Report on week 4 of Solidarity’s Problems of Socialist Organization reading group
Ivan DZ
While the first three classes in Solidarity’s “organization” reading group were not unqualified celebrations of socialist victory, this was the first one that focused on the challenges, failures, setbacks, and defeats suffered by socialists since the Paris Commune. Titled, “Consequences of the rise of a Soviet bureaucracy in Russia and Spain,” the readings and presentations presented a dire portrait of the degeneration of Soviet politics in the 1920s and 30s.
Suzi Weissman, biographer of the iconoclastic anarchist and Bolshevik thinker Victor Serge, opened the discussion with a presentation about, in her words, “the defeats of the revolutionary project.” You can watch the video of Suzi’s presentation here and listen to the recording here.
Revolutionary defeat
Suzi Weissman’s presentation was based largely on Victor Serge’s narration of the rise of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union during and after the civil war, but she transcended his writing to give a total overview. The centerpoint of this historical discussion was the purges that Stalin’s regime carried out –– first against the “old Bolsheviks” and then within and against the working class.
Suzi said her overall argument was that “the purges were not an aberration or an excess alone. They were a manifestation of a new system that was based on the power of the bureaucracy, an anti-socialist and anti human society.” Rather than seeing Stalin’s industrial programme as a “revolution from above,” as some have framed it, she said it’s more true to understand it “as a counterrevolution – made possible through the repression of the revolutionary generation.”
To consolidate itself, the regime had to wipe out threats, “real and imagined.” And in the process, “the Bolshevik party was killed.” She means that, literally and directly, physically, the counter revolution massacred members of the Bolshevik party, and also that the principles and politics that constituted the Bolsheviks as a force of communist futures were systematically snuffed out.
This process followed from our prior discussion about the first months of the October revolution. The feeling in the discussion was that what distinguished the Bolsheviks from other parties, and what made the revolution possible, was the sensitive, dialectical relationship between the whole people and the party. And, for our discussion about problems of socialist organization overall, this was the essential lesson: that a revolutionary party is a constituent part of the social revolution, not something that exists independent of the revolutionary self activity of the working class.
That’s not to say that the Bolsheviks were populist, in the sense that we tend to understand populism today as a pandering tailism of the predominant mood of the class or people. What we saw consistently in Lenin’s thinking especially was an assessment of concrete class forces at a particular historical juncture, to ask not only what was possible, but what the real, demystified forces were that underlay appearances, including the appearances of common sense opinion. So, when there was an upswing of support for Russia in the inter-imperialist war, Lenin continued to hold communist ground and argue an internationalist position that he called “revolutionary defeatism,” regardless of what the moods were of the masses at that particular moment.
And after taking state power this meant, in some cases, like with the Party’s overreaction to the Kronstadt sailors’ uprising, adopting the use of force against the people as a determining method of leadership. As Eric pointed out in discussion: Serge said that those workers and soldiers who went to repress the Kronstadt uprising all knew that the sailors were right. They wanted to have secret elections to Soviets. What’s so objectionable about that? From Serge’s account, and Suzi’s history, it’s apparent that something began to shift when the Party began to lie to the people to justify the use of force to maintain state power.
Suzi explained that, once the political turn from international revolution to building “socialism in one country” was concluded, the use of force, and terror, became the axis of Stalinist statecraft. This had a material, productive logic because the resources for development –– and the territories once ruled by the Tsar had a terrible problem of underdevelopment — then had to be drawn only from within, “which meant the peasants or workers had to be squeezed.” And “terror was the mechanism for this squeeze.”
But the premise that all of the USSR could be developed under these conditions was also fantastical, so a contradiction was born inside Stalinist developmentalism. Suzi explained: The state implemented strict rules to increase productivity and limit absenteeism. Workers responded with maneuvers of resistance, and managers then increased pressure on them. The result was that everyone lied in order to meet production quotas on paper and not get shot.
On one hand, it was necessary to claim and project massive developmental progress. But on the other, these targets, set from above, were often radically unrealizable. Stalin sought out and found “wreckers,” sabateurs, to blame for these shortfalls, and after executing them, the pressure brought to bear on the system generated a powerful impetus to lie: to fabricate production results, to produce quantity in abeyance of quality. The productive logic of Stalinism was a stagnation of real development.
This, Suzi argued, was the material basis for Stalinist terror. Stalin found the revolutionary generation of Bolsheviks to be poor material for the period of development by terror. And then he found the Soviet working class to be poor material for the realization of his five year plans.
Political control over people in the society was accomplished, but control over the economic conditions and production was not accomplished. The purges destroyed the old guard, creating a vacuum at the top with plenty of room for social mobility for new bureaucrats trained in lying about and squeezing production. The system that Stalin created was not socialism, it was forced production, governed by fear. Suzi argued, “Stalinism was not a distortion of socialism but its negation.”
State, party, politics
In our discussion, we were interested in better understanding the reasons that Stalinist terror became so extreme. Cynthia said all revolutions have the problem of what to do with their opponents: exile them, jail them… But the paths embraced under Stalinism were extreme. Why, she asked, did killing take such a central role and at such an extreme scale in the practice of the authoritarian bureaucracy?
One problem, Suzi answered, was that “it simply wasn’t possible” for the USSR to develop its productive forces in a better way. “They could not find support from new revolutions elsewhere. They faced impossible demands by underdevelopment,” she said. So all Bolsheviks, by the time of the civil war, were embracing some form of state force. The furthest Trotsky went, she said, was to not allow opposing currents in the society at large, but to maintain the right to have factions in the Party. But Stalin’s personality was suited to a totally force-based system of production. Suzi explained that when everyone was having discussions about what do to about the New Economic Policy (NEP), the reintroduction of market forces to deal with problems of famine, Stalin was known as comrade index card. He was busy building a database about party members.
While it’s an exaggeration to claim that the seeds of Stalinist abuses were sprouted in Lenin’s party, the idea that the party could use force to settle contradictions did not originate with Stalin. Kronstadt was one example of this logic being active during the pre-Stalinist years of the revolution. But an even better example might be the trade union debate of 1919. We had readings about this from CLR James and also Barbara Allen’s edited collection of documents from the workers’ opposition.
In the trade union debate, Trotsky argued for unions to be absorbed into the state, because it was a worker’s state after all. But Lenin argued that unions must remain independent of the state, in order to correct against capitalist logic inherent to the state, and the pragmatic excesses that might develop out of the state, which represented society as a whole, not only workers.
What I thought was energizing about Lenin’s view of the trade unions is that he saw their independence as necessary for workers to have an autonomous form of expression –– in order to ensure that the party and state, which claim to represent them, do not speak over them. I think he was right to be worried, and that in fact the relative autonomy of the state proved to be a grave danger to the revolution.
But Lenin did not go so far as to call for the unions to also be independent of the Bolshevik party and, interestingly, neither did the Workers’ Opposition. In theory, the Bolshevik party and the state were separate and operated under separate authority. But in practice, the daylight between the party and state was narrowing fast through these exact years.
In the period of the civil war, we see the party, Soviets, unions, and other social institutions and organizational forms, and, indeed, politics as a total field (which I think is well illustrated by Serge’s anecdote about fraudulent newspaper coverage of the Kronstadt uprising) collapsing into the state. And with this coalescence, the fields of independent political life were foreclosed.
It’s not that Stalinism was the sprouted seed of Bolshevism, because, as Suzi said, Stalinism was a counterrevolution that killed the Bolsheviks. But the state’s growing monopoly over politics provided fertile grounds for that politics to be reduced down to a logic, primarily, of force, when such a logic spread by historical occasion.
Conclusion
Suzi did not end the discussion with an optimistic conclusion, other than to say, with relief, that the Stalinist system is over. But she did offer useful lessons about the political function of democracy within a socialist mode of production.
“Democracy is critical because you can force workers to produce fast but you can’t force them to produce well,” she said. Her parting words? “Socialism without democracy is not socialism.”
One thing we did not elaborate in this far ranging discussion was that, whatever the brutal power of the bureaucracy, workers and oppressed people continue to fight back. That theme, we’ll pick up through the next class, “The Maoist party as protagonist,” on Thursday January 15th, 5pm ET. The opening presenter will be Rebecca Karl, author of China’s Revolutions in the Modern World. Find the readings here and register here, if you haven’t already.
Also, continuing the theme of the development of Stalinism, Solidarity is co-hosting a book talk and discussion with Andy Durgan, author of The POUM: Republic, Revolution, and CounterRevolution. This event is not part of this reading series, but is consistent with the topic and could be considered an appendix to these discussions, so we encourage you to attend.
The POUM event will be on Sunday January 25th at 1pm ET, on Zoom. Find more information and register here: https://solidarity-us.org/the-poum-in-the-spanish-civil-war/