THE HERITAGE OF TROTSKYISM - MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU
Philosophy Football have produced a crowd pleasing Trotsky T-shirt in time for Xmas. So this is a good opportunity to appraise the historical legacy of Trotsky.
One of the most extraordinary achievements in advancing scholarly understanding of the USSR, and the experience of Stalin’s rule is the compendious work by J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov “The Road to Terror” which assembles and discusses hundreds of previously top secret Soviet documents from the 1930s.
This describes the process of the growing use of state terror, and in particular how the causes were not solely the personal responsibility of Stalin: agency was dispersed and devolved throughout the Communist Party. The extensive use of violence came from a particular type of party organisation that had been forged in specific historical conditions and which then encountered difficult real-world challenges that triggered an exaggerated repressive response.
Getty and Naumov discuss the peculiar nature of Russian Marxism in the pre-revolutionary period. They reject the conceit of Michel Foucault that the language, patterns and interactions used in “discourse” create meaning – whereby language becomes the mediation through which historical reality is created as a social reality independent of physical reality. Nevertheless, while rejecting this specious and fashionably technical usage of the word “discourse”, Getty and Naumov nevertheless locate the historically specific experience of the Bolsheviks in creating a sub-culture of discourse, within the everyday meaning of that word: debate and discussion creating a particularly text-oriented belief system. As they put it:
“For the Bolsheviks before the revolution (and especially for the intellectual leaders in emigration), hairsplitting over precise points of revolutionary ideology was much of their political life. To a significant extent, Bolshevik politics had always been inextricably bound with creating and sharpening texts”
The nature of Bolshevism was to seek to create an ideologically relatively homogenous political party sufficiently socially insulated and self-referential to dare to overthrow not only the government but also to restructure or replace all of the civil society institutions that mediated daily life; and who were sufficiently self-assured to seek to form a new form of government untrammelled by the historical constraints of precedence or the rule of law.
Naturally, this political party was also immersed in day to day practical agitation, organising among working people, publishing and arguing with other political forces and therefore while in opposition was constantly having this self-contained intellectual world challenged. However, the messianic role that the party cast itself in made it very difficult for individuals to break discipline: they saw any behaviour that weakened the party as weakening the cause of socialism, indeed jeopardising the future of humanity, who without their success would be doomed to barbarism.
The experience of power was challenging. War and civil war, terrorism, famine and economic collapse created a brutalised siege mentality, and the language of the Bolsheviks in power became full of references to being “merciless” and “intransigent”, and of “smashing opposition”. As early as 1918 the Bolsheviks cut themselves free of any concept of constitutionality or legal process by reintroducing the death penalty by fiat, overruling the theoretically sovereign All Russian Congress of Soviets, (This incident was the cause of the Social Revolutionaries leaving government and taking up arms against the Bolsheviks – itself an irrational reaction that could only be understood from the heritage of Russian nineteenth century politics. As Randall Law describes in his very recent book “Terrorism, a History” there was a very wide acceptance of political violence in Czarist society at all levels.).
The ideological homogeneity and discipline that had informed the sub-culture of the Bolsheviks in opposition became an elite belief system and expectation of behaviour that bound together the party in power. What is more, party members were the only part of society immune to GPU (state security police) supervision until 1927, providing a demarcation in society between a political strata empowered to discuss alternative politics, and the broader population where any manifestations of opposition were anathematised as expressions of “white counter-revolution”.
Now of course, we do need to understand that the material circumstances that the CPSU leadership were operating in were desperate indeed; by 1926 and 1927 the economy was in protracted crisis, exacerbated by partial failures of the grain harvest, and the breakdown of trade with Britain and France; the fevered debates in the party in the 1926 to 1929 period, so vividly documented in Michal Reiman’s “The Birth of Stalinism” reveal a millenarian atmosphere; with factions of the leadership of the party locked in bitter conflict, while all around them society was falling apart.
After his exile, Leon Trotsky sought to present himself as a clean pair of hands. But it is important to remember that before his fall from grace he was the most ruthless of all the Bolshevik leaders; and that he had fully supported the extraordinary measures of “war communism”, had supported the violent suppression of the Krondstadt mutiny, had supported the ban of factions within the party. It was Trotsky who wrote “Terrorism and Communism” a coruscating and defiant defence of the use of state terror; and had advocated the conscription of labour, which made the Soviet trade unions determined opponents of Trotsky. He was removed from power after Lenin’s death because there was genuine apprehension among other party leaders that he might use his position as head of the Red Army to become Russia’s Napoleon.
Notwithstanding the sometimes brilliant work of party theoreticians like Nikolaii Bukharin in seeking to understand the complexity of the economic situation, and the attempts by leading party figures like Chicherin, Rykov and Tomsky to explore moderate and realistic options and to stabilise the USSR’s international trading position; the debate became polarised around caricatures and symbolic unreasonable positions divorced from reality.
For example, the left ridiculously called for compulsory grain seizures in the famine of 1927 ignoring evidence known to the party that the harvest was not being hoarded, and the crops had genuinely failed in parts of the country. The so-called “Kulak” threat was talked up to the point where people genuinely believed it, and sincerely thought that the poor and middle peasants supported the government in grain seizures. The myth of grain hoarding was to have truly horrific consequences in the 1932 famine. Stalin’s supporters caricatured all opposition as being the work of Trotskyists and saboteurs, developing a fantastical paranoia. The way in which all dissent was externalised as an alien and existential threat partially explains the fear and insecurity leading to state terror.
The Stalinised party in power developed three important attributes; i) a self-referential Weltanshauung or belief system rooted to the idea that the party itself was an historical actor with privileged access to truth; ii) a culture of demonising categories of opponent “Kulaks”, “Trotskyists”, “counter-revolutionaries”, that became symbolic concepts to pidgeonhole and depersonalise real life dissent; and iii) a leader cult, where the messianic historical role of the party became personified to an individual to whom loyalty was expected.
This is not the place to discuss the consequences of Stalin’s policies, but the USSR did achieve considerable economic growth and modest improvements in living standards over the course of the 1930s; and even the scale of repression was not experienced by many ordinary people as being any worse than the period following 1917.
It is important to understand that Trotskyism in exile developed in entirely symmetrical response, and of course grew out of the same soil. Trotsky, who while in power had brooked no dissent became a born-again advocate of party democracy as soon as he was in a minority. Each Trotskyist group has the same conceit that the ideological or theoretical delimiters which justify its special existence as a discrete organisation give it unique access to truth; the labelling of other activists as “stalinists”, or “reformists” acts to contextualise those disagreeing with the partys as being inherently flawed, and therefore their opinions are delegitimised and thus bureaucratic practices to overcome them can be justified (and a similar attitude is displayed to opponents of the leadership line within the party) ; and the Trotskyist left has especially perpetuated the leader cult, deflected onto the historical person of Lenin or Trotsky, but with an implied apostolic succession to the current leadership of their group. At its most obscene, Healy’s WRP paraded Trotsky’s death mask on stage; the Militant brought Trotsky’s living relatives to London, and the IS/SWP published the only theoretical defence of the leader cult that I am aware of “Lenin, Building the Party” by Tony Cliff. (Which as John Sullivan pointed out reads very much like a biography of John the Baptist written by Jesus)
The Trotskyist tradition has sought to unite around a shared belief system, and interpret the world through a largely self-referential and textually based discourse; so they are resilient at ignoring aspects of reality that contradict an arguably faith based political project. Concrete and specific situations in the modern world are often judged by reference to Trotsky’s writings about related but different circumstances more than half a century ago.There is a certain cognative dissonance among some “Marxists” who prefer the idealised working class of their imagination to the real, living and complicated mass of working class people; and prefer purity to the compromises and adjustments that are needed to make socialism a living political reality, relevant to the day to day experience of working people.
Indeed, while the official communist parties have, since Khruschev’s speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU systematically sought to recognise and overcome this historical legacy; the Trotskyist left, certainly in the Anglophone world, have made no such reappraisal of the aspects of continuity in their own politics with the negative parts of the Russian experience. (It is worth making the aside that the Trotskyite tradition around Ernest Mandel were always more pluralistic, as Liam Mac Uaid has recently pointed out, but in other respects still bear the weaknesses of Trotskyism)
Trotskyism consists of an uncritical identification with the Russian revolution, while simultaneously deflecting all responsibility for the negative consequences of the actual historical experience onto a mythologised “Stalinism”. The identification has two further highly negative consequences: i) firstly to accept the Russian experience as normative – which is a very poor guide for political activity in developed liberal democracies in the twenty first century; and ii) an exaggerated emphasis on theoretical homogeneity and faith in the wisdom of the small group has had extremely bad consequences in terms of sectarian and divisive behaviour.
I have written before about how “Marxism” as practised by Trotskist groups takes an unscientific attitude towards verification; and that the material basis of sectarianism lies in the conservatism inherent in separating organisationally on the basis of differences in theoretical doctrine.
In science, theories become accepted not only on the basis of explaining the evidence, but also by a process of evaluating the impact they have on the already existing body of mature scientific theory. (Follow the link here if you want more philosphical justification)
In defence of scientific realism … we must say that theories that explain the empirical evidence must also conform to theoretical virtues, such as coherence with other established theories, completeness, unifying power and the capacity to generate novel predictions.
So is Marxism a science? To which I would answer it could be, but usually isn’t. If we mean by Marxism a social theory that seeks to establish its own approximate truth through examination of the evidence, and through self-critical evaluation of its own theoretical virtues, including coherence, then Marxism is a science. However, there must be a number of caveats. Firstly, that the development of evidence involves the art of seeking to change the world though political activity, and it is extremely hard to evaluate the impact of such activity, and what evidence is gathered is subjective . Secondly, the research resources of the Marxist left, including academics, are puny compared to the complexity of the society we are seeking to understand, so any theories we develop are likely to be only highly flawed approximations to the truth; thirdly the problem of organisational conservatism on defending false aspects of theories. When we take these caveats into account we can see the inadequacy of all those arguments that start: “As Marxists we should, or as Marxists we must … “
The last factor I mention, organisational conservatism is perhaps the most important. Precisely because the empirical evidence is sparse, or subject to other interpretations that are equally consistent with the evidence, then the question of “theoretical virtues” are of elevated importance. Alex Callinicos includes a useful discussion of this in his short book on Trotskyism, discussing the question of progressive and regressive problem shifts derived from Lakatos. If the consequence of a theory entails evidence consistent with an unrelated theory then this is a progressive problem shift, that supports a presumption towards truth-likeness. If however, defence of a theory involves rejection of parts of other mature ands established theories, then we are involved in a regressive problem shift (That doesn’t necessarily mean it is wrong as all theories are only truth approximations and can be refined – but a regressive problem shift should raise a presumption of truth-unlikeness requiring further research.)
Yet the various Leninist groups, the SWP, CWI, USFI etc, all derive their justification for separateness by defining themselves as having a coherent world vision based upon a unique or semi unique interpretation of Marxism, often deriving from very partial and incomplete evidence. How could it be different? How could a few amateur researchers, with scarcely any access to evidence, really develop theories that were sufficiently supported empirically; and sufficiently theoretically virtuous in the technical sense; to explain social phenomenon as complex as the degeneration of the Soviet Union? Yet on the basis of these differing interpretations, each of these groups has developed a distinct Weltanshauung that is largely hermetically sealed. For example, if we look at the theoretical writings of the IS tendency, they only refer to works within their own “tradition”, or to the old grey beards. The same can be said of the Mandelite tradition, or the Taafeites. In other words, the left groups deliberately eschew an attempt to develop a scientific exposure of their theories to a discussion of their theoretical virtues – again in the technical sense of what degree they are consistent, consilient, lacking ad hoc features, etc.
The heritage of Trotskism in the British labour movement has therefore been a largely negative one – that is not to say that individual initiatives or campaigns undertaken by Trotskist groups were negative, or that individuals are not useful activists. The Poll Tax and Stop the War were both important campaigns that owed their success partly to the Trotskyist left. Nor should we deny the role that the Trotskist left have played in inspiring and maintaining a cadre of good socialist activists.
However, they have also tried to graft an almost entirely alien Russian tradition of organising onto very unsympathetic British conditions; and have perpetuated traditions of intellectual arrogance, and hairsplitting. They have valued division over doctrinal questions as more important than unity, and have been prepared to wreck collaborative organisations or campaigns that do not bow to their superior wisdom, and recognise their right to lead.
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Excellent piece, Andy.
The disengagement from the world as it is in favour of a romanticised, idealistic notion of the working class and the unrealistic prospects for revolution in the West have defined the Trotskyist movement and been responsible for its inability to establish roots within the class to any great degree. The obsession with the Bolsheviks to the point of adopting the same vanguardist template, which was only adopted by Lenin in 1903 in response to particular material conditions, is an obvious but most revealing symptom of the confusion of Marxism with the cult of Leninism.
Then there is the fixation on Gramsci’s mantra of ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’ It was then and continues to be the theoretical underpinning to the substitutism that we’ve continually seen masquerading as political activity shorn of any analysis worthy of the name.
Comment by John — 19 November, 2009 @ 10:05 am
@ 1 What a lot of hot air. So many words to describe so little - I would “define the Trotskyist movements” I’ve been involved in through the likes of the Liverpool struggle and the Poll tax. Are you seriously saying these were an “inability to establish roots within the class”
Pseudo-trotskyist and for that matter many other pseudo-left pretenders love empty rhetoric like that you spout - a few partial truths mixed up with a whole load of prejudices expressed as crude generalisations. Does not get us any nearer to understanding either the failings of the left or the wider working class movement though
Comment by dennisr — 19 November, 2009 @ 10:32 am
Wear the T shirt, take he quiz:
Are You Smarter Than a 4th Internationalist?
Comment by Darren — 19 November, 2009 @ 10:38 am
This piece manages to combine both the anti-socialist arguments against the Russian revolution and yet also be pro-Stalin. Nothing I’ve ever read on a blog has made me physically sick until now.
Comment by Futurecast — 19 November, 2009 @ 10:48 am
“Philosophy Football have produced a crowd pleasing Trotsky T-shirt in time for Xmas. So this is a good opportunity to appraise the historical legacy of Trotsky”.
Probably the most unintentionally hilarious sentence ever written. Lucky the T-shirt came along though or we’d all still be breathlessly waiting for your historical appraisal.
Comment by All grades united in one common object — 19 November, 2009 @ 10:55 am
#4
“and yet also be pro-Stalin”
I think it takes a special type of intellect to read this article as being “pro-Stalin” !!!
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:04 am
Another post from Andy designed to foster the “socialist unity” enshrined in the blog’s title. Not. Sometimes reading this blog is like watching the proverbial slow motion train crash. A poisonous article which will generate far more heat than light. Maybe that’s the way Andy likes it - I’m sure his stats will enjoy another spike. I used to enjoy reading this site for robust debate, but it looks to me more and more like a vehicle for attacking the revolutionary left, and for spreading distrust, discord and suspicion where there used to be at least a modicum of cooperation and (grudging) mutual respect. Andy’s political trajectory over the last couple of years has been fairly bizarre, but I’m more concerned about the role his blog is playing in opening up deeper and deeper rifts between socialist activists. Maybe it’s time to change the title of the blog. ‘Icepick’, maybe?
Comment by Deckchair Socialist — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:06 am
“This is not the place to discuss the consequences of Stalin’s policies, but the USSR did achieve considerable economic growth and improvements in living standards over the course of the 1930s; and even the scale of repression was not experienced by many ordinary people as being any worse than the period following 1917.”
This is a bit pro-Stalin.
Comment by tyresome points — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:07 am
#8 In relation to Soviet workers’ living standards, a rough generalisation would be that the 1913 level of consumption had more or less been restored by 1928. Workers’ living standards then plummeted again as resources were diverted from consumption to accumulation to finance industrialisation and rearmament, and the 1913/1928 level was not reattained until around 1940. Of course, different groups of workers had different experiences. Living standards did rise in the 1930s, but from an abysmally low level.
As for the repression, I remember seeing a Russian TV interview with an old OGPU veteran from the 1930s. He recalled his response to the new OGPU regulations introduced following the assassination of Kirov: “My God! This is like 1920 all over again!”
Comment by Francis King — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:23 am
#8 “This is a bit pro-Stalin.”
No - that is statement of two incontestable facts.
i) there was considerable economicgrowth accompanied by modest improvement in living standards
ii) the great terror affected the party itself more than the general population, and as such would have been a less traumatic experience for most people than the civil war and war communism.
There is an odd thing that some people are prepared to look at everything that happened after 1917 in terms of context and difficult material circmstances, but then after 1928 all the ocntext is dropped, and it just becomes due to the inanate evil of the government
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:29 am
#4- I think you need to develop a stronger stomach.
#7 - That you can read into Andy’s post (a bit pointless as it may or may not be) that he thinks that Trotsky’s murder was justified says more about the cultish nature of so much that goes under the heading of Trotskyism than any trot-baiter could. It is no wonder that Trotsky himself found it impossible to unite all the forces on the left opposed both to sell-out social democracy and to stalinist repression, and that his own followers fell out among themselves so virulently.
If you criticise us you are as bad a those who want to destroy us is what you are implying.
Comment by Armchair — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:56 am
What exactly were the difficult material circumstances that required the terror, then? What objective necessity dictated the arrest of tens of thousands of both CPSU members and non-CPSU workers, and the judicial murder of thousands of them?
Comment by chjh — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:59 am
#12
did I say that the terror was “required”??? or the product of “objective necessity” ???
That is a wholely irrational reading of what I have written.
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 November, 2009 @ 12:11 pm
#12- I’ve read through Andy’s post a few times now. Could you quote the bits that are relevant to your question?
Comment by Armchair — 19 November, 2009 @ 12:18 pm
Andy: ‘Trotskyism consists of an uncritical identification with the Russian revolution, while simultaneously deflecting all responsibility for the negative consequences of the actual historical experience onto a mythologised “Stalinism”. The identification has two further highly negative consequences: i) firstly to accept the Russian experience as normative – which is a very poor guide for political activity in developed liberal democracies in the twenty first century; and ii) an exaggerated emphasis on theoretical homogeneity and faith in the wisdom of the small group has had extremely bad consequences in terms of sectarian and divisive behaviour.’
Mind you, you could reverse it: ‘Stalinism consists of an uncritical identification with the Russian revolution, while simultaneously deflecting all responsibility for the negative consequences of the actual historical experience onto a mythologised “Trotskyism”…’
Both the Stalin and Trotsky variants of Bolshevism have a common origin, a common philosophical outlook and a common disdain for any restraints on the exercise of power. Both see politics as essentially a form of warfare, to be waged against recalcitrant elements within their own populations. The main difference is that Stalin’s version was considerably more practical, and could be applied within the USSR witholut any need for the deus ex machina of the world revolution.
Comment by Francis King — 19 November, 2009 @ 12:25 pm
#15
“Mind you, you could reverse it: ‘Stalinism consists of an uncritical identification with the Russian revolution, while simultaneously deflecting all responsibility for the negative consequences of the actual historical experience onto a mythologised “Trotskyism”…’”
Indeed you could, but it would be very rare to meet anyone, (outside perhaps the very small pond of Harpal Brar’s CPGB(ML)) who would make that argument nowadays, so it is of historical interest only.
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 November, 2009 @ 12:28 pm
#15 “The main difference is that Stalin’s version was considerably more practical,”
Personality also comes into it. Stalin was avuncular rather than intellectual, and was relatively calm and unflappable. So in the context of economic and social crises, he was a reassuring figure for party and state functionaries to identify with.
Whereas, taking a punt on the highly improbably chances of a world revolution was much less appealing, especially for people still suffering from their last experencne of revolution.
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 November, 2009 @ 12:32 pm
# 16. Quite true, Andy. There are very few proper Stalinists left in Britain - although you can still meet them abroad, not least in Russia, if you try to hang around with the Russian left. But the symmetry between Stalinism and Trotsyism remains, as does Trotskyism’s need for Stalinism as a reference point against which it can define itself.
Comment by Francis King — 19 November, 2009 @ 12:37 pm
#18. Comparatively speaking, the UK is the Promised Land of Trotskyism, and has been since the 1970s. That the left isn’t doing any better here, and is arguably doing worse than many other places, is interesting, at least for me.
Comment by Mark Victorystooge — 19 November, 2009 @ 12:42 pm
Haven’t had time to read this yet but I’m guessing it’s a pile of Gramscian Stalinism. `War of position’ means pragmatic theoretical and organisational adaptation to all but the theoretically and organisationally principled. Very corrosive, very corrupting. And of course the arch anti-Russian Revolution pontificator Francis King weighs straight in to support.
I like the T-Shirt though. Well done to Philosophy Football.
Comment by David Ellis — 19 November, 2009 @ 12:59 pm
Its an interesting debate but the difference between the violence inflicted by the Bolshevks and that inflicted by Stalin surely was that Lenin and Trotsky saw the struggle they were waging as necessary for the survival of the nascent workers’ state,whereas Stalin’s terror was used to consolidate his rule, after state capitalism had been established.
And this take the biscuit Andy: How could a few amateur researchers, with scarcely any access to evidence, really develop theories that were sufficiently supported empirically; and sufficiently theoretically virtuous in the technical sense; to explain social phenomenon as complex as the degeneration of the Soviet Union?
Yes, we should just leave it all to those clever professors in univesities to explain it to us.
Comment by swp_John — 19 November, 2009 @ 1:21 pm
#21
“we should just leave it all to those clever professors in univesities to explain it to us”
Not at all, but we need to be modest about the theoretical completeness of our understanding, and therefore reluctant to organisation split into different organisations over such questions of interpretation.
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 November, 2009 @ 1:25 pm
#21
Well, i wuld recommend that you read Arch Getty’s book, because it is quite clear that Stalin and his supporters also believed they were defending the workers state.
So what you call the establishement of “state capitalism” ( an odd wateshed, because the USSR’s economy became distinctly less capitalist under Stalin than it had been under NEP ) is an arbitrary distinction that you are introducing ex post facto.
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 November, 2009 @ 1:28 pm
#21. Perhaps Stalin saw his violence as “necessary for the survival of the nascent workers’ state”. Saying it was to consolidate his rule is neither here nor there, as it could just as easily be said that Lenin and Trotsky were trying to consolidate their own rule through violence. The “after state capitalism had been established” just tells me that this was posted by an SWP member, for whom that particular dogma is crucial.
Just after the German invasion in 1941, Stalin is reported by several sources to have said something along the lines of “Lenin bequeathed us a great legacy and we f**ked it up” (sources differ about the exact wording). The statement is often taken to reflect his panic and despondency at the invasion, but it can also be taken as an indication that Stalin saw himself and his followers as Lenin’s heirs, rather than as introducing state capitalism etc.
Comment by Mark Victorystooge — 19 November, 2009 @ 1:36 pm
In reply to #13 and #14, I was drawing what seemed to me out the implications of Andy’s comment at #10. I’ll go at it from another angle.
When ‘Trotskyists’ (in the wider sense of the term) discuss the experience of 1917-1921, we often argue that a particular policy of the Bolsheviks was regrettable, and not a model to be followed, but defendable in the circumstances forced on them. Those circumstances included the invasion by 13 imperialist armies, the armed counter-revolution, the withering of the Russian economy…if you’ve read this far, you probably know the list.
My question was whether Andy wanted to make a similar defence of the Moscow Trials and the Great Purges, namely that there were material factors outside the control of Stalin and the people around him that made the repression a (regrettable, obviously) necessity.
Because if not, then innate evil doesn’t seem like such a far-fetched explanation.
Comment by chjh — 19 November, 2009 @ 1:38 pm
Very soft sell for a Trotsky t-shirt. Great stuff! Nice to see someone else has heard of J.Arch Getty et al. I happened to look at Louis Proyect’s site a couple of weeks ago (embarrassed to admit it) and found him quoting Robert Conquest style figures for the penal and famine deaths under Stalin. A commenter referred him to Getty’s figures (from the archives, so the best estimate to date). Proyect’s reply seemed to indicate that he had vaguely heard of Getty, but wasn’t much interested. A perfect illustration of the very widespread tendency, which Andy noted, to consider facts an optional extra to doctrinal requirements. ‘Marxist’ has almost come to mean someone who reads books about ‘Marxism’ and next to nothing else.
Comment by jock mctrousers — 19 November, 2009 @ 1:39 pm
#26
” happened to look at Louis Proyect’s site a couple of weeks ago (embarrassed to admit it) and found him quoting Robert Conquest style figures for the penal and famine deaths under Stalin. A commenter referred him to Getty’s figures (from the archives, so the best estimate to date). Proyect’s reply seemed to indicate that he had vaguely heard of Getty, but wasn’t much interested. “
Project is worse than that! If you look at this article below, Louis accuses Arch getty of being a Stalinist, because Arch getty looks at the historical evidence and therefore deviates from treating Trotsky’s writings as inherently the ultimate guide to the facts and truth.
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/joseph-stalin-nostalgia/
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 November, 2009 @ 1:44 pm
Re # 21. There was never any shortage of data or evidence about the processes underway in the Soviet Union. There was always lots to be gleaned from Soviet newspapers and journals, which in the 1920s were relatively open about events, and there was masses of high-quality reportage and analysis in the émigré press. Some time back I read a lot of the Mensheviks’ journal in exile, Sotsialisticheskiy Vestnik, for the 1920s, and was very struck by how well-informed it was on developments in Soviet Russia.
But - most of the stuff was available only in Russian. So anyone who wanted to develop a really informed analysis of the place needed to know the language. That’s fair enough, though.
Comment by Francis King — 19 November, 2009 @ 1:45 pm
#25
I was certainly argue that the great terror and the Moscow Trials were regretable and not a model to be followed, but I don’t think the excesses of war communism, and the red terror of 1920 were any better.
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 November, 2009 @ 1:46 pm
” My question was whether Andy wanted to make a similar defence of the Moscow Trials and the Great Purges, namely that there were material factors outside the control of Stalin and the people around him that made the repression a (regrettable, obviously) necessity.”
Not to defend the scale of the repression, or any particular instances, or even that it was in any way necessary, but try this: the largest political party in Germany (re-industrialising and re-arming) was headed by someone who had for years advocated invading Russia for its natural resources, and treating Russia as Germany’s Wild West, its population to be enslaved or exterminated.
I think it’s just as well for us all that someone in the Soviet Union took that one seriously.
I know what you’re going to say: the ‘Hitler-Stalin’ pact. Well, wouldn’t you do your best to avoid a war under the circumstances?
Comment by jock mctrousers — 19 November, 2009 @ 1:47 pm
Andy @ # 29 - indeed. The assumptions underlying war communism and the red terror - that Soviet Russia was in mortal danger from enemies within and without who had to be crushed ruthlessly - were identical to those behind the Moscow Trials and the great terror. The mechanisms set up for the first waves of repression were responsible for all the subsequent ones. You can accept those assumptions, and justify the various waves of repression, or you can reject them, and reject the whole Bolshevik experiment. Either is intellectually consistent. But to justify the first waves and decry their successors is a bit perverse.
Comment by Francis King — 19 November, 2009 @ 2:00 pm
Its not perverse. The difference between the red terror in the time of Civil War and that of the show trials was that there actually was a Civil War in 1919. There was not a civil war in 1938. Indeed by massacring the Bolshevik Party and most of the apparatus and the whole of the officer core, Stalin fatally weakened the resistance of the USSR to the fascist invasion in 1940.
Comment by bill j — 19 November, 2009 @ 2:27 pm
Andy Newman’s apologetic phrase “the excesses of the Moscow Trials” is a sick joke, the entire Moscow Trials were an excess in which Stalin massacred what was left of the old Bolshevik Party and 10s of thousands of basically Stalinist but sincere apparatus revolutionaries.
The Red Terror of 1920 was not the same thing at all. Then it did indeed have excesses, but that was because it was directed primarily at the capitalists/landlords. It did go too far in clamping down on working class democracy, and its methods did infect the Bolshevik Party and were therefore, in a sense antecedents to Stalin’s counter revolution, but they were altogether different in scale and situation. One was defending the revolution from the counter revolution, one was the counter revolution. Quite fundamental really.
Comment by bill j — 19 November, 2009 @ 2:32 pm
1941, actually. And how was it “fatally weakened”. Nazi Germany did not win the Second World War, and indeed it was more drained on the Eastern Front than anywhere else.
Comment by Mark Victorystooge — 19 November, 2009 @ 2:33 pm
Excellent article Andy, but how do you get from here to a complete rejection of the struggle of the working class to become the ruling class?
Isn’t it possible to share these criticisms of the semi-religious nature of a large part of the left, but still to retain the view that capitalism needs to be ended and replaced with socialism?
By the way, this from “SWP member” (21), taking the piss out of the followers of the Trotsky-cult:
“The difference between the violence inflicted by the Bolshevks and that inflicted by Stalin surely was that Lenin and Trotsky saw the struggle they were waging as necessary for the survival of the nascent workers’ state,whereas Stalin’s terror was used to consolidate his rule, after state capitalism had been established.”
Funny stuff, but surely their analysis is not quite that crude?
Comment by Karl Stewart — 19 November, 2009 @ 2:34 pm
#35
Karl
I think we need a socialist government.
Neither the historical expereince nor theory provides us with a roadmap to how we accomplish that.
So I am not sure that I either completely reject not completely accept the goal of “the struggle of the working class to become the ruling class”.
But certainly that is not a foreseeable prospect in contemporary Britain.
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 November, 2009 @ 2:46 pm
#35. I regret to say it probably is as crude as that.
Comment by Mark Victorystooge — 19 November, 2009 @ 2:51 pm
“Neither the historical experience nor theory provides us with a roadmap to how we accomplish that.”
lol - we’re pretty screwed then. That cuts off the only two real routes to interpretation, organization, planning. Thank god there’s TV!
Mark Victorystooge - I read your contributions on liam about state cap theory. I wouldn’t be so smug if I were you, given your own contributions to that discussion.
Comment by redbedhead — 19 November, 2009 @ 3:22 pm
1) “the labelling of other activists as “stalinists”, or “reformists” acts to contextualise those disagreeing with the partys as being inherently flawed, and therefore their opinions are delegitimised and thus bureaucratic practices to overcome them can be justified (and a similar attitude is displayed to opponents of the leadership line within the party);”
This is called a non-sequitur but it does at least flow from your point just above that we can’t know anything about how to get where we want to by either history or theory. It implies that any attempt to develop or utilize political categories is inherently “authoritarian”. But, this is, of course, a vast generalization and in my day-to-day practise I’ve rarely heard socialists working in coalition accusing coalition partners of “reformism”. Activists tend to take each other on an issue by issue basis (and based upon a shared history of work). This is in no small part because an individual’s positions can exist in flux and contradiction to an over-arching ideological framework or allegiance. Labour members can be solidly militant on anti-nazi mobilizing or rank-and-file perspectives in the union movement. Revolutionaries can be top-down or conservative.
2) “and the Trotskyist left has especially perpetuated the leader cult, deflected onto the historical person of Lenin or Trotsky, but with an implied apostolic succession to the current leadership of their group…the IS/SWP published the only theoretical defence of the leader cult that I am aware of “Lenin, Building the Party” by Tony Cliff. (Which as John Sullivan pointed out reads very much like a biography of John the Baptist written by Jesus)”
You’re conflating two things here - the tendency in small groups for there to develop personal identification with a central leadership figure, particularly where a group is cut-off from broader social struggles with the attempt (which you scorn) to draw upon the lessons of past struggles to act as a guide (not a bible) to present practice. And the description of Building The Party is just silly. I certainly wouldn’t accuse Cliff of being a great literary light - he wrote to a purpose in what was his second language - but the book was a useful exploration of the development of Lenin as a historical person who changed his mind and who can never be quoted without noting the context in which he was writing/speaking. Not an un-useful point (amongst others) to generalize.
Comment by redbedhead — 19 November, 2009 @ 3:37 pm
Smugness being something SWP members never do, of course. Totally modest people. Wallflowers at parties, they have to be encouraged to dance.
Since you bring up Liam’s blog, I wondered why the Nazis made major efforts to forge British and US currency during WW2 but left the ruble alone - preferring to destroy the Soviet economy by destroying factories and rolling stock (espe. during their long retreat from occupied territory). The fact that they failed to attack the USSR’s currency while attacking Britain’s and the USA’s, I suggested, might have been because it was considered a different economy from a “capitalist” one.
Actually, the Nazis never treated the USSR and the West as similar societies, and nourished the hope that the contradictions between them might break their alliance apart before they crushed Germany.
Comment by Mark Victorystooge — 19 November, 2009 @ 3:45 pm
“The Trotskyist tradition has sought to unite around a shared belief system, and interpret the world through a largely self-referential and textually based discourse; so they are resilient at ignoring aspects of reality that contradict an arguably faith based political project. ”
This is just ad hominem dressed up as fancy-pants theoretical insight. It’s obviously true that people with limited time will tend to read the theoretical texts produced by those with whom they agree. But if one looks at the ISJ or Inprecor or International Viewpoint of ISR (just to mention “party” publications that come to mind), there are regularly articles by “non-party” people and all the articles rely upon footnoted references to mainstream and non-party leftist articles, books and analyses.
But, in reality, this fits with your regular attacks on - in particular - SWP members as being drones and sock puppets. The trouble is, as proved by your earlier article on whether the SWP still calls for a vote for Labour, that your animus means you mis-read and mis-interpret comments or you take the comments of individuals to stand in for the position of the organization (because it’s a religious group). Sometimes this makes sense - when the election comes, there will certainly be a decision (if there’s any change being proposed) - but much of the time there is likewise flux as people assess and debate.
Because unlike your frankly elitist attitude that ordinary people can’t know the world theoretically, ordinary people all the time are theorizing based upon the available evidence - which is quite substantial, especially in this internet age. Lucky for you, you don’t believe that position yourself, otherwise you’d stop writing blogs.
Comment by redbedhead — 19 November, 2009 @ 3:49 pm
Mark - your question about counterfeiting was answered in very short order because it’s not a difficult question. The rouble wasn’t an international currency - it wasn’t traded - and so printing roubles wouldn’t effect their value and thus the ability of the USSR to conduct the war. But not having a convertible currency or a free floating currency is hardly the mark of a non-capitalist society. Many developing countries have used non-convertible currencies. It’s just a mechanism to avoid rapid, destructive fluctuations in exchange value. The Tobin Tax was an attempt to get around the problem of non-convertible currencies - which limit the ability of countries to trade internationally - while preventing currency speculation from destroying an economy whose real fundamentals were sound.
Comment by redbedhead — 19 November, 2009 @ 4:05 pm
It’s not just that the ruble wasn’t traded internationally, though. In the USSR, holding rubles did not give you access to resources the way that holding pounds or dollars did. The purchasing power of a ruble depended entirely on who held that ruble. Resource allocation on the large scale was political, and on the small scale was very heavily dependent upon systems of rationing, particularly in wartime. Whether you call that system socialist depends on how you choose to define socialism. But it was certainly very different from capitalism.
Comment by Francis King — 19 November, 2009 @ 4:24 pm
I meant: “the way that holding pounds or dollars did in Britain or the USA.”
Comment by Francis King — 19 November, 2009 @ 4:27 pm
Francis - that’s just called corruption, that doesn’t negate that the rouble officially was a universal equivalent and acted thus as a currency. It’s just a mass scale version of the beat cop who takes an apple from the green grocer and doesn’t have to pay for it. Corruption and differential treatment isn’t inconsistent with capitalism.
Comment by redbedhead — 19 November, 2009 @ 4:32 pm
In addition to corruption, I would add, is the related phenomenon of rationing (related because rationing leads to corruption) - a symptom of the fact that the USSR directed the bulk of its investment towards big industry capital investment to compete with the Americans militarily.
Comment by redbedhead — 19 November, 2009 @ 4:34 pm
#45 - The ruble didn’t operate the same as capitalist currencies, due simply to the fact it performed a different function within a socialist economy - i.e. it was used as a measure of accountancy rather than value. Also, the Soviet government had a monopoly on foreign trade, there were no private companies or banks to invest in, so there could be no currency speculation in the capitalist sense.
Sorry to have to break this to you, but the Soviet Union, warts and all, was a country with a socialist economic base.
Comment by John — 19 November, 2009 @ 4:36 pm
The Nazis (who used concentration camp prisoners - see Adolf Burger’s “The Devil’s Workshop”) had major trouble convincingly forging the pound and the dollar, because of their complex watermarks. The wartime Soviet ruble, of which I have seen examples, was probably much less of a technical challenge, yet they didn’t bother attacking it that way, preferring to attack the Soviet economy by blowing up factories, destroying crops and wiping out villages.
Comment by Mark Victorystooge — 19 November, 2009 @ 4:37 pm
# 45. No, there certainly was massive corruption, but that was something else. The Soviet economy allocated resources to enterprises on the basis of political decisions through the planning agencies. Ability to pay - “effective demand”, the mainstay of capitalist economics - was not the main determinant of who got what. Money simply did not play the role in the Soviet economy that it plays in a capitalist economy.
But just because an economy isn’t capitalist doesn’t necessarily make it socialist - why should it?
Comment by Francis King — 19 November, 2009 @ 4:56 pm
This is going back further in time but, according to the “Blackwell Encyclopaedia of the Russian Revolution”, edited by Harold Shukman, 1988, one demand of the Kronstadt mutineers was for workers’ wages to be paid “in gold and not in paper trash”. This was probably one comment on the impact of the Russian Civil War on the economy. A feature of the period was that everyone - Reds and Whites - was issuing paper money but its real value was questionable. Quite a few people were hoarding bundles of money issued by Bolsheviks, Denikin, Kolchak, Petlyura, Wrangel, the Poles etc. etc. and perhaps all of them at the same time.
Comment by Mark Victorystooge — 19 November, 2009 @ 5:28 pm
From 1917 to the early 1920s, currency printing was the main source of revenue for the Soviet treasury. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky even tried to provide a theoretical justification for it as the specific way in which money would disappear in the transition to communism. The problem was that its efficacy continually diminished - more and more had to be printed in order to get the same effective revenue, which just accelerated the hyperinflation up to the point where notes almost cost more to print than they were worth. The “emission tax” was analysed in the Soviet economic literature as they prepared to introduce the stable chervonets currency between 1922 and 1924.
People only hoarded money where there was absolutely nothing to buy with it. Otherwise, its value diminished so fast that people tried to spend it as soon as they could. This caused massive problems for the USSR State Bank as it tried to introduce a stable currency. A currency’s stability depends in part on the quantity of money in circulation and the velocity of circulation. But they had no idea what would constitute a normal velocity of circulation…
Comment by Francis King — 19 November, 2009 @ 5:42 pm
John - money as a measure of accounting means that it is measuring something. it is acting as a mediating universal tool. What could they be counting? It was ultimately abstract labour time. That it was mediated by the state, rather than the supply and demand of the market, doesn’t make it any less of a universal equivalent.
Francis - “The Soviet economy allocated resources to enterprises on the basis of political decisions through the planning agencies”
But these weren’t based on abstract desires - more paintings vs more bathtub plugs - they were rooted in the military competition the USSR faced against the west. This forced them to accumulate in way akin to western capitalism and to submit the economy to rationalization to reduce labour time and make, for instance, weapons manufacture and big industry more efficient.
Comment by redbedhead — 19 November, 2009 @ 5:52 pm
Trotsky was wrong about the Militarisation of Labour, Lenin got it right.
He accepted he was wrong, end of story.
But what’s often forgotten is that Ernest Bevin implemented the “Militarisation of Labour” in Britain during World War 2.
The Emergency Powers (Defence) Act gave him complete control over the labour force and the allocation of manpower.
Using this law 48,000 child labourers (Bevin Boys) were sent to work in the coal industry
This was in a state where the capitalist class still controlled the bulk of industry.
But from what we already know of Andy Newman’s views on the War, he would have entirely supported this!
As did the wartime CPGB using a mixture of social chauvinist and Soviet Defencist arguments.
Only Trotskyists actively defended the conditions of the workers at the time.
It’s also very difficult to make promises that pure democracy would prevail in a situation of Civil War and foreign intervention.
In October 1917 less than a dozen people were killed in Petrograd, but in Moscow over 500 Bolsheviks were killed in the fighting.
In Chile in 1973, tens of thousands were killed because Allende’s Popular Front government failed to take decisive action against the coup plotters in the Army.
With regard to the issue of inner party democracy Andy Newman is simply being disingenuous.
Trotsky was never in favour of the ban on factions being permanent and spoke in favour of inner party democracy as early as the 12 congress in 1923.
“The New Course” contains the proposals he was making at the time.
If anything, it was the popularity of these positions that led to the Troika solidifying.
The bureaucratisation of the party was something Lenin tried to fight against and Trotsky continued.
It was a real social phenomenon.
Stalin’s terror in the late 1930’s represented the completion of a political counter-revolution.
Spot the Bonapartist
Comment by prianikoff — 19 November, 2009 @ 5:55 pm
redbedhead - quite true. Indeed the competition wasn’t just military - the Soviet authorities expected to be able, ultimately, to defeat capitalism economically. An important part of Marx’s schema of social and economic development is the idea that more productive modes of production displace less productive ones. In the USSR they expected that the planned socialist economy they intended to build would eventually attain labour productivity levels way above those attainable under capitalism, by dint of its greater rationality. They - and this wasn’t just Bolsheviks, but other Marxists in the planning apparatus as well - didn’t regard rationalisation and high productivity as an essential feature of capitalism, but as something that socialism would be able to do much better.
Of course, it didn’t work out like that, but that’s another story…
Comment by Francis King — 19 November, 2009 @ 6:11 pm
After WW2, nobody other than the USSR even tried to compete with the USA, and in the age of Sputnik, it was not a foregone conclusion that the USA would come out ahead.
About that time, Anthony Burgess wrote “Clockwork Orange”, in which delinquents talk a youth patois he called “nadsat” which is strongly influenced by Russian.
Comment by Mark Victorystooge — 19 November, 2009 @ 6:37 pm
John wrote: ‘Sorry to have to break this to you, but the Soviet Union, warts and all, was a country with a socialist economic base’.
Well only if you define socialism in a very narrow economistic sense John. It puzzles me how you can separate one sphere of socitey from the other. The Bolsheviks, including Lenin and Trotsky, and then later Stalin, attemped to justify a polticial dictatorship on the grounds that the ‘economic base’ was a ’socialist’. Surely this is a Leninist argument if nothing else. Yet in your very first post you talk about a ‘confusion of Marxism with the cult of Leninism’? It’s bizzare to see you then putting forward a Leninst position having entered the debate with this assertion?
Comment by Owen — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:06 pm
Em, Trotsky didn’t think that the Soviet Economy was ever socialist and much of his fight against Stalin revolved around a rejection of the notion that ’socialism’ had been achieved in ‘one country’ (a backward one, at that).
Those who try to say Trotsky = Stalin only think in terms of a ‘power struggle’ with no knowledge of the politics and economics that were fought.
Was Trotsky for example in favour of preventing petty commodity production (ie private enterprise) after the period of ‘war communism’? Was he in favour of forced collectivition - the disaster that was supposed to be the basis of ’socialism in one country’?
Some of the contributors above (eg prianikoff) are right about the political struggles, but there still is the is nagging feeling that the left measures revolutionary advance solely by state control of production, rather than the strength of the working class in power.
Andy’s way off course to suggest that it was just the party who suffered the repression - the peasantry weren’t by and large party members.
It’s ironic that the Chinese Revolution was led by pro-Stalin revolutionaries, yet the economic policies purued since 1978 are the exact opposite of Stalin’s ’socialist plans’
Comment by Howard T — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:25 pm
#55 Burgess was right about the process and wrong about the direction. Modern Russian teen slang is full of Americanisms…
Comment by Francis King — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:26 pm
Mein Gott! An article by Andy Newman I actually agree with. How bizaare. Did Andy actually write this…?
Comment by Dora Kaplan — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:27 pm
#56 - The cult of Leninism as an organisational model is entirely different from the objective analysis of an economic system, much less a Marxist analysis. It is simply wrong to assert that pointing out the Soviet Union’s socialist economic base constitutes a ‘narrow definition of socialism’.
Without this economic base there is nothing, no superstructure, no society - nothing.
Socialism is more than nice people doing nice things for other nice people. It describes a particular economic system based on concrete social relations of production, distribution, and exchange.
Comment by John — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:33 pm
I think Andy your making too much of Trotskyist groups (particualrly British Trotskyist groups) as in any way a representation of the politics of Leon Trotsky. You have set up a caricature of Trotskyist groups (which nevertheless is accurate) and suggested that this corresponds with Trotsky’s politics (which is inaccurate).
As most Brits ahve never experienced a revolution, and judging by those still around never will, it is always worth remembering that the demands after coming to power are immense in order to defend democracy and tactics in different situations vary. Not least there is the question of imperialist inspired counter-revolution, be it 1917 in Russia or having to deal with the Contras in Nicaragua or Castro’s Cuba. Not every leader had the advantage of Chavez of huge oil revenues and an urban working class, hence greater democracy compared to say Castro facing a blockade for 50 years. War communism was a necessity till the Whites had been defeated, but after that new economic strategy was needed. Trotsky supported some very ruthless actions in defence of the revolution, but did not see any of that as being a permanent feature.
Once Stalin emabarked on a ludicrous economic path that abolished all private property and called that socialism, rather than use markets and taxation to link the peasantry into the growing economy. There was no use of international division of labour so that consumer goods were made available to the peasantry as they became wealthier. What could they buy? 12 tons of pig iron?
The Soviet Union never recovered from Stalin’s forced collectivisation of the peasantry.
Comment by Stuart Graham — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:50 pm
It really is laughable when the worshippers of the Trotsky cult argue that Trotsky’s terror was “good killing because it defended the revolution,” but Stalin’s terror was “bad killing because it betrayed the revolution.”
You can’t come over all wish-washy liberal-pacifist about “terror” if you then defend some types of terror and not others.
On the other hand, communists have honestly addressed, analysed and condemned Stalin’s reign of terror.
Our movement did this over 50 years ago.
We condemed the leader cult, the Moscow show trials and the great purges over 50 years ago and we’ve continued to condemn these crimes.
And we’ve moved on.
Sadly, the worshippers of the Trotsky cult are utterly unable to be either honest or critical and they remain stuck - as they will forever be in a 1930s time-warp.
Comment by Karl Stewart — 19 November, 2009 @ 11:59 pm
#39
Do you really think that gerry healy did nothing to foster the cult of the leader in the WRP? Bringing Trotsky’s bloody death mask onto the platform at conference!!! And the MIlitant beinging over Trotsky’s relatives to the UK!!! why?
Also you seriously misread Cliff;s book, did you never work with him? The argument by Cliff is that Lenin was the historical product of the interaction of the leadership and the party, and the party and the class; and that Lenin was able to syntheise that exerience to make intuitive advances where the party were conservative; and that Lenin needed time and again to correct the party. Mmmm. Who else do we know who behaved like that? bloody rubbish!
Have you never sat in an SWP eduactional meeting pouring over what exactly trotsky meant by the United Front, etc, etc.
Comment by Andy Newman — 20 November, 2009 @ 12:12 am
#41
It is not about time. There are any number of ridiculaous occassions such as the Militant reprint from the 1980s of Ted grant’s “The marxist theory of the State”, which polemicises against Cliff’s theory of state cap, but there are NO references to who the arguement is adresssed against. Or Hallas’s artricle “White Collar workers” from the old series ISJ that polemicises against the Militant in the NUT, without mentioning their name, or sayng who they are. Anyone who has been in the British trot left will know of the scorn that other left groups are described as Sectarians, cults, sects, etc. Don’t you remember the series of SWP meetings in the 1980s “Are the Militant marxists?”, which concluded that they were not. have you even seen the eye rolling and sighs in a British SWP meeting if someone qutes from Ernest mandel?
Yes the theoretcial jounransl refer to sources who are not rival marxists, or occassionally guest an article from a rival group to polemicise against it; but there is not attempt at synthesis, or comparative reasoning. It is taken as read that all the theoretical work of your own group is virtuous, even when wrong; and all the theory from other groups is delusional and sectarian, even when right,
Comment by Andy Newman — 20 November, 2009 @ 12:19 am
#41
Sorry that my argument went over your head, I will try to write more simply next time.
Of course ordinary people can theorise, the question is, whether theories can be judged truth approximate, where the evidence is incomplete or more than one theory explains the available evidence.
This is where consideration of the theoretical virtues, in the technical sense, is important. Does your theory fit in with other established theories or not, does the acceotance of your theory meand jetisoning parts of other well established theories.
Yes ordinary peopple can do this, but trotskysists cannot. The reason trotskists cannot is because they are organisationally committed to defending the theoretical uniqueness at the root of their own seperate organisation.
Look at the way the Cliffite State Cap theory requires jetsiining of much of orthodoc maxist economics. this doesn’t matter for the Is tradition, beacsue they hermetically seal off the two spheres. Bt it does make it hard to theoretically recincile economic analysis fromo Chris Harman, and Ernest mandel, for example.
In science, two such irreconsilable theoretical outlooks would be regarded as a problem, and there wuld be an attempt to reconcile the contradictions with further research. In trot world, it requires that one side is completely wrong, and the other side is completely right.
Comment by Andy Newman — 20 November, 2009 @ 12:27 am
Andy wrote: In science, two such irreconsilable theoretical outlooks would be regarded as a problem, and there wuld be an attempt to reconcile the contradictions with further research. In trot world, it requires that one side is completely wrong, and the other side is completely right.
Perhaps in the natural sciences Andy-but what we are dealing with here is social science which is of course politicsed and value based. We cant take politics/ideology out of the social sciences so there will always be debates within different traditions on the right and the left-,competing discourses as Foucault might say-who incidently never argued that there is no objective reality outside of discourse-which you referred to in your introduction to this subject.
Comment by Owen — 20 November, 2009 @ 12:42 am
“And the MIlitant beinging over Trotsky’s relatives to the UK”
Hi - (one of these days when I’m a bit more confident I’ll pick a name)
As I understand it the Militant had a telephone link from Mexico with Trotsky’s grandson on the specific question of a campaign for rehabilitation of those murdered under Stalin - nothing to do with trotsky as a guru, just do with families killed because of ideas - they might have well contacted Prokofiev’s wife but she was already long, long dead; Babel too…..
God bless you all
Bertolt
Comment by brechtengestillen — 20 November, 2009 @ 12:46 am
“competing discourses as Foucault might say-who incidently never argued that there is no objective reality outside of discourse”
Accepting that there is an objective reality is not the same as accepting that theories are approximate descriptions of that reality. Foucoult argues that reality is only accessible mediated by language, and this is a different philospohical position from scientific realism, which argues that mature scientific theories are truth approximate, and can be verified not by language but by experience.
Social theories can also be tested not only be discourse but also by validation and verification. that is the scientific meathod, and it is not restricted t the hysical sciences, it is the philosphical dimension to how we judge truth.
Comment by Andy Newman — 20 November, 2009 @ 1:00 am
#67
“As I understand it the Militant had a telephone link from Mexico with Trotsky’s grandson on the specific question of a campaign for rehabilitation of those murdered under Stalin”
I stand partially corrected.
BUt I know they made a BIG bally-hoo about Trotsky’s grandson, so i think you are being a bit disingenuous.
Comment by Andy Newman — 20 November, 2009 @ 1:01 am
“In defence of scientific realism … we must say that theories that explain the empirical evidence must also conform to theoretical virtues, such as coherence with other established theories, completeness, unifying power and the capacity to generate novel predictions”
We should bear in mind that sometimes science evolves new understanding in a way that has no ‘coherence with other established theories.’ Newton abolished Cartesian contact mechanics at a stroke, to the horror of many of his contempories, who accused him of invoking ‘occult’ forces to explain action at a distance without a physical medium or substratum (gravitation). Unifying power is a more subtle point - Quantum mechanics lacks the unifying elegance of special relativity, but conforms more closely to the observed behaviour of light and matter.
Notions like ‘Marxism’ appear to belong more to the history of organised religion than rational enquiry. It’s hard to imagine a scientist declaring herself as a ‘Newtonian’ or ‘Feynmannian’ and only admitting of evidence the supports the theories of her designated master. You accept the contributions of your forbears, analyse the limitations of their theories and move on.
The ’social sciences’ are indeed ideological, and often bereft of substantive content(discourse theory etc), but it’s interesting how much work is being done in neuroscience, public health research and the cognitive sciences that should give hope to anyone with a concern for social justice. Much of it has parallels with some of Marx’s earlier work on ’species character’ It seems increasingly clear that our need for meaningful interaction, moral self-realisation and creativity may well be embedded in our genetic makeup - just like the rest our physical attributes.
Comment by Dora Kaplan — 20 November, 2009 @ 1:13 am
68-’Foucoult argues that reality is only accessible mediated by language’
I think this is a very crude and one sided view of Foucualt. This is one of the problems of these types of debates. Important intellectuals, in this case Foucualt get reduced to caricutures of what they really are.
His work on language, his insight into the ways in which dicourse constructs the subject, is insightful and there is much in Foucualt that the left can learn from-particualry in his analysis of power. And whilst his work ebbs to much on the social construcntionst side of things for my liking, he is one of the great thinkers of recent times.
Comment by Owen — 20 November, 2009 @ 1:20 am
“BUt I know they made a BIG bally-hoo about Trotsky’s grandson, so i think you are being a bit disingenuous.”
Actually genuinely no as i think there was some discussion at the time that esteban volkov had no specific political platform to promote but a generally humanitarian one - remember this was at a time when gorbachov was in power and the crisis in the su had a real possibility to establish a mass movement to re-establish genuine soviet democracy (ok, you’ll disagree with that but I’ve had whisky and you’ve had ‘flu so get back to bed - now get more hanns eisler on the jukebox - the trotskyists can agree on that surely? - no? oh well)
bertolt (now i’ve got a name i don’t want and some fascist has something similar too)
Comment by brechtengestillen — 20 November, 2009 @ 1:25 am
Its just one long slide from trotsky through to tankie-liberalism for you andy. This reminds me of reading some latter-day Hobsbawm - that is, the stuff he wrote after his brain had oozed out of his ears like how sex was anti-socialist.
Just a bunch of stupid old folk wisdom about how nasty and middle class the bolsheviks were, backed up by some liberal theories of agency.
Pray tell me how the bolsheviks were able to defeat all those foreign armys which invaded russia after the insurrection as well as a domestic fascist insurgency with a ruined economy? Obvious answer - because the bolsheviks had no popular support. The red army all hated the bolsheviks, who they considered a bunch of poncy dreamers. The red army - like all working class people - were only interested in football and belching lowdly.
They also like to buy Andys T-shirts, which have the word football on them, because workingclass people like football. If you wack the word football on some leftwing stuff then workers, who struggle to understand all that politics stuff, will like it. Hence the most important initiative on the left in britain since the second world war has been those tatty t-shirts with some geeky idiosyncratic left wing banter coated in big manly normal footy and andy’s desperate attempt to get us to love winston churchill, who the workers in their ignorance also adore and who must be hijacked for the purposes of… well… getting people to agree with calling off the postal strike (working class people dont like strikes either, their just for trumped up bolshy weirdos). SOCIALISM!!!!!!!
Comment by Anonymous — 20 November, 2009 @ 1:28 am
#64 “Don’t you remember the series of SWP meetings in the 1980s “Are the Militant marxists?”, which concluded that they were not. ”
-No.
What a pit of a branch you were in Andy if you had such meetings. I certainly do not remember any such meetings when in Lowestoft SWP from 82-84 nor Manchester/Salford SWP up to 1989.
Comment by aarghh — 20 November, 2009 @ 6:49 am
Er, they’re not ‘Andy’s T-shirts’, tho I have it on good authority he owns a fair few.
You make all sorts of assumptions don’t you? Philosophy Football (see www.philosophyfootball.com) was founded by two football fans who yes have been around the left for a fair few years. We have managed to turn it into a modestly successful small business, something the left is notoriously poor at. And we’ve used a chink of the resultant surplus value to support a wide variety of progressive causes, both financially and in kind.
There is nothing patronising in being engaged in popular culture. What is really patronising tho’ is the assumption that ‘class politics’ can only be presented in one form, a form that has proved stunningly successful in failing to engage with the class it purports to represent.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 20 November, 2009 @ 7:52 am
#74
“when in Lowestoft SWP from 82-84 nor Manchester/Salford SWP up to 1989″
Every branch had meetings on “Are the MIlitant marxist?” following the publication of Sheila Rowbotham’s article in the ISJ about them, which was in 1986 or 1987.
Comment by Andy Newman — 20 November, 2009 @ 8:17 am
Karl Stewart
“..communists have honestly addressed, analysed and condemned Stalin’s reign of terror.
Our movement did this over 50 years ago.
We condemed the leader cult, the Moscow show trials and the great purges over 50 years ago and we’ve continued to condemn these crimes.”
Nonsense.
The problem wasn’t a question of a “leader cult”, but a political counter- revolution led by the bureaucracy. This bureaucracy was not capable of reforming itself, as the events in Hungary immediately after the 20th congress showed.
The same situation was repeated in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The bureaucracy moved from political, to social counter revolution and the restoration of capitalism during the 1980’s.
Trotsky was one of the few major leaders never officially rehabilitated because it was too dangerous for the bureaucracy as a whole.
The events in Chile was a very good example of where your fuzzy ideas lead.
The coup plotters within the army were like a malignant cancer which had to be surgically removed before it spread to the vital organs of the body-politic.
Allende had been warned about them by the rank and file sailors in Valparaiso, but chose to ignore the warning.
The Chilean CP’s leadership aided and abetted this by promoting “progressive generals” and calling for popular unity.
But what was needed was decisive action to arrest and bring to trial the coup plotters. To sever the lines of the communication between them and their CIA controllers and seize the means of communications; TV and Radio.
They had to be isolated and decisively smashed.
These lessons are relevant to the situation in Venezuela too.
See Alan Woods interview in Últimas Noticias, Caracas Tuesday, 17 November 2009
http://www.marxist.com/woods-carry-out-revolution-within-revolution-un.htm
and in Ciudad CCS Thursday, 19 November 2009
http://www.marxist.com/ciudad-ccs-woods-you-cannot-make-half-a-revolution.htm
As to comments about Trotsky’s grandson Esteban Volkov.
He was actually wounded during the first assassination attempt on Trotsky led by the Siqueiros gang. His grandmother Alexandra Sokolovskaya and father Platon Volkov died in the Gulags.
Estaban Volkov is not an apolitical figure;
As he said at the time of Gorbachev:-
“Power must pass from the hands of the bureaucracy into the hands of the working. class as a whole. There must be a genuine workers’ democracy that would involve the rural proletarians and also the technicians, scientists and other layers who under modern conditions, in my view, should really be regarded as part of the proletariat.”
Comment by prianikoff — 20 November, 2009 @ 8:31 am
Prianikoff #77
‘The problem wasn’t a question of a “leader cult”, but a political counter- revolution led by the bureaucracy.’
If there was a counter-revolution led by the bureaucracy, which I certainly dispute, then it was led by Lenin and Trotsky with the abolition of factions in 1920 and the change in the role of the unions from representing the workers interests to the govt to that of representing the wishes of the govt to the workers. This change was instituted at Trotsky’s behest.
As Andy rightly says in his original piece, Trotsky only discovered his attachment to workers’ democracy after he’d been deposed.
Comment by John — 20 November, 2009 @ 9:10 am
#78 Some of my best friends have been Libertarians, but this is Libertarian wank.
The sort of shit that ends up in the “Times” or “Telegraph”, or gets you a job in a university department.
btw. I should correct #53, where I called Bevin boys “child labourers”. The lower age limit was 18. But they were conscripted labour and many had to keep working in the pits after the war was over.
So, Ernest Bevin, T&G leader and Labour Minister of Employment in the Wartime Coalition Government with the Tories, introduced the militarisation of Labour.
Thousands of workers were also prosecuted and jailed for leaving jobs without permission, or unofficial strike action too.
Comment by prianikoff — 20 November, 2009 @ 9:21 am
#76 You mean Sheila McGregor and it was in 1986 “The History and Politics of Militant”
I’m sure the meeting wasn’t titled “Are the Militant Marxist?” but, maybe I missed that one.
Comment by aarghh — 20 November, 2009 @ 9:29 am
#79 - Hardly libertarian when I am a supporter of the SU. But I understand your inability to deal with the points I raised on an intellectual and political level.
After all, when you start out on a false premise it’s inevitable that you soon find yourself going down a theoretical cul de sac.
There was no counter revolution led by the bureaucracy in the SU. There was a set of events unleashed by 1917, a revolution in a backward country, which was immediately beset by huge external and internal pressure and contradictions, that made the emergence of a rigid bureaucracy well nigh inevitable.
The counter revolution came in 1989.
Comment by John — 20 November, 2009 @ 9:30 am
Prianikoff at (77),
“The events in Chile was a very good example of where your fuzzy ideas lead.”
What the fuck are you talking about?
Which “fuzzy” ideas of mine are you referring to?
And how do any of my ideas lead to such a situation?
My main “idea” is that the parties of the working-class left should unite into a single Workers Party, a united political force of socialists and communists with the aim of replacing the rule of the capitalist class with the rule of the working class.
If a coup is threatened at some point, then we - our class collectively - must act resolutely to resist it using all means necessary.
Where have I ever said that we can rely on the organs of the capitalist state to defend our class’s gains against the forces of reaction?
I’ve never said it and your reference to Chile is completely inappropriate to this discussion.
With regard to Stalin’s reign of terror, the leader cult, the Moscow trials and the great purges, communists did address, analyse and condemn the crimes of this period over 50 years ago.
We have to keep reminding worshippers of the Trotsky cult about this because they always refer to these crimes when they attack communism.
Yes of course the socialist countries and the world communist movement did not resolve all of its problems with the political work that it carried out dealing with the crimes of the Stalin period.
Yes of course problems of excessive bureacratism and disconnection from the working class remained areas where there were serious shortcomings.
Many of these problems led eventually to the 1989/91 counter-revolutions.
Since then, there have been volumes of work on where we went wrong - hours of discussion on how we need to work for communism in the future and all in a rigorous, honest and self-critical way.
We still, however, vigorously defend the positive legacy of our movement and we remain thoroughly committe to fighting for a socialist and eventually a communist future.
By contrast, worshippers of the Trotsky cult - despite the good work that many of these individuals have carried out in the wider movement - have never been honest about their shortcomings, have never been self-critical and as a consequence, have never developed politically.
Theirs is a fossilised faith-based religion.
Comment by Karl Stewart — 20 November, 2009 @ 9:40 am
Very relevant point about Lakatos. Much to think of there. Excellent.
Strange that whenever Tendance Coatesy posts something weighty Andy Newman writes about it in the following days.
For the original ‘centrist’ critique of Trotksy see:
http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/trotsky-two-recent-books/
Perhaps next time Andy should ask what I’m going to post on beforehand.
Comment by Andrew Coates — 20 November, 2009 @ 10:04 am
Karl wrote at #82:- “My main “idea” is that the parties of the working-class left should unite into a single Workers Party, a united political force of socialists and communists with the aim of replacing the rule of the capitalist class with the rule of the working class. If a coup is threatened at some point, then we - our class collectively - must act resolutely to resist it using all means necessary.
Where have I ever said that we can rely on the organs of the capitalist state to defend our class’s gains against the forces of reaction?”
I don’t disagree with what you’ve said here Karl. But your constant babbling about the “Trotsky” cult and assertion that all these problems were addressed by the international communist movement 50 years ago is clearly rubbish.
The Chilean CP, under Luis Corvalan, did “rely on the organs of the capitalist state” in the period before September 11th 1973.
In July 1972, the Chilean CP described the Concepción Assembly of unions and grass roots movements as a “maneuver by reaction and imperialism, using elements of the ultra-left as a cover.”
Along with Allende, it opposed the strike by the Copper Miners at El Teniente, totally demoralising the vanguard of the organised working class in Chile.
Along with Allende, Luis Corvalán opposed workers self defence militias , insisting that the Chilean “army is not invulnerable to the new winds blowing in Latin America and penetrating everywhere. It is not a body alien to the nation, in the service of anti-national interests. It must be won to the cause of progress in Chile and not pushed to the other side of the barricades”
Following the failed coup on June 29, 1973, by Colonel Robert Souper, the CP along with Allende sought to placate the military leadership by bringing its leaders into the government. These included General Augusto Pinochet.
Corvalán stated: “We continue to support the absolutely professional character of the armed institutions. Their enemies are not among the ranks of the people but in the reactionary camp.”
They demobilised and disoriented the working class opposition and prepared it for the slaughter it experienced in September, described by Mike Gonzalez thus:
“The coup was conducted with extraordinary savagery. Thousands were raped, subjected to inhuman torture, starved, abused, murdered. In the following 12 months 30,000 people were killed. They were the best and Most courageous leaders of their class, systematically picked off with sophisticated foreign intelligence help. And they were not just killed—they were torn apart, to warn and terrify the next generation. The rest were dealt with arbitrarily, to terrorize the population and give graphic notice that the new regime would give no quarter. That was the significance of the maimed bodies that floated every morning along Santiago’s River Mapocho”
This was done using Populist rhetoric that blurred the differences between the classes, obscured the role of the military and failed to differentiate reform from revolution.
All this was 17 years after 1956, but I’ve never seen an honest political assessment of it from any Communist Party.
Comment by Prianikoff — 20 November, 2009 @ 10:54 am
#81 “There was no counter revolution led by the bureaucracy in the SU.”
Idiot, ignore.
Comment by Prianikoff — 20 November, 2009 @ 10:59 am
#85 - Thank you. Game, set and match.
Comment by John — 20 November, 2009 @ 11:02 am
#80 around 1986 the SWP wrote an open letter to the Militant proposing unification (or was it the Militant who wrote to the SWP, I can’t remember)
Comment by Gavin — 20 November, 2009 @ 11:35 am
Gavin:
It was the SWP which wrote to Militant. It was clearly not at all intended as a serious offer of unity (or else it wouldn’t have been issued in the form of an open letter) and was intended purely as what is known as a “unity offensive”.
Comment by Irish Mark P — 20 November, 2009 @ 12:12 pm
Prianikoff (84)
“But your constant babbling about the “Trotsky” cult and assertion that all these problems were addressed by the international communist movement 50 years ago is clearly rubbish.”
But I didn’t say all the shortcomings of the world communist movement were addressed by the post-Stalin leadership did I?
In fact, if you look back at my post (82), I said: “Yes of course the socialist countries and the world communist movement did not resolve all of its problems with the political work that it carried out dealing with the crimes of the Stalin period. Yes of course problems of excessive bureacratism and disconnection from the working class remained areas where there were serious shortcomings.”
What the post-Stalin leadership did do, however, was to deal with the crimes of the Stalin period.
What happened in Chile was not relevant to this discussion at all in my opinion. It was not relevant to issues around the leader cult, mass purges, show trials, the religious nature of the Trotsky cult. It was not relevant to any of these issues.
The events of 1973 in Chile were relevant to issues of understanding the class nature of the state. And reams and reams of work has been done on this issue - specifically with reference to the Pinochet coup - in the years since then.
What you said in your point at (77) was that my “fuzzy ideas” would lead to this type of coup situation. That was utter nonsense and nothing you’ve said subsequently has substantiated that point.
Comment by Karl Stewart — 20 November, 2009 @ 12:20 pm
“I’ve never seen an honest political assessment of it from any Communist Party”
I’ve never seen an honest political assessment of the disastrous role of ultra-leftism in Chile from any Trotskyist sources, although it is worth noting that the sizeable French Maoist group Gauche Proletarienne did at least have the decency to make an auto-critique and dissolve itself after having supported the lunacy of the MIR in Chile.
Comment by lone nut — 20 November, 2009 @ 12:49 pm
The thesis that there was a “bureaucratic counter-revolution” in the USSR is not an established fact, but a contestable assertion. It all depends on your standpoint, and on whether you think that a revolution can have pre-set “tasks” or not. Many Mensheviks and SRs were arguing at the end of 1917 that the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power represented the “counter-revolution”, in that they understood the task of the revolution as the introduction of a democratic republic and (in the SRs’ case) land reform. Left SRs and SR-Maximalists tended to date the counter-revolution from mid-1918, when the Bolsheviks clamped down heavily on the opposition and closed the independent press down. Anarchists tended to take the same sort of line. Many in the Bolshevik party regarded NEP as a betrayal, etc. etc.
It seems to me that it makes most sense to regard the Russian revolution as a process, which spanned the first third of the 20th century, in which the old order broke down and a new order was created. The revolution didn’t have “tasks” (how can an impersonal process have tasks?), and the outcome was the result of a mass of sharp political, economic, class, national etc. etc. conflicts. It wasn’t the only possible outcome, but one thing is certain - revolutions don’t follow anybody’s script. It’s not in their nature.
Comment by Francis King — 20 November, 2009 @ 12:49 pm
`This is where consideration of the theoretical virtues, in the technical sense, is important. Does your theory fit in with other established theories or not, does the acceotance of your theory meand jetisoning parts of other well established theories.
`Yes ordinary peopple can do this, but trotskysists cannot. The reason trotskists cannot is because they are organisationally committed to defending the theoretical uniqueness at the root of their own seperate organisation.
`Look at the way the Cliffite State Cap theory requires jetsiining of much of orthodoc maxist economics. this doesn’t matter for the Is tradition, beacsue they hermetically seal off the two spheres. Bt it does make it hard to theoretically recincile economic analysis fromo Chris Harman, and Ernest mandel, for example.’
That’s wickedly dishonest Andy. You must surely be aware that state-cap theory directly contradicts Trotsky’s analysis of the bureaucratic degeneration of the first workers’ state? State-cap theory is the SWP’s little contribution to the Gramscian-Stalinist pragmatic `war of position’. It is an adaption to Western imperialist middle class sensibilities. It then became their unique little piece of theology (it, as you say, having no connection with any previous Marxist analysis) that distinguished them from everybody else and made them the sect they are today. Nothing to do with Trotskyism I’m afraid. Everything to do with the kind of Gramscian, post-modern rubbish they teach in British universities these days.
The Soviet thermidor was politically consumated when the bureaucracy was able to definitively drop international socialism in favour of the self-serving mantra of socialism in one country and peaceful co-existence with imperialism. To do this it had to rid the CP of all remnants of Bolshevism. It turned the third international into a vehicle for its own foreign policy rather than a vehicle for international revolution. Eventually, a powerful section of the bureaucracy collapsed the Soviet Union adding social-counter revolution to its long-ago consumated political counter revolution.
Comment by David Ellis — 20 November, 2009 @ 1:52 pm
#26
Very soft sell for a Trotsky t-shirt. Great stuff! Nice to see someone else has I happened to look at Louis Proyect’s site a couple of weeks ago (embarrassed to admit it) and found him quoting Robert Conquest style figures for the penal and famine deaths under Stalin. A commenter referred him to Getty’s figures (from the archives, so the best estimate to date). Proyect’s reply seemed to indicate that he had vaguely heard of Getty, but wasn’t much interested. A perfect illustration of the very widespread tendency, which Andy noted, to consider facts an optional extra to doctrinal requirements. ‘Marxist’ has almost come to mean someone who reads books about ‘Marxism’ and next to nothing else.
–
I am not really interested in participating in this dreadful forum, but Jack McTrousers was referring to my citation of 31,000 executions under Stalin. In fact I got that figure from Getty himself:
“In either event, if these figures are accurate, we might presume that the total number of arrests in the Great Purges was well under a million and the total number of executions was near 31,000.”
source: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n19/letters
Comment by Louis Proyect — 20 November, 2009 @ 4:18 pm
David #92
‘The Soviet thermidor was politically consumated when the bureaucracy was able to definitively drop international socialism in favour of the self-serving mantra of socialism in one country and peaceful co-existence with imperialism.’
This just isn’t true. There was no political thermidor, wherein the bureaucracy turned in on the revolution. There was instead an acknowledgement, based on empirical fact, that attempts to spread the revolution beyond its own borders had by 1924 failed. The task then facing the Soviet Union was industrial development in order to prepare for an inevitable attack from the international ruling class in some form or another. What ensued was brutal and extreme, especially in relation to the struggle with the kulaks. But the SU had to industrialise and quickly if it was going to survive. Trotsky advocated the same policy as Stalin in the late 1920s. His policy advocated taxation as a way to expropriate the kulaks and increased govt subsidies to encourage collectivization. As for the workers, they’d been denuded of political power and participation in the running of the govt when Lenin was still alive.
Comment by John — 20 November, 2009 @ 4:45 pm
Trotsky great on directing the Red Army (dont mention Kronstadt)
But had no idea about trade unions - had he ever been a member or involved in one
Dont remeber voting for him at the branch meeting
then again
Comment by Sean — 20 November, 2009 @ 7:16 pm
Louis # 94 - Thanks for sourcing the figure you quoted - to a letter in LRB from 1987! Getty may have been a fool for taking that figure seriously even then, but if he were to ‘insist’ upon it now (as you originally said he did) he would be worse than a fool. In fact, his most recent estimate (as far as I know) is as given in the first comment to your post: something like three-quarters of a million executions in the Terror. (Which is, interestingly enough, pretty much the figure for executions that Robert Conquest gave in The Great Terror.)
Comment by Ken MacLeod — 20 November, 2009 @ 9:47 pm
Louis Proyect - ” if these figures are true…” seems important.
Ken McLeod - your solidarity with your fellow science fiction writer, Robert Conquest, is touching. Getty et al estimate about 750,0000 executions 1929-53, the Stalin period, NOT during the great terror.
There is a very handy paper at this site:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2166597
“Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the pre-war years: a first approach on the basis of archival evidence” J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rittersporn, and Victor N. Zemskov ( 1993)
This paper is referred to in source note 2 on p. 589 of ‘the Road to Terror’. It used to be free to read online, but now you have to pay. It is quite short but thorough and has tables comparing the differing estimates of penal deaths - you’re wrong about there being any agreement whatever between Conquest and Getty. They explain their methods. In short, if you’ve not troubled to search this out, you’ve not really been very interested in facts about the Soviet Union - take a step to rectify this.
Comment by jock mctrousers — 20 November, 2009 @ 11:28 pm
Francis King wrote ~28: ‘There was never any shortage of data or evidence about the processes underway in the Soviet Union. There was always lots to be gleaned from Soviet newspapers and journals, which in the 1920s were relatively open about events, and there was masses of high-quality reportage and analysis in the émigré press. Some time back I read a lot of the Mensheviks’ journal in exile, Sotsialisticheskiy Vestnik, for the 1920s, and was very struck by how well-informed it was on developments in Soviet Russia.
‘But - most of the stuff was available only in Russian. So anyone who wanted to develop a really informed analysis of the place needed to know the language. That’s fair enough, though.’
Actually, there was sufficient material in the English language to enable anyone with a reasonably open mind to get a pretty good idea of what was happening under the Stalin regime in the 1930s. Proof? Get a copy of my recent book The New Civilisation, available via here, and the evidence is there to read.
Comment by Dr Paul — 20 November, 2009 @ 11:30 pm
Of course that should have been 750,000 (750 thousand) above. Michael Parenti discusses this in his indispensable book ‘ Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism’. He considers that the 750,000 number may include cossacks who fought for the nazis. He says there is no way of telling this from the info published so far - anyway, read him yourself if you’re curious.
Comment by jock mctrousers — 20 November, 2009 @ 11:33 pm
#89 “The events of 1973 in Chile were relevant to issues of understanding the class nature of the state. And reams and reams of work has been done on this issue - specifically with reference to the Pinochet coup - in the years since then.”
Perhaps you could provide some quotes and citations then?
Particularly from the Chilean Communist Party.
#90 “I’ve never seen an honest political assessment of the disastrous role of ultra-leftism in Chile from any Trotskyist sources”
I’m not aware of any Trotskyist group that uncritically endorsed the politics of the MIR either.
Their ultra leftist, guerillaist mistakes were one reason why no mass alternative to PU was built.
But at least they were warning against the role of the military and arguing for the mass movement to prepare for a Coup.
Allende and Corvalan, on the other hand, bore responsibility for disorienting the working class and preparing the way for it to succeed.
#94 “Trotsky advocated the same policy as Stalin in the late 1920s.”
You really are an idiot aren’t you?
Comment by prianikoff — 21 November, 2009 @ 8:41 am
#100
And you have zero knowledge of the history of the Soviet Union. Trotsky advocated the same policy of industrialisation at the expense of the kulaks as Stalin. This is a fact. Stalin decided on force, while Trotsky advocated taxing them whilst at the same time providing subsidies to help collectives assume an increasingly prominent role in agricultural production. This is why the Left Opposition collapsed, when the likes of Radek, Zinoviev and Kamenev all went over to Stalin when he changed course in 1928.
Prianikoff, dry your eyes. Your nonsensical attempts at distorting history in order to support a subjectivist theory which views historical events through a filtering system designed to separate what you consider the good stuff from the bad has been thoroughly refuted.
Ultra leftist demagoguery is evident in everything you post. As is political immaturity in your inability to engage in debate without resorting to insults.
Comment by John — 21 November, 2009 @ 8:58 am
#101 “This is a fact. Stalin decided on force, while Trotsky advocated taxing them whilst”
This is what you describe as “the same policy” ???
Clearly you have major problems of categorisation then.
Your assertion that I have “zero knowledge of the history of the Soviet Union” is of course, complete and utter drivel.
To help you understand the differences I’d suggest you read “The New Course” and “Platform of the Joint Opposition” from cover to cover.
Then Google “Socialism in One Country”.
Hope this helps.
Comment by prianikoff — 21 November, 2009 @ 9:12 am
#102 - The same policy to be followed via different means. What is so hard to understand about that.
And I suggest your try reading Deutscher’s biographies of both Stalin and of Trotsky (The Prophet Outcast) before spouting your ahistorical shite on a blog.
Comment by John — 21 November, 2009 @ 9:16 am
Prianikoff,
You seem to have quite extensive knowledge of the events of the 1973 Chilean coup and events leading up to it already. You certainly seem to have a more detailed knowledge than I do - why are you asking me where you can find more reading matter on the subject?
I could only suggest maybe you could visit your local library, or google the subject, or perhaps if it’s specific work by the Chilean CP you’re after, perhaps you could try to contact them direct?
Of course the question of the class nature of the state is of vital importance to us.
And that’s the lesson of Chile 1973.
But I don’t see where you and I differ on this subject.
Nor can I see this subject’s relevance to the discussion we began with, where we clearly do differ.
Comment by Karl Stewart — 21 November, 2009 @ 9:17 am
The figure of 31,000 is just those Stalin sentenced to death. Hundreds of thousands more died who were not sentenced to death but simply murdered in the camps. There a loads of accounts of the slaughter, but Eugenia Ginsberg Into the Whirlwind is as good as it gets.
Comment by bill j — 21 November, 2009 @ 9:50 am
#103 I first read that one over 30 years ago. Any other suggestions?
Comment by prianikoff — 21 November, 2009 @ 9:53 am
#106 - And obviously without understanding them. But rather than deal with the issues, you prefer to throw around book titles as if engaged in a fifth form debate. Let’s see if you understand the issues. As I’ve already said, when Stalin changed course in 1928 the Left Opposition collapsed, with major figures such as Radek, Kamenev and Zinoviev moving over to Stalin. You can read about this is My Life if you don’t believe me.
Why did it collapse?
Because the names mentioned saw the intrinsic goal as being the end - i.e. face to the workers as opposed to the peasantry - as opposed to the means to that end. They saw this as a change in official govt economic and political policy and, wrongly as it happened, believed that it reflected Stalin’s power weakening. That Stalin also saw his left course as a way of weakening and dividing the Left Opposition is also true. But this doesn’t change the fact that Stalin had essentially decided on the same goal of prioritising the interests of industry via ensuring that food and grain supplies to the workers increased. He also saw the dangers of allowing the kulaks to continue in an independent role within the Soviet economy, as espoused by Bukharin, Rykov and the rest of the Right Opposition - both internally as the seed of an emerging class and externally with regard to the danger of capitalist penetration via international trade.
Comment by John — 21 November, 2009 @ 10:10 am
Jock # 97 - I have of course read that paper, and The Road to Terror and The Great Terror, as well as one or two other books. I don’t claim any expertise. The great majority of actual executions occurred in 1937-38. The only point I was making about Conquest was that his actual figure for actual executions (not camp deaths from privation, etc) for those specific years was roughly the same as what the archive shows. I didn’t say that his estimates of total deaths was the same.
’solidarity with [a] fellow science fiction writer’? It is to laugh.
Comment by Ken MacLeod — 21 November, 2009 @ 10:31 am
One figure we do have comes from Ezhov’s draft order of 30 July 1937, “On operations to repress former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements”, confirmed by the CPSU Politburo the next day. It gave region by region quotas of people to be arrested and either imprisoned or shot. The number in the category to be shot in this particular campaign (the sentences were decided in advance) was 75200. It is unlikely that this target was underfulfilled.
Trotskyist mythology tends to present the terror as being mainly aimed at “Bolsheviks”, as part of an imagined campaign to destroy “revolutionaries” within the Bolshevik party. This particular campaign was aimed mainly at “former kulaks” in the first instance, and “members of anti-Soviet parties (SRs, Georgian Mensheviks, Mussavatists, Ittihadists and Dashnaks)” - in other words, the sorry remnants of Russia’s more capable peasants and anybody with the temerity to think something other than the official ideology. In other words - much the same people who had been the victims from the civil war onwards.
Comment by Francis King — 21 November, 2009 @ 10:34 am
#107 “..when Stalin changed course in 1928 the Left Opposition collapsed, with major figures such as Radek, Kamenev and Zinoviev moving over to Stalin….Why did it collapse?”
But the Left Opposition didn’t collapse, it grew.
It continued to exist in Russia, under much more repressive conditions.
But it grew internationally, as Trotsky’s writings were disseminated outside the USSR. Because they were the most coherent critique of the policies of the Stalinist leadership.
You glibly assert that Trotsky and Stalin had the same position in the late 1920’s.
But anyone who imagined that there was any convergence in policy was deluding themself.
Radek, Kamenev and Zinoviev capitulated because they were more cowardly and less principled than Trotsky. This was just a form of living death, to be followed by the real thing.
Hardly any of the capitulators were allowed to occupy responsible positions in the party apparatus.
Stalin’s policies in 1928-9 were a grotesque caricature of what the Opposition had been arguing for at a time when Stalin was opposing planning and major electrification schemes.
The “Platform of the Joint Opposition” proposed a policy of inserting the Soviet Economy into the world market and international division of labour. Importing Western technology in areas where the USSR was deficient and creating more consumer goods for the peasants to buy.
Stalin’s policy was based on the premise of “Socialism in Once Country”.
This, in practice, meant violating the worker-peasant alliance on which the Revolution was based.
The Opposition policies, by contrast, would have maintained it, but shifted the balance in favour of the poor peasants and agricultural labourers, by a system of progressive taxation on the Kulaks
The argument that Stalin’s methods were essential for the defence of the USSR in 1941 is just a self-serving myth.
Comment by prianikoff — 21 November, 2009 @ 11:51 am
110
But for this sort of policy to work, it would have required stability in the USSR’s trading relationships with the capitalist countries; wheras in practice Left Oppositionist Christian raokonsky silly “revolutionism” while in France where he was ambassador precipiatated France breaking off trade relations with the USSR. Which was a disaster that contibuted to unemployemt, famine and despair. The Left opposition failed to understand the most basic thing, that the key task of the Soviet government was to protect the livelihoods and future of their citizens, not jeopardise their lives of millions with their inflamatory talk of revolution, which was really an understandingof politics as being a type of warfare.
The practical and beneficial policy promoted by Chicherin was to seperate the diplomatic and state policy of the USSR from the internatinal political links of the CPSU.
So the CPSU could talk to the CPGB about revolution, but Moscow’s ambassador to the Court of St James would only talk government to government, and the USSR would bind itself to keeping its commitments to cpaitalist governments.
This aspect of “socialism in one country” was absoutely indispensible for the sort of trading relationships that the Left Oppositions economic platform envisaged.
So the Left Opposition was promoting an economic polisy out of kilter with their silly idea of committing the weak and beseiged Soviet state to actively exporting revolution.
Comment by Andy Newman — 21 November, 2009 @ 12:07 pm
It collapsed in Russia and it was never more than marginal internationally, esp throughout continental Europe.
The revolution existed on an alliance between the proletariat and POOR peasantry, not the peasantry in total. The kulaks were not the poor peasantry. They grew in influence to the point where they were in the position of being able to hold the pace of industrialisation to ransom by the mid 1920s. When Bukharin encouraged them to ‘enrich themselves’ in 1925 it presaged a dangerous development within the SU in terms of the potential for capitalist restoration.
Trotsky saw the dangers then, Stalin didn’t come round to the same conclusion until three years later.
Comment by John — 21 November, 2009 @ 12:12 pm
Prianikoff:
‘Radek, Kamenev and Zinoviev capitulated because they were more cowardly and less principled than Trotsky.’
You’re clutching with this. Radek, Kamenev and Zinoviev were communists to the marrow of their bones. Trotsky of course stood head and shoulders above them, but it is a truism that Trotsky had no choice other than to hold out by this point, given the threat he posed to Stalin and the bureacuracy which he represented.
The point is, however, that any attempt to place a halo over the head of Trotsky is both apolitical and ahistorical. His record when in power demonstrated a willingness and ability to be every bit as ruthless and brutal as Stalin. It suggests that if he’d emerged from the struggle for power victorious after the death of Lenin there would not have been much to choose between them in terms of method. What would have been certain is that an adventuristic foreign policy would have endangered the gains made after October and placed the revolution in peril.
Comment by John — 21 November, 2009 @ 12:30 pm
#112 - John. The relevant part of Bukharin’s 1925 speech can be read here - I translated it a few years back:
http://www.korolevperevody.co.uk/korolev/obogashchaytes.html
The tragedy was that Bukharin’s sensible approach here did not remain official policy for long. The fear of “capitalist restoration”, and the anti-”kulak” line was one of the most economically damaging aspects of Bolshevik agrarian policy in the 1920s. It makes absolutely no sense to rely on poor peasants. Economically, poor peasants are no use at all. They don’t even produce enough for themselves, let alone to feed the cities. Russia had been suffering from rural overpopulation for some time, and the equalising tendencies of the revolution had meant that the proportion of subsistence peasants had increased massively.
Russia needed marketed grain. The persecution of “kulaks” during the 1920s made the more competent peasants unwilling to invest and expand their production, lest they became “class enemies”. It was much easier just to consume any surplus themselves. Low state grain prices tended to reinforce this. In other words, the grain crisis of the 1920s was largely the result of the Bolsheviks’ own policies and assumptions for most of that decade.
There were two realistic ways out of this impasse. One was to abandon the “class war in the countryside”, encourage peasants to produce as much as they could without persecution. Grain could be acquired through trade and taxation. The other was the one the Stalin group chose - to seize grain. Once that option had been chosen, “collectivisation” with its attendant horrors, and the subsequent stagnation of Soviet agriculture were the inevitable consequences.
Comment by Francis King — 21 November, 2009 @ 1:36 pm
Francis #114
‘One was to abandon the “class war in the countryside”, encourage peasants to produce as much as they could without persecution.’
The problem with this Francis was as I said the danger of the kulaks gaining too much economic influence, which inevitably, if unchecked, would lead to political influence and their emergence as a new capitalist class. This was the fear which drove the Left Opposition initially and then Stalin latterly.
The contradiction of attempting to build socialism from such dire and unfavourable material conditions is reflected in the dilemma facing the govt vis-a-vis the role of the peasantry. I disagree that Bukharin’s solution out of this impasse was the sensible way forward. It simply allowed too much economic power to devolve to the countryside and away from the proletariat. Ultimately, a choice had to be made between the two. What followed was indeed brutal, but perhaps driven by necessity following the brutal logic of the revolution itself.
Comment by John — 21 November, 2009 @ 5:17 pm
Well, this is the question: was the “kulak threat” real or not? So far as I can see there was no such thing as a really rich peasant in the USSR in the 1920s. There were subsistence peasants and peasants who produced a small surplus. The village commune had enjoyed a certain revival after 1917, which meant that in the agrarian sector itself there were mechanisms which operated against the emergence of agrarian capitalism.
But, even assuming that there was a possibility of capitalism emerging in the countryside, surely the introduction of something akin to serfdom, with peasants obliged to work in the kolkhoz fields for merely token remuneration, was not the answer. From a Marxist standpoint, there is little benefit in imposing a pre-capitalist economic structure to avoid the development of capitalism. And if anything was a fetter on the development of productive forces, it was the kolkhoz system.
Comment by Francis King — 21 November, 2009 @ 5:43 pm
JOhn
I agree with francis here. The moderates were seeking a pragmnatic way out of the nightmare, sometimes it is better to retreat and compromise, than to win a Pyrhic victory.
Comment by Andy Newman — 21 November, 2009 @ 6:32 pm
Francis and Andy,
We have to be careful when looking at these events through the prism of historical restrospect. The choice facing Stalin in 1928-29 was one between the well-to-do peasantry or the proletariat. If he’d continued to follow the line of the Right Opposition it would have been at the expense of the proletariat and industrialisation. The decision was made for him by the failure of the peasants to deliver a few million tons of grain to the towns after the harvest in 1928. It wasn’t a concerted move by the peasants, rather it was more a conseuquence of an earlier Bolshevik policy of splitting up the large estates into small holdings during the Civil War, which had the effect of gaining them the support of the peasantry against the Whites, who supported the landlords. The effect in terms of agricultural production was a deleterious one, which reached the point of critical mass by the late 1920s. The large farmers that were still left demanded a high price for food in line with the law of supply and demand. This placed a burden on the towns that was intolerable. It left the govt having to confront a serious dilemma, esp as it had no money with which to import the food required.
The extent of the crisis facing the govt at the time should not be underestimated.
Comment by John — 21 November, 2009 @ 6:53 pm
In the last years of Tsarism, attempts were made by the authorities to develop a class of relatively prosperous peasants who would become a factor favouring the established order. These reforms are particularly associated with Prime Minister Stolypin, but they survived his assassination in 1911. WW1 derailed them, however.
The idea of well-off peasants as potentially counter-revolutionary probably rested on memories of this.
Comment by Mark Victorystooge — 21 November, 2009 @ 9:13 pm
“The revolution existed on an alliance between the proletariat and POOR peasantry, not the peasantry in total.”
In 1917, the Bolsheviks made an alliance with the *whole of the peasantry* by adopting the land programme of the SR’s.
Consequently, they gained an absolute majority in the Soviets.
Completing the Democratic Revolution required that the Workers take power.
After which, the land was nationalised, but divided unequally by peasant land seizures.
Class differentiation in the countryside widened after NEP.
The question was how to navigate from there to a developed socialist system without driving the peasants into support for reaction.
The Opposition differed fundamentally from the Stalinists on this question.
But you continually obscure this, and deny the existence of a bureaucratic counter-revolution.
Just as you obscure Trotsky’s continual calls inner-party democracy from 1923.
Your arguments are a mixture of academic liberalism and Stalinist apologetics.
Comment by prianikoff — 22 November, 2009 @ 10:40 am
Karl, this article accurately predicted the events in Chile and the role of the CP.
Chile - the threatening catastrophe 1971
Comment by prianikoff — 22 November, 2009 @ 10:42 am
Anyroad up, if you want Trot paraphernalia, buy it from Trots
Comment by KrisS — 22 November, 2009 @ 11:03 am
This really is pathetic and dishonest, written without reference to the civil war, the difference between Stalinism and international socialism, and no analysis of what the Kronstadt uprising actually was. But why should we expect anything else from andy Newman?
Comment by Keith Watermelon — 22 November, 2009 @ 11:09 am
#120 - The revolution did not end in 1917. Thereafter followed a brutal civil war and the intervention of foreign troops. In order to ensure the support of the peasantry and break the power of the large farms and estates, the Bolsheviks split them up into small holdings and distributed them among the poor and middle peasants.
It was this policy, driven by necessity under the exigencies of the civil war, which led to the drop in agricultural production which readed a nadir in 1928.
Trotsky advocated a slow phasing out of the influence of kulaks via taxation in order to ensure the supply of food to the towns, which would then result in a higher industrial output and lower prices for industrial goods for the rural areas. However, it is dsiputatious as to whether this policy would have worked. It relied on the connection between private agriculural production and state owned industry leading to a process of economic and political osmosis whereby the kulaks would be won to socialism. What we do know is that if Trotsky’s gradualist policy hadn’t worked he would have had to resort to the brutal methods of Stalin. The only other option was the policy of the right opposition, allowing the kulaks more and more economic influence, which, as Trotsky said himself, posed the danger of the kulaks and well-to-do peasantry forging a connection with international capitalism instead of with the towns.
The point is that Stalin was certainly guilty of extreme measures. But so was Trotsky. Attempting to suggest otherwise, or to sugar coat Trotsky’s record in order to support a thesis of saint v sinner in relation to both is what I would describe as ‘liberal academism.’
You can’t have a revolution without a revolution. Stalin and his legacy, whether you like it or not, is a product of Bolshevism. As Trotsky himself said: ‘Lenin created the apparatus. The apparatus created Stalin.’
Comment by John — 22 November, 2009 @ 12:39 pm
“The point is that Stalin was certainly guilty of extreme measures. But so was Trotsky.
Attempting to suggest otherwise, or to sugar coat Trotsky’s record in order to support a thesis of saint v sinner in relation to both is what I would describe as ‘liberal academism.’
Evidently you can’t tell the difference between revolution and counter-revolution.
In the first 6 months after the Revolution there was freedom for almost all the parties, freedom of the press, abolition of capital punishment and the army was demobilising.
Only in April-May 1918 did the counter revolutionaries begin to organise a series of armed revolts.
This forced the Bolshevik government to adopt harsh counter measures, or face being overthrown.
During the Civil War, industrial production plummeted.
Famine, peasant revolt and armed imperialist intervention threatened the existence of the USSR.
This was the background to “War Communism” and the extreme measures you refer to.
An entirely different situation to 1928-1937.
Had Trotsky sought to become the ‘Bonaparte of the Russian Revolution’, he could have used his position in the Red Army to do so.
During the dispute over the use of Military Experts, Stalin and Voroshilov’s “Military Opposition” were disobeying orders from the Red Army High Command.
Trotsky could have had them court-martialled over this, but it might have led to a fratricidal split in the Party.
Something the Opposition later scrupulously tried to prevent.
By contrast, Stalin when in power, broke the unity of the Bolshevik party by expelling Oppositionists who refused to capitulate in 1927.
The execution of the Chekist Jakob Blyumkin, for meeting Trotsky and smuggling back a letter from Prinkipo, introduced internal Civil War into the party for the first time.
Stalin went on to elminated almost every other member of the Bolshevik Central Committee of 1917 and then decimated the leadership of the Red Army.
Rather than this being a “product of Bolshevism”, it was a violent break with it.
A reflection of the social forces which had distorted and de-proletarianised the Party in the ensuing period.
Such a break was necessary for the Stalinists in order to implement their reactionary theory of “Socialism in One Country”
A theorisation that rationalised the international retreat and then fed further defeats prior to the outbreak World War Two.
In short, a river of blood separated Stalinism from Bolshevism.
“We must not build socialism by the bureaucratic road, we must not create a socialist society by administrative orders; only by way of the greatest initiative, individual activity, persistence and resilience of the opinion of the many-millioned masses, who sense and know that the matter is their own concern … socialist construction of possible only through the growth of genuine revolutionary democracy.”
quoted in “The Marxism of Leon Trotsky” By Kunal Chattopadhyay
Kolkata: Progress Publishers, 2006.
Comment by prianikoff — 23 November, 2009 @ 5:19 pm
A couple of Kadet deputies, one a former Provisional Government minister, were killed in their hospital beds in January 1918 by an armed group, at least some of whom seem to have been Red Guards. The Bolsheviks denied responsibility but never tried to bring the killers to justice. Killings that resembled lynching were fairly widespread in the first months of Bolshevik rule and predated the establishment of the Cheka.
Comment by Mark Victorystooge — 24 November, 2009 @ 2:01 pm
talking of the fourth. Chavez called for the creation of a Fifth International this week. Surely a topic worthy of discussion i’d have thought?http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4946
Comment by Gavin — 24 November, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
Maybe next year, a Sixth?
Comment by Mark Victorystooge — 24 November, 2009 @ 2:26 pm
Has Chavez joined Workers Power?
Comment by 'spotter — 24 November, 2009 @ 2:45 pm
Trying reading Zizek introduction to Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism on Verso. For a better perspective of LT.
Comment by Raphie — 24 November, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
#130
which says what? Do you care to share wioth us? Or are you just showing off your knoweldge of fashionable academics.
Comment by Andy Newman — 24 November, 2009 @ 7:35 pm
#130 - I think Zizek is way overrated as a Marxist academic. I tried reading his postscript to Verso’s ‘Revolution At The Gates’ - an otherwise excellent collection of Lenin’s speeches and articles in the run up to October - and found it woeful, full of abstract nonsense.
Verso seem to have a love affair with the guy. Beats me why.
Comment by John — 24 November, 2009 @ 7:54 pm