The Russian October Revolution of 1917 remains a brilliant inspiration of us It showed that workers could overthrow the capitalist class. Only the isolation and decimation of the Russian working class destroyed their revolutionary vision of 1917. What was set up in Russia in the 1920's and after was not communism but centrally planned state capitalism. There have as yet been no communist societies anywhere in the world.

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Nous publions ce texte (Pour le moment en anglais) du Communist Workers’Organisation, section britannique du Bureau International pour le Parti Révolutionnaire alors que certains donnent des notes de 60% au boucher de la classe ouvrière Staline.

SWP and
Stalinism —
A Tangled Web

The collapse of the Soviet Empire
heralded political crisis for those
Stalinists and Trotskyists groups who
applauded the Moscow regime and saw
it in varying degrees as “non-capitalist�?
or even “post-capitalist�?. These groups
are faced with the problem of
explaining how a “workers’ state�?, is
able to transform itself into a
“bourgeois state�? by a series of reforms
imposed by the political leadership,
without any resistance from the
working class. How can socialism be
transformed to capitalism without any
significant class struggle? No serious
explanation of the Soviet collapse
which is remotely compatible with
Marxism has been presented by these
groups. The question can be reduced
to the following alternatives; either the
Soviet Union was not a “workers state�?
and was not socialist, or Marxist theory
is incorrect. Despite all their squirming
the Trotskyist and Stalinist groupings
cannot avoid this dilemma. For the
Italian left communist tradition the
system of production which arose on
the ashes of the October revolution was
one of “State Capitalism.�? This is the
key to understanding the history of the
20th century. Russian state capitalism
necessarily produced Russian imperialism
and the defeat of Russian imperialism
by its US rival led to the reform of the
system of state capitalism to the
present arrangement. There is thus no
conflict with the theory of Marxism.

The crisis, caused by the Soviet Union’s
collapse, manifested itself in hundreds of
variants with some organisations simply
maintaining their systems of labelling
and preserving their precious memories
of their dear Stalinist states that had sadly
departed this world. We have in the past
commented on organisations like the
Alliance for Workers Liberty who suddenly discovered
how wrong they and their fellow
Trotskyists had been for some four
decades and instead decided that the
Stalinists had really been a new class,
dynamic enough to take over significant
parts of the world and then disappearing as
mysteriously as they arrived. Others
searched for hope in the remaining
bastions of Stalinism – the Castro fan-club
centred on the Socialist Workers
Party of USA being a somewhat grotesque example. Others,
such as the Sparticist tendency blamed
the later generation of Gorbachevite
Stalinists for having abandoned what
they bizarrely claimed to be part of the
“gains of October�? – such as the
Russian occupation of Afghanistan and
the Berlin Wall.

The list of attempted explanations was
endless as was the list of collapsed
organisations. For the organisations
which survived to provide capitalism
with its left wing one major conundrum
remains. All those organisations
remain committed to solutions which
mean passing off state capitalist
remedies as socialism. The advocacy
of nationalisation and state intervention
remains the cornerstone of the illusions
which they peddle.

What cannot be escaped is that a
political vision of the state apparatus
defending and developing its national
industry is no different to capitalist
systems which existed throughout the
last 100 years. They existed in the
advanced capitalism of Western
Europe throughout the post-war
reconstruction. Most uncomfortably
for the leftists the same system existed
in a particularly grotesque form in
the Stalinist states. The degree to
which the overt state function became
interlinked with the “economic�?
dynamics of capitalism varied only in
degree and, in some respects, in
appearance between Stalinist, fascist
and democratic states.

Those parallels between the form of
capitalism which existed in Russia
from the 1920’s onwards and in the rest
of the world poses an ever-recurring
problem for the leftists. Each time they
turn to their recipes for state
intervention they, either consciously or
unconsciously, hark back to the
statification which was most complete
in Russia after the political heritage of
1917 had been left isolated and
transformed into its own negation.

A particularly unpleasant response to
this conundrum appeared in the
Socialist Worker of 14th September.
The article serves as a useful
illustration for those who wish to
understand the politics and practice of
the Socialist Workers Party – the
biggest force of the British capitalist
left and the main mover behind the
Stop the War Coalition.

The Socialist Workers’
Party school of
falsification

The article, written by one Charlie
Kimber, is headlined as “A counter to
Martin Amis’s new book�?.

The book “Koba the Dread�? may well
be worth countering but Amis does not
pose as an advocate of revolutionary
socialism. Kimber, on the other hand,
poses as precisely that but produces an
article which exposes the left fully
trapped in falsification and
contradiction.

Kimber’s method is to rewrite history
to exonerate Trotsky as an individual
and vilify Stalin, albeit with some
bizarre and sickening quirks which
we’ll return to later.

The key to Kimber’s rewriting of
history is contained in his throwaway
reference to “1928-9, the year when
Stalin consolidated his rule�?. Kimber’s
choice of the start of the First Five Year
Plan is not accidental. The date is
chosen because it coincides with
Trotsky being exiled and losing all
prospect of winning the faction fights
within the Russian state bureaucracy,
in reality a re-emerging national
bourgeoisie, which had already
eradicated all remnants of working-
class political control.

The critical airbrushing of history
which Kimber repeats is to demonise
Stalin by identifying the repressive
state capitalist regime with him and his
followers. They blithely ignore the role
Trotsky and his followers played as a
“loyal opposition�? (temporarily even
allied with Zinoviev) desperately trying
to win the faction fight within the
Soviet bureaucracy long after the life-
blood had been drained from the
Soviets and any vestige of working-
class power had disappeared.

In trying to exonerate their mentor
Kimber and company actually outdo
“the old man�? himself in avoidance of
responsibility. Trotsky acknowledged
that the process of overturning
proletarian power (although he only
ever accepted that power had been lost
politically but, bizarrely, not
economically) had been completed
several years before 1928. Indeed, in an
unguarded paragraph he wrote in 1935
that “The Thermidor [a confusing
attempt to draw a parallel with the loss of
revolutionary v i g o u r following the
F r e n c h Revolution] of the Great
Rus s i a n Revolution is not before us
but very far behind. The Thermidoreans
can celebrate, approximately, the tenth
anniversary of their victory.�?
As we outline in our pamphlet
“Trotsky, Trotskyism and Trotskyists�?
the paragraph was written as a belated
admission that other non-Trotskyist
oppositionists inside Russia such as the
“Democratic Centralists�? had
understood the implications of
proletarian power being lost for years
while Trotsky and his followers
continued to operate as a faction within
the bureaucracy.

In fact the adoption of the Five Year
Plan by the Soviet state capitalists
caused great confusion amongst many
of Trotsky’s followers (e.g.
Preobrazhensky) at the time. The
leading faction around Stalin, did
indeed consolidate its rule by breaking
its alliance with the faction around
Bukharin and adopting policies based
on increasing the pace of
industrialisation .... a cornerstone of
the policies of the Trotskyist Left
Opposition. To complete their theft of
the Trotskyists’ clothes the ruling
faction also adopted heavy doses of
bogus “revolutionary�? rhetoric
....under the false premise of a new
revolutionary upsurge, the “Third
period�?.

In that way Kimber’s potted history
incorporates the falsifications shared
by all the Trotskyists but he also, rather
touchingly, shows his commitment to
the SWP’s political inspiration, Tony
Cliff. Kimber provides a neat list of
“Marxists such as Trotsky, Boris
Souvraine, Victor Serge, CLR James
and Tony Cliff [who] denounced Stalin
when he was tolerated or feted by much
of conventional opinion�?.

Critical Trotskyists such as Shachtman
are airbrushed out because he broke
with official Trotskyism in 1940 in
protest at its continuing devotion to the
Soviet state. In contrast Tony Cliff
stayed with official Trotskyism for a
further 10 years. During that period
Trotskyism (including Cliff) supported
the Soviet Union (already clearly state
capitalist according to Cliff’s later
system) during the Second World War,
and then baptised the Soviet empire in
Eastern Europe as “deformed workers’
states�?.

However the great Kimber project has
to repaint the history of the real
opposition to the emerging Russian
state bourgeoisie because otherwise he
would have to acknowledge that
Communists were fighting that struggle
while Trotsky tried to keep his place
in the Party faction fight. In the article
already quoted there is a glimpse of that
opposition when Trotsky recalls “in
1926 ... the group of ‘Democratic
Centralism’ (V.M. Smirnov, Sapronov
and others who were hounded to
in exile by Stalin) declared, ‘Thermidor
is an accomplished fact!’ �?. Another
unacknowledged resistance is that of
the emerging Italian Communist left –
Bordiga’s resistance to the Stalinist
faction at a Comintern meeting in 1926
further helps destroy the myth that the
Trotskyists were the first, or only,
coherent opposition in World Communism.

Stalin –
the Socialist Workers’
Party’s more favoured
Butcher

If Kimber (or his editors) had stopped
with the standard Trotskyist distortion
of history the article could just have
taken its place alongside thousands of
other similar pieces. In reality, the
article manages to plumb new depths
in its final section when the SWP
decides to persuade its readers that
Stalin was an altogether nicer chap than
Hitler.

The article finally loses any claim to
anti-Stalinism as it collapses in its own
contradictions when responding to “
times in the book when Amis equates
Stalin with Hitler�?. Under the pressure
of its ingrained anti-Marxist positions
the SWP draws out the conclusions of
its anti-fascism and its homage to the
power of a state-run economy. For the
SWP “there were still important differences
between them [Stalin and Hitler]�?.

Kimber really should have added “Well, that’s
alright then�? after each of the following absurd
assertions and irrelevancies as he
compares Stalinist Russia favourably to
fascist Germany.

“Stalin carried through in a couple of decades
what had taken 300 years to achieve in
Britain. The result was a death toll enormously concentrated in time.�?

“The death toll in the [Stalinist] labour camps
was probably much lower than that of the
Atlantic slave trade, but took place over 25
years, not 250 years.�?
“The death toll through famine Ukraine
and Kazakhstan was certainly lower
than the famines that resulted from the
British pillage of Ireland and India.�?
[Italicised in the original for no
apparent reason – possibly to mark it
out as the SWP’s entry for the Beria
prize for apologias for Stalinism].

“Stalin’s barbarism against the
minorities was not genocide in the Nazi
sense of the killing of a whole people
because of their alleged ethnic characteristics.
“.... The people who looked to Stalin,
however misguidedly, wanted an end
to Hitler’s barbarity.�?

Bizarrely, but in full consonance with
their politics, the SWP present their
article as countering Amis’s argument
“that the reality of Stalin’s crimes has
been largely ignored, especially by the
left�? and by the end of the article they
are arguing that Stalin’s crimes were
broadly on a par with British
imperialism, but not nearly as bad as a
short period in the history of German
imperialism.

KT

For those who managed to read the
article and turned to the page opposite,
the SWP provided their own
unintentional irony. Having
commented that “Under Stalin Russia
was a state capitalist society where the
bureaucracy acted in accordance with
the same dynamic of accumulation as
the private owners of Western capital�?
the opposite page carried a photo of
the comedian Mark Steel carrying a
placard for the SWP-supported
Socialist Alliance.

Steel’s placard simply reads “Defend
Rover jobs ... Nationalise NOW�?. Oh,
what a tangled web ...

Note

1 Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934-35],
2nd Edition(1974), Pathfinder Press,
page 182.

Groupe Internationaliste Ouvrier, section canadienne du Bureau International pour le Parti Révolutionnaire/Internationalist Workers'Group, Canadian affiliate of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party

can...@ibrg.org

www.ibrp.org