial forgeries, which have become the normal thing, it imputes to them any crime it finds convenient. Under threat of the firing squad, it extracts confessions dictated by itself from the weak, and then makes these confessions the basis for accusations against the more sturdy.
âIt would be unpardonably stupid and criminal,â teaches Pravda of June 5, 1936, â commenting upon the âmost democratic constitution in the world,â â notwithstanding the abolition of classes to assume that âclass forces hostile to socialism are reconciled to their defeat ... The struggle goes on.â Who are these âhostile class forcesâ? Pravda answers: âRelics of counter-revolutionary groups, White Guards of all colors, especially the Trotskyist-Zinovievist.â After the inevitable reference to âspy work, conspiracies and terrorist activityâ (by Trotskyist-Zinovievists!), the organ of Stalin gives this promise: âWe will in the future too beat down and exterminate with a firm hand the enemies of the people, the Trotskyist reptiles and furies, no matter how skillfully they disguise themselves.â Such threats, daily repeated in the Soviet press, are but accompaniments to the work of the GPU. A certain Petrov, member of the party since 1918, participant in the civil war, subsequently a Soviet agricultural expert and member of the Right Opposition, who escaped from exile in 1936, writing in a liberal ĂŠmigrĂŠ paper, now characterizes the so-called Trotskyists as follows: âThe lefts? Psychologically, the last revolutionists, genuine and fervent. No gray bargaining, no compromises. Most admirable people. But idiotic ideas ... a world conflagration and such like raving.â We will leave aside the question of their âideas.â This moral and political appraisal of the left from their enemy on the right, speaks for itself. It is these âlast revolutionists, genuine, fervent,â that the colonels and generals of the GPU are arraigning for ... counterrevolutionary activity in the interests of imperialism.
The hysteria of the bureaucratic hatred against the Bolshevik Opposition acquires an especially sharp political meaning in connection with the removal of limitations upon people of bourgeois origin. The conciliatory decrees in relation to their employment, work and education are based upon the consideration that the resistance of the former ruling classes dies away in proportion as the stability of the new order becomes clear. âThere is now no need of these limitations,â explained Molotov at a session of the Central Executive Committee in January, 1936. At the same moment, however, it was revealed that the most malicious âclass enemiesâ are recruited from among those who struggled throughout their whole lives for socialism, starting with the closest co-workers of Lenin, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev. In distinction from the bourgeoisie, the âTrotskyistsâ, according to Pravda, become more desperate, âthe more clearly the features of a non-class socialist society are drawn.â The delirious character of this philosophy, arising from the necessity of covering up new relations with old formulas, cannot, of course, conceal a real shift in the social antagonisms. On the one hand, the creation of a caste of âgentryâ opens broad opportunities for careers to the more ambitious offspring of the bourgeoisie: there is no risk in giving them equal rights. On the other hand, the same phenomenon produces a sharp and extremely dangerous discontent in the masses, and especially the worker youths. Hence, the exterminating campaign against âfuries and reptiles.â The sword of the dictatorship, which used to fell those who wanted to restore the privileges of the bourgeoisie, is now directed against those who revolt against the privileges of the bureaucracy. The blows fall not upon the class enemies of the proletariat, but upon the proletarian vanguard. Corresponding to this basic change in its functions, the political police, formerly recruited from especially devoted and self-sacrificing Bolsheviks, is now composed of the most demoralized part of the bureaucracy.
In their persecution of revolutionists, the Thermidorians pour out all their hatred upon those who remind them of the past, and make them dread the future. The prisons, the remote corners of Siberia and Central Asia, the fast multiplying concentration camps, contain the flower of the Bolshevik Party, the most sturdy and true. Even in the solitary confinement prisons of Siberia the Oppositionists are still persecuted with searches, postal blockades and hunger. In exile wives are forcibly separated from their husbands, with one sole purpose: to break their resistance and extract a recantation. But even those who recant are not saved. At the first suspicion or hint from some informer against them, they are subjected to redoubled punishment. Help given to exiles even by their relatives is prosecuted as a crime. Mutual aid is punished as a conspiracy.
The sole means of self-defense in these conditions is the hunger strike. The GPU answers this with forcible feeding or with an offer of freedom to die. During these years hundreds of Oppositionists, both Russian and foreign, have been shot, or have died of hunger strikes, or have resorted to suicide. Within the last twelve years, the authorities have scores of times announced to the world the final rooting out of the opposition. But during the âpurgationsâ in the last month of 1935 and the first half of 1936, hundreds of thousands of members of the party were again expelled, among them several tens of thousands of âTrotskyists.â The most active were immediately arrested and thrown into prisons and concentration camps. As to the rest, Stalin, through Pravda, openly advised the local organs not to give them work. In a country where the sole employer is the state, this means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat. Exactly how many Bolsheviks have been expelled, arrested, exiled, exterminated, since 1923, when the era of Bonapartism opened, we shall find out when we go through the archives of Stalinâs political police. How many of them remain in the underground will become known when the shipwreck of the bureaucracy begins.
How much significance can twenty or thirty thousand Oppositionists have for a party of two million? On such a question a mere juxtaposition of figures means nothing. Ten revolutionists in a regiment is enough to bring it over, in a red-hot political atmosphere, to the side of the people. Not for nothing does the staff mortally fear tiny underground circles, or even single individuals. This reactionary general-staff fear, which imbues the Stalinist bureaucracy throughout, explains the mad character of its persecutions and its poisonous slanders.
Victor Serge, who lived through all the stages of the repression in the Soviet Union, has brought startling news to western Europe from those who are undergoing torture for their loyalty to the revolution and hostility to its gravediggers.
âI exaggerate nothing,â he writes. âI weigh every word. I can back up every one of my statements with tragic proof and with names. Among this mass of martyrs and protestants, for the most part silent, one heroic minority is nearer to me than all the others, precious for its energy, its penetration, its stoicism, its devotion to the Bolshevism of the great epoch. Thousands of these Communists of the first hour, comrades of Lenin and Trotsky, builders of the Soviet Republic when Soviets still existed, are opposing the principles of socialism to the inner degeneration of the regime, are defending as best they can (and all they can is to agree to all possible sacrifices) the rights of the working class ... I bring you news of those who are locked up there. They will hold out, whatever be necessary, to the end. Even if they do not live to see a new revolutionary dawn ... the revolutionists of the West can count upon them. The flame will be kept burning, even if only in prisons. In the same way they are counting upon you. You must â we must â defend them in order to defend workersâ democracy in the world, in order to revive the liberating image of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and some day restore to the Soviet Union its moral greatness and the confidence of the workers.â
3. The Inevitability of a New Revolution
Discussing the dying away of the state, Lenin wrote that the custom of observing the rules of social life can lose all need of compulsion if there is nothing which provokes indignation, protest and revolt, and thus creates the necessity for repression.â The essence of the matter lies in that if. The present regime in the Soviet Union provokes protest at every step, a protest the more burning in that it is repressed. The bureaucracy is not only a machine of compulsion but also a constant source of provocation. The very existence of a greedy, lying and cynical caste of rulers inevitably creates a hidden indignation. The improvement of the material situation of the workers does not reconcile them with the authorities; on the contrary, by increasing their self-respect and freeing their thought for general problems of politics, it prepares the way for an open conflict with the bureaucracy.
The unremovable âleadersâ love to issue statements about the necessity of âstudyingâ, of âacquiring techniqueâ, âcultural self-educationâ, and other admirable things. But the ruling layer itself is ignorant and little cultured; it studies nothing seriously, is disloyal and rude in social contacts. Its pretension to patronize all spheres of social life, to take command not only of co-operative shops but of musical compositions, is the more intolerable for that. The Soviet population cannot rise to a higher level of culture without freeing itself from this humiliating subjection to a caste of usurpers.
Will the bureaucrat devour the workersâ state, or will the working class clean up the bureaucrat? Thus stands the question upon whose decision hangs the fate of the Soviet Union. The vast majority of the Soviet workers are even now hostile to the bureaucracy. The peasant masses hate them with their healthy plebian hatred. If in contrast to the peasants the workers have almost never come out on the road of open struggle, thus condemning the protesting villages to confusion and impotence, this is not only because of the repressions. The workers fear lest, in throwing out the bureaucracy, they will open the way for a capitalist restoration. The mutual relations between state and class are much more complicated than they are represented by the vulgar âdemocrats.â Without a planned economy the Soviet Union would be thrown back for decades. In that sense the bureaucracy continues to fulfill a necessary function. But it fulfills it in such a way as to prepare an explosion of the whole system which may completely sweep out the results of the revolution. The workers are realists. Without deceiving themselves with regard to the ruling caste at least with regard to its lower tiers which stand near to them â they see in it the watchman for the time being of a certain part of their own conquests. They will inevitably drive out the dishonest, impudent and unreliable watchman as soon as they see another possibility. For this it is necessary that in the West or the East another revolutionary dawn arise.
The cessation of visible political struggle is portrayed by the friends and agents of the Kremlin as a âstabilizationâ of the regime. In reality it signalizes only a temporary stabilization of the bureaucracy. With popular discontent driven deep, the younger generation feels with special pain the yoke of this âenlightened absolutismâ in which there is so much more absolutism than enlightenment. The increasingly ominous vigilance of the bureaucracy against any ray of living thought, and the unbearable tensity of the hymns of praise addressed to a blessed providence in the person of the âleaderâ, testify alike to a growing separation between the state and society. They testify to a steady intensifying of inner contradictions, a pressure against the walls of the state which seeks a way out and must inevitably find one.
In a true appraisal of the situation, the not infrequent terrorist acts against representatives of power have a very high significance. The most notorious of these was the murder of Kirov, a clever and unscrupulous Leningrad dictator, a typical representative of his corporation. In themselves, terrorist acts are least of all capable of overthrowing a Bonapartist oligarchy. Although the individual bureaucrat dreads the revolver. the bureaucracy as a whole is able to exploit an act of terror for the justification of its own violences, and incidentally to implicate in the murder its own political enemies (the affair of Zinoviev, Kamenev and the others). [1] Individual terror is a weapon of impatient or despairing individuals, belonging most frequently to the younger generation of the bureaucracy itself. But, as was the case in tzarist times, political murders are unmistakable symptoms of a stormy atmosphere, and foretell the beginning of an open political crisis.
In introducing the new constitution, the bureaucracy shows that it feels this danger and is taking preventive measures. However, it has happened more than once that a bureaucratic dictatorship, seeking salvation in âliberalâ reforms, has only weakened itself. While exposing Bonapartism, the new constitution creates at the same time a semi-legal cover for the struggle against it. The rivalry of bureaucratic cliques at the elections may become the beginning of a broader political struggle. The whip against âbadly working organs of powerâ may be turned into a whip against Bonapartism. All indications agree that the further course of development must inevitably lead to a clash between the culturally developed forces of the people and the bureaucratic oligarchy. There is no peaceful outcome for this crisis. No devil ever yet voluntarily cut off his own claws. The Soviet bureaucracy will not give up its positions without a fight. The development leads obviously to the road of revolution.
With energetic pressure from the popular mass, and the disintegration inevitable in such circumstances of the government apparatus, the resistance of those in power may prove much weaker than now appears. But as to this only hypotheses are possible. In any case, the bureaucracy can be removed only by a revolutionary force. And, as always, there will be fewer victims the more bold and decisive is the attack. To prepare this and stand at the head of the masses in a favorable historic situation â that is the task of the Soviet section of the Fourth International. Today it is still weak and driven underground. But the illegal existence of a party is not nonexistence. It is only a difficult form of existence. Repressions can prove fully effective against a class that is disappearing from the scene this was fully proven by the revolutionary dictatorship of 1917 to 1923 â but violences against a revolutionary vanguard cannot save a caste which, if the Soviet Union is destined in general to further development, has outlived itself.
The revolution which the bureaucracy is preparing against itself will not be social, like the October revolution of 1917. It is not a question this time of changing the economic foundations of society, of replacing certain forms of property with other forms. History has known elsewhere not only social revolutions which substituted the bourgeois for the feudal regime, but also political revolutions which, without destroying the economic foundations of society, swept out an old ruling upper crust (1830 and 1848 in France, February 1917 in Russia, etc.). The overthrow of the Bonapartist caste will, of course, have deep social consequences, but in itself it will be confined within the limits of political revolution.
This is the first time in history that a state resulting from a workersâ revolution has existed. The stages through which it must go are nowhere written down. It is true that the theoreticians and creators of the Soviet Union hoped that the completely transparent and flexible Soviet system would permit the state peacefully to transform itself, dissolve, and die away, in correspondence with the stages of the economic and cultural evolution of society. Here again, however, life proved more complicated than theory anticipated. The proletariat of a backward country was fated to accomplish the first socialist revolution. For this historic privilege, it must, according to all evidences, pay with a second supplementary revolution â against bureaucratic absolutism. The program of the new revolution depends to a great extent upon the moment when it breaks out, upon the level which the country has then attained, and to a great degree upon the international situation. The fundamental elements of the program are already clear, and have been given throughout the course of this book as an objective inference from an analysis of the contradictions of the Soviet regime.
It is not a question of substituting one ruling clique for another, but of changing the very methods of administering the economy and guiding the culture of the country. Bureaucratic autocracy must give place to Soviet democracy. A restoration of the right of criticism, and a genuine freedom of elections, are necessary conditions for the further development of the country. This assumes a revival of freedom of Soviet parties, beginning with the party of Bolsheviks, and a resurrection of the trade unions. The bringing of democracy into industry means a radical revision of plans in the interests of the toilers. Free discussion of economic problems will decrease the overhead expense of bureaucratic mistakes and zigzags. Expensive playthings palaces of the Soviets, new theaters, show-off subways â will be crowded out in favor of workersâ dwellings. âBourgeois norms of distributionâ will be confined within the limits of strict necessity, and, in step with the growth of social wealth, will give way to socialist equality. Ranks will be immediately abolished. The tinsel of decorations will go into the melting pot. The youth will receive the opportunity to breathe freely, criticize, make mistakes, and grow up. Science and art will be freed of their chains. And, finally, foreign policy will return to the traditions of revolutionary internationalism.
More than ever the fate of the October revolution is bound up now with the fate of Europe and of the whole world. The problems of the Soviet Union are now being decided on the Spanish peninsula, in France, in Belgium. At the moment when this book appears the situation will be incomparably more clear than today, when civil war is in progress under the walls of Madrid. If the Soviet bureaucracy succeeds, with its treacherous policy of âpeopleâs frontsâ, in insuring the victory of reaction in Spain and France â and the Communist International is doing all it can in that direction â the Soviet Union will find itself on the edge of ruin. A bourgeois counterrevolution rather than an insurrection of the workers against the bureaucracy will be on the order of the day. If, in spite of the united sabotage of reformists and âCommunistâ leaders, the proletariat of western Europe finds the road to power, a new chapter will open in the history of the Soviet Union. The first victory of a revolution in Europe would pass like an electric shock through the Soviet masses, straighten them up, raise their spirit of independence, awaken the traditions of 1905 and 1917, undermine the position of the Bonapartist bureaucracy, and acquire for the Fourth International no less significance than the October revolution possessed for the Third. Only in that way can the first Workersâ State be saved for the socialist future.
Notes
1. Translatorâs Note: The reference here is to the January 1935 trial and not the August 1936 trial, the lines having been written prior to the latter.