by Abbie Bakan
Many people today are interested in a revolutionary alternative to the capitalist market. But they often associate socialism with the brutality of Stalinism, a system that was no better than capitalism.
In fact, when Russia was dominated by the rule of Joseph Stalin and his followers, it was a system that had nothing to do with socialism or the Marxist alternative.
Stalin died in 1953, and the USSR collapsed in 1991. Today, Stalinism has far less influence on the international left than at any time in history. But like a ghost, the legacy of Stalinism still haunts the revolutionary left in Canada and internationally.
What then do we mean by "Stalinism"?
Why did a system so far away from any commitment to freedom and liberation claim a place in the Marxist tradition?
There was nothing inevitable about the rise of Stalinism after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Stalin's political power was based on specific historical circumstances.
It was not a continuation of the revolution, but the product of a counter-revolution against all the gains of the Russian workers' state.
Stalin led the Bolshevik Party, and ruled Russia in the name of socialism. But by 1929 when Stalin's grip was secured, the Russian state no longer expressed the interests of the working class, inside Russian borders or internationally.
Instead, under Stalin the state played the historic role of a new capitalist class, a bureaucratic state capitalist ruling class.
state capitalist
This was true in economics. The Stalinist bureaucracy was a class driven by the goal of capital accumulation.
And it was also true in politics. Russian revolutionary socialists who opposed Stalin were viciously repressed.
All of the old Bolsheviks, most importantly Leon Trotsky, who fought to preserve the real socialist tradition were literally tortured, silenced or killed.
In the late 1920s and 1930s, Communist Parties around the world under Stalin's direction -- in China, in Germany, in Spain -- tragically betrayed the revolutionary prospects for workers' power.
None of this was the inevitable outcome of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
At that time, the old Tsarist state was eliminated in the revolution and defeated in the Civil War that followed.
The private landlords and the private industrial capitalist class were completely turned over by a mass popular government led by workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils.
These councils, called in the Russian language "soviets," were the kernel of a new state.
Through the soviet councils workers could manage society in their class interests, and begin the task of the construction of socialism.
Rather than producing for profit, production was for the purpose of satisfying to human needs.
Soviet delegates were elected on the basis of representation of the majority of the council.
They received no more than the highest wage of any council member, and they were subject to recall at any point by majority decision.
Russia, despite poverty and hardship, was a young workers' state under the early Bolsheviks. But by the 1930s it was no longer a workers' state in any form, but a state capitalist one.
Tony Cliff, a Marxist theoretician and the founder of the International Socialist tendency, developed this analysis in detail. The decisive shift toward the profit motive in the Russian state can be identified in the year 1929.
It was in this year that the first "five year plan" was presented. Now the Russian bureaucracy began consciously to move on its own as a class, a new state capitalist ruling class.
In the towns, workers were denied the right to strike, and trade unions lost any independence from the state. Instead, they became enforcers of production quotas to further state accumulation.
The bureaucracy under Stalin, and for the sixty years following 1929 -- even after Stalin's death in 1953 -- until the collapse of the Russian state in 1989, was a class whose prime interest was capital accumulation.
Unlike western capitalism at that time, property was entirely nationalized.
The economy was "planned" in a certain way. But despite the five year plans, each production target was actually set in reaction to the competition of the military arms race.
The arms market was, and remains, no less capitalist than any other market.
competition
Military expansion was absolutely central to the Stalinist project.
There was no "bourgeoisie" in the sense of a class of private capitalists. But it was capitalism nonetheless.
Rather than an internal market, the market was global.
Russia, then a poor Euro-Asian economy, embarked on a massive, unprecedented strategy of accumulation. This meant massive exploitation of the workers.
The rate of exploitation, the rate of surplus extraction, was determined by competing gun for gun, bullet for bullet, bomb for bomb, with the largest capitalist power in the world at the time, the US.
It was this global military competition between the US in the west, and the USSR in the east, that set the background to the long years of Cold War.
They competed for profits, global strategic influence, markets, labour, and resources.
And they competed for the most destructive nuclear and conventional military technology known to humanity.
Russia has now abandoned Stalinism, and with it any false claim to the Marxist tradition. But the embrace of western market-style capitalism in Russia today has proven to be no solution to the crisis.
Once again, the lessons of the real Marxist tradition, of the early history of the Russian revolution, need to be remembered.
Socialists have an even greater responsibility to fight for a new world today, building upon that tradition, than ever before.