Letter: Soviets and Socialists (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Soviets and Socialists

I thought that the article in your December issue on the International Socialists made a lot of good points. But one point I am not yet convinced about is your preference for Parliament as a means for the Socialist working class to take power over and transform society.

Parliaments as institutions don’t seem to me to suit the practical work of delegates, under the direct control of their constituents and recallable by them. Parliament is geared to the deliberations of so-called representatives, controlled not by their constituents but by rival Party bureaucracies who make all important decisions behind the scenes.

“Soviet” is only a Russian word for “council”. If by Soviet we genuinely mean a council of direct delegates, then surely this would be a better way of establishing a society in which we all take an active rôle in social affairs. If they were based on workplaces of all kinds, educational institutions, neighbourhoods and so on, they could easily be made as universal and democratic as you think Parliament is. Of course, you could convert Parliament and other State bodies into the form of workers’ councils, or you could develop the councils independently in the course of the struggle, or maybe some of both — I don’t think that is the crucial point.

The Soviets which existed in 1917 were not real Soviets in the direct democratic sense, but often little parliaments in which different supposedly Socialist parties — Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs and so on — competed for power. The Party leaders took the decisions, like in present-day Britain, not the workers. Otherwise how could Lenin and Trotsky have taken part in the Soviets — as delegates of fringe journalism? Lastly the Soviets were not a Bolshevik tactic, but a form of organization that Russian workers set up to cater to their needs. The Bolsheviks manipulated them (because the workers were not conscious enough to prevent them, and not because Soviets are particularly fishy organizations) and then suppressed them into tools of their Party dictatorship.

As far as State power is concerned, both your idea of capturing and using it, and the Bolshevik or anarchist idea of “smashing” it, seem to assume that the armed forces are things which must be seized or destroyed. But isn’t State power not a thing, but a form of social behaviour by which we all allow ourselves to be things, the blind tools of others? Surely conscious organized Socialists won’t allow themselves to be used against the revolution — in the armed forces (if they still exist) or in the industries and services which support the forces? State power would fade away.

By the way, do members of the SPGB have views on this or other subjects (Women’s Lib. etc.) which are different from the Party line — or have members differed on interesting issues in the recent past? If so, do they have the right to express minority views, clearly labelled as such, in the Socialist Standard? It would improve your journal still more if the ideas were sometimes discussed from more than one point of view. Otherwise some readers may gain the false impression that Socialists are all identical in their attitudes, without variety.

Cicely Joyce 

London N.10

Reply:

The capitalist class have economic power because they have political power and not the other way round. They control the state machine and the armed forces through Parliament and are confirmed in their control by the working class at election times.

We are organized as a political party not out of preference (which implies that there are other ways of achieving our object) but because all the evidence of history and an analysis of capitalist society shows that this is the only way to achieve working-class emancipation. Without first gaining control of the state (the public organ of coercion and repression) through which the capitalists maintain their privileged relationship to the means of life by keeping the working class in its propertyless position, any minority movement seeking to challenge them will inevitably be beaten by the armed forces and the police who remain under the control of the capitalist class.

It does not follow that because Parliament is at present an institution of so-called “representatives” it must necessarily remain so. Once a working class who know what they want and how to get it send their delegates to Parliament with a mandate to capture political control of the state machine, it will cease to function as an instrument of class rule and become the indispensable instrument for our emancipation.

Soviets cannot establish Socialism

1. because they are economic organizations and not political; and
2. because they are based on the workplace, not on the centre of political power (See Gilmac’s articles in the Socialist Standard for January and February, and Horatio’s article in the October Socialist Standard.)

Before an electoral demonstration of a Socialist majority, Socialist ideas will have penetrated all strata of society — including central and local government, the police and the armed forces and this would strengthen the growing demand for Socialism.

However, control of the state machine is necessary

1. to lop off its repressive features; and in order:
2. to prevent any possibility of their being used in desperate attempts by counter-revolutionary groups to frustrate the wishes of the majority.

Armed forces will continue as long as capitalism because capitalism needs them. The capitalist class won't simply give up armed forces in the face of opposition. That is, they will still exist until consciously done away with.

On your final point we must point out that membership of the SPGB is dependent on acceptance of our aims and object set out in our Declaration of Principles. No-one is forced to join or prevented from leaving through disagreement. What for example would be the point of an advocate of minority action attempting to join the SPGB, other than possibly to be disruptive? Such a person is at liberty to join organizations which advocate his or her views. Party members finding themselves in disagreement with the Declaration of Principles invariably leave the Party — what would be the point in remaining in an organization dedicated to a method and object with which you disagree?

New situations faced by the SPGB have to be thrashed out, e.g. the Russian revolution of 1917, the rise of CND etc. The Socialist Standard is under the control of the whole of the membership and must reflect the democratically arrived-at Party case. The Socialist Standard does not exist to propagate anti-Socialist views — these are to be found in abundance elsewhere.

Editors.

The Socialist Forum: The Programme of the Russian Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. (1932)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

A reader at St. John, New Brunswick, asks the following questions :—

What was the programme, or principles, in brief, of the Mensheviks and the Left Social Revolutionaries, now under a ban in Russia? Have these extinct organisations much in common with the S.P.G.B. ?

Yours, etc., M. Wasson.

Reply.

In order to make our comments on these Russian organisations understandable we must first give some facts about them. The “Russian Social Democratic Party,” which later split into two separate bodies, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, was formed in 1898. Its aim was declared to be Socialism. Its energies were largely taken up with problems of organisation, with the struggle for immediate demands (such as the right to organise in trade unions, the shorter working day) and with resisting the efforts of the Czarist Government to suppress its propaganda. From the first there were two wings in the Party, and in 1903 at the Party Congress at Geneva a split developed. The following statement concerning the split is taken from “The Labour International Handbook,” published in May, 1921, by the Labour Publishing Co., Ltd., London. The Editor, R. Palme Dutt, is a well-known Communist.

“It is important to note that there was no disagreement on the programme, which was adopted unanimously. The difference was one of tactics, and concerned (1) the importance to be attached to illegal work; and as the difference developed (2) the question of co-operating with bourgeois parties of the left.” (P. 286.)

A Unity Congress was held in 1906, but the two sections continued to keep their separate organisations and journals. In 1912 they ran candidates against one another in the elections for the Fourth Duma (“Handbook,” p. 287).

Both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks claim (and still claim) to be Marxists.

The “Socialist Revolutionary Party, ” formed in 1901 did not claim to accept Marxist principles. They advocated and practised political association, which both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks condemned.

“In their social theory they looked above all to the peasants and the development of agricultural communes with a large local autonomy” (“Handbook,” p. 288.)

The “Socialist Revolutionary Party,” with a predominantly peasant membership, was much larger than the other parties, whose members were chiefly in the towns. The Mensheviks were less numerous than the Bolsheviks.

The “Left Socialist Revolutionaries” were a wing led by Spiridonova and Kamkov, who gave general support to the Bolsheviks in their seizure of power in 1917. They had seven seats on the Council of Commissaries until early in 1918, when they resigned as a protest against the Bolshevik policy of making peace with Germany.

The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries still have organisations and journals, with headquarters in Berlin.

In 1920 when a British Labour Delegation visited Russia the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries each issued a full statement of their position. These were included in the Report of the Delegation (Published by the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress, London).

If the Mensheviks could be judged solely on this declaration of Socialist principles there would be little to find fault with.

The S.R. declaration, on the other hand, contains little about principles, and is not in any real sense a Socialist declaration at all. It is merely a propaganda effort to justify the tactics of the S.R. Party and to blacken the Bolsheviks.

The important thing is that the Menshevik document referred to above, although issued by the Central Committee of the Party, does not give anything like a full and true picture. Rather it represents the views of certain individuals on Socialist principles, completely divorced from the actions of the Party. This characteristic of the Mensheviks is one often found in the Labour Parties of Western Europe and elsewhere.

Let us look at certain of their actions.

The Mensheviks permitted their members  to support the war—-in flat contradiction of’ the Socialist principles they were supposed to understand and accept.

The Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries (and the Bolsheviks) belonged to the Second International before the war. They accepted the absurd claim that that body and its affiliated parties were Socialist.

The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries are still affiliated to the “Labour and Socialist International ” and still push the reforms which make up the only stock-in-trade of that non-Socialist body.

It will be seen, therefore, that the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries have no more in common with the S.P.G.B. than any of the other reformist parties which find it convenient to cover over their reformist programmes with a gloss of Marxian phrases and ideas.  

Ed. Comm.

Letter: Our attitude on Hungary (1957)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our attitude on Hungary

Salford, 7,


December 18, 1956.

Dear Comrades,

I think the Party’s attitude on this subject needs further elucidation. In this month’s S.S. it is considered that the revolt is not worth the shedding of a drop of working-class blood.

This seems to conflict with previous statements that the Hungarian workers were trying to improve their miserable condition. In my view it also differs from the position on the first Russian revolution recently quoted in “50 years ago.” There it was stated that the workers and Capitalists have a short way to travel together. But not in Hungary!

In any case it needs to be made clear what the workers are supposed to do under a Communist dictatorship. It won’t be smashed without the shedding of working class blood; and there won’t be any Socialism or even propaganda for Socialism till it is smashed.

It has often been said that the Capitalists will never let themselves be ousted but if defeated on the Parliamentary field would form a dictatorship. I should have thought the original success of the Hungarians against their own national dictatorship (before overwhelming Russian intervention) was a good case for the Party in that respect. I think it also might have been mentioned that the working class, even those who had been schooled only on “Communism,” showed that objective conditions still prevailed over ’phoney propaganda.

In general I did feel the S.S. was less than generous to the heroic effort which wrested power, “with bare hands” from a police state.

Yours truly,

L. E. Weidberg.

Having said the above, may I add that the general excellence of the articles in the S.S. over the years is not unappreciated by one who has left the work to others.

Reply

The article in the December S.S. to which the critic refers made it clear that, whilst expressing sympathy with the victims of the “Communist” savagery, the Hungarian revolt was fundamentally a movement in favour of Hungarian Capitalist rule, and therefore was not worth the shedding of a drop of working class blood. One reason for this is that the removal of Russian Capitalist oppression is no guarantee that Hungarian Capitalist rule would be any better in the long run.

We have learnt from experience during the last 50 years. We were urged to support the Russian armed rising against the Czarist Police State 40 years ago. The result of that rising has been the establishment of one of the most savage and oppressive police states in the history of the world. We were urged to support the German rising about the same time and the result was another form of police state equally savage. Austria and China have had similar experiences.

However much we may desire to see freedom of expression where it is denied, armed uprising is not the way to accomplish it. Once guns enter into the dispute then guns continue to be be arbiters in internal clashes of ideas afterwards, until either economic development or organised working class action compels the powers that rule to make concessions. That has been the lesson repeatedly driven home, but not wholly appreciated, during toe last 100 years of working class activity. However much we may desire to make progress there is no quicker way than this organised working class action to clear the road to working class emancipation.

Thus, although we appreciate the courage of those who were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice rather than continue to suffer Russian domination, it is our duty as Socialists to tell the bitter truth. Firstly, that it was not a rising aimed at bringing toe workers freedom; secondly, that armed uprisings may bring a change of rulers but will not bring freedom from class rule; thirdly, that the success of toe uprising would not necessarily have put an end to the police state.

It is not true that there cannot be any Socialist propaganda until a “Communist” dictatorship is smashed. The critic himself suggests that there can be Socialist propaganda when he writes that “the working class, even those who had been schooled on 'Communism' showed that objective conditions still prevailed over phoney propaganda” The revolt was not a bolt out of toe blue. It had been discussed and organised. There is, and has been. Socialist propaganda in all “Communist” and other police states.

It is worth while bearing in mind that, according to the information so far available the peaceful agitation of the Hungarian workers by stopping work has accomplished more, at far less cost in human life, than the armed uprising did. Thus, it certainly appears that the sounder attitude for the Hungarian workers would have been to stick to that method from the beginning in order to accomplish the limited objectives they were after. Sooner than see the whole social fabric collapse into confusion the rulers would have conceded some at least of their demands. However, once an armed revolt was embarked upon bloody conflict was inevitable, with savage reprisals and the use of Russian armed might; and now the atmosphere is still there for further savage reprisals.

Another advantage strike action alone would have achieved would be this. Attacks on peaceful strikers by the police, the militia, and the army, would have made the savagery of the Russian overlords more obvious to the world of Labour. The Russian rulers would not then be able to pat forward the pretence that they were quelling an armed rising against the government.

We are surprised at the last paragraph of the critic’s letter. Over and over again we have expressed our admiration for the courage and devotion of those who took part in the rising; we have, however, been truthful in regretting that it was not done in a better cause, the freedom from all oppression. To be generous without being truthful is to invite cheap praise. We have done our best to be helpful to the working class cause by pointing out realities in order to minimise, as far as possible, useless heroism in the future. We are also mindful of the bitter fact that the victims of today are so often the oppressors of tomorrow.

The revolt did not, as our critic puts it “wrest power, ‘with bare hands,’ from a police state.” The repressive action from outside was a foregone conclusion, and the power remains where it was. Furthermore, the action was not taken “with bare hands.” A portion of the Hungarian army took part in it and arms were in the the hands of the revolters.

Finally, let us consider the reference to the extract from the Socialist Standard of “Fifty Years Ago” that appeared in the November number. It concerns the attitude of the Socialist movement in a country where there is a revolt against a particular form of repression. We would urge the critic to look at the whole extract again in order to get a clear picture of what the writer was driving at. We would particularly urge him to take note of the following selections from the extract:—

“Hence, in the other nations of Western Europe a straight fight is possible between the proletariat and the capitalist ruling class, whilst in Russia the rising capitalist class has yet its emancipation from autocracy to accomplish: so that, in contrast with practically the whole of civilised nations, the working class and the capitalist class in Russia have, in the abolition of Tzardom's tyranny, a step to go together. This historical circumstance, which is at once the strength and weakness of the Russian movement, distinguishes it from that of all capitalist countries." . . .

“ Let us then do all in our power to help our Socialist comrades in Russia in the hope that they will not be deceived as to the outcome of the present upheaval: in the hope. also, that they will sternly keep their separate identity, and distinct aim. so that the Russian bourgeoise State of tomorrow may find a militant class-organisation of Socialist workers leading the final struggle against the Capitalist class, whose defeat must herald the Triumph of Humanity."

It will be seen from the above that the struggle in Russia 50 years ago was to get rid of the semi-feudal barriers, and the Socialist movement there was urged to keep their independence and their Socialist policy. As far as Capitalist Hungary is concerned that is still the attitude for the Socialist to take. Socialists there, just as under autocratic Russia in days gone by, should stand by their Socialist objective and do what propaganda they can under existing conditions, just as, for instance, an Austrian comrade of ours did under the Nazi and Russian occupations.

Editorial Committee.

The Russian Revolution (2026)

Book Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924. By Robert Service ISBN 9781529065855

Continuing his popular histories of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Robert Service seeks to look more broadly at events, rather than through personalities and political decisions alone. Rather, he seeks to ‘explore […] how ‘ordinary’ people coped – or failed to cope – with the shattering dislocation of Russian and global affairs’ during the revolutionary period.

He utilises the diaries of the likes of Alexei Shtukaturov, a worker who was conscripted into the Imperial Army, and Alexander Zamaraev, a peasant, too old to be conscripted. Embedded within the stories of events, their own words reveal frustrations and aspirations. In part, this helps unveil the political sophistication of those often dismissed as ignorant peasants (as Service notes, ‘peasant’ was a legal, rather than an economic category). Nonetheless, the frustrations of the peasants form a significant backdrop to the events of the revolution.

Zamaraev lived in Totma district, Vologda, where 92 percent of agricultural land belonged to the state, church, and Imperial family. His diaries reveal concern over conscription, support for the Tsar and for the war, and over access to food as the war continued.

Service effectively brings home the conditions under Tsarism during the war, and helps show how common people were far from passive objects during these great events. At this time, one-third of European Russia was placed under martial law, and 13 million men went through the army (Service notes its harsh discipline.) Many others also laboured in the civilian economy. This fact, and the way that previously toothless local government bodies took on increasing responsibility for welfare provision, such as food and medicine, in a co-ordinated fashion (later to be joined by industrial committees) prefigured the kind of state that was to come out of the war.

Service is critical of Tsar Nicholas, especially his war aim of trying to gain Istanbul (or Tsargrad, as they referred to it) for the Russian empire. Service also notes the racist suppression of Jews and Poles within the Empire, the Tsar’s failure to grapple with its massive structural problems, and the way he vigorously resisted the changes needed to fight a modern mechanised war.

He notes that the Bolsheviks did not expect or want the specific revolution that they found themselves involved in, but that the line of party discipline and a one-party state were part of their core ideas from the very beginning: ‘They opted for force over persuasion; for central authority over democratic accountability’. They had no more legitimacy than the provisional government of Kerensky, but they were more prepared to use force to get their way.

The book draws out the role of the peasants, economically, politically and legally, and the way their frustrations formed a significant part of the backdrop to the drama against which the political leaders played their parts. In his assessments, though, Service does not look at whether there was any alternative path available which could have led to a different outcome.

Pik Smeet

Trotskyism regurgitated (2025)

Pamphlet Review from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why you should be a communist. By Fiona Lali. Wellred Books. £2. 2025.

Fiona Lali is a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (ex-Socialist Appeal, the section of the Militant Tendency that stayed in the Labour Party after most left in 1991 until they were themselves finally expelled in 2021). She stood as their candidate in last year’s general election and has become their poster girl (literally as she appears on many of their posters). This pamphlet has been written as part of a recruitment drive by the RCP, at the moment the Trotskyist group that seems to have been the most successful in recruiting young people.

The pamphlet starts off with an attack on capitalism and is aimed at young people who realise that something is wrong with the world and want to do something about it. There is not much that can be objected to here. It’s the second part — about what is to replace capitalism and how — that is open to criticism. It starts off with the absurd claim that ‘the Russian Revolution of October 1917 — led by Lenin and Trotsky — was the greatest event in human history’. An important event in 20th century history perhaps, but in the whole of human history?

We are told that the regime it ushered in, while far from perfect (due to Stalin being in charge), was able, thanks to its ‘nationalised planned economy’, to industrialise the country and provide the workers with ‘extremely low rents’ that included ‘energy and phone services’ and retirement at age 55. The implication is that what happened in Russia in the last century is something to be emulated. But what the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 led to was a form of state-run capitalism that left the workers propertyless wage-workers, indeed forcibly changed the peasantry into these. It had nothing to do with communism or socialism. Lali is deceiving herself and misleading others in suggesting otherwise. It is not the path to go down.

She presents the Bolshevik seizure of power as the model for the future. In a section headed ‘need for a revolutionary party’, she tells us that ‘what is required is a party of trained class fighters — cadres — who dedicate themselves to the study of the class, its history, and the theory needed to liberate us’ and that:

‘In the not too distant future, Britain will be convulsed by revolutionary upheavals. It is essential that we build a revolutionary party in advance of these titanic events. This is what we are doing. And we appeal to you to join us in this effort.’

Apparently, hundreds of young people, of which Lali is one herself, have responded to this appeal. It’s the classic formula, successfully applied in the 1960s and 1970s by the founders of Trotskyist groups, to attract young people discontented with capitalism — promising them exciting times of ‘revolutionary upheavals’ and ‘titanic events’ in ‘the not too distant future’.

There are good opportunities to advance the socialist cause at the moment but to make extravagant promises like these can only lead to disillusionment when they don’t materialise. The only positive outcome would be that some will be able to sort the Marxist wheat, which they will have had to study, from the Leninist chaff.

Adam Buick

Trotsky: the Prophet Debunked (1979)

From the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lyov Davidovich Bronstein was born a hundred years ago this month in Yanovka in the Southern Ukraine. He attended schools in the Black Sea ports of Odessa and Nikolayev, and by the age of 18 was a committed Russian revolutionary, with the basic aim of overthrowing Tsarism. In the 1890s the revolutionaries had become divided into two main streams, differing over the tactics to be adopted. One stream called themselves Social Democrats and claimed to be Marxist; they held that Russia would have to pass through the stage of capitalism even if the Tsar were overthrown and that the mass movement for this overthrow was to be sought in the industrial working class. The others were known as Narodniks (Populists) and held that a ‘socialist’ regime could be established in Russia alone following the overthrow of Tsarism by the peasant masses.

Trotsky associated himself with the Social Democrats, though the extent to which he really absorbed Marx’s ideas on history and economics is very much open to question. One thing cannot be doubted however: he was a courageous fighter for the Russian anti-Tsarist movement. Arrested for the first time in 1898, he spent two years in prison before being exiled to Siberia for four years. The abortive Russian revolution of 1905 found him a leading figure in the St. Petersburg council of Soviets, which earned him another period of deportation to Siberia. He escaped and spent the period until 1917 in exile in Austria, Switzerland, France and finally America.

While in prison after the 1905 uprising, he developed a theory which casts doubt on his understanding of Marxism. Under the influence of Plekhanov, the ‘father of Russian Marxism’, the Russian Social Democrats held that Russia would have to pass through the capitalist stage before becoming ripe for socialism. The coming revolution in Russia was thus seen as inevitably a ‘bourgeois revolution’, not necessarily in the sense of being led by the bourgeoisie but in the sense of establishing the political and economic conditions for the development of capitalism. Even Lenin at this time shared this perspective, not differing from the Mensheviks here: socialism was out of the question in Russia; the coming anti-Tsarist revolution could only be a bourgeois revolution, during which the working class might indeed play a prominent role, but after which it would find itself in the same position as the working class in the countries of Western Europe. (The disagreement between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks was not over the nature of the coming revolution but over how the Social Democrats should organise themselves; into a vanguard party or into a mass democratic party.) This perspective was quite in accordance with Marx’s materialist conception of history, which teaches that socialism is only possible on the basis of developed capitalism and a majority working class which has become socialist.

Trotsky, who had refused to take sides in the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (though on the question of party organisation his sympathies were with the Mensheviks), rejected this. He argued that if in the course of the coming anti-Tsarist revolution, the working class were to get political power, it was unrealistic to expect them, or ask them, to hand over power to the bourgeoisie. According to Trotsky, they would not do this but would continue the revolution in a ‘socialist’ direction by measures of nationalisation.

“One may reassure oneself that the social conditions of Russia are not ripe for Socialism, without thinking that the proletariat, taking power, by the very logic of its position, must inevitably press forward the introduction of State management of industry.” (Quoted in Marx and the Marxists by Sidney Hook, p.201.)

This theory that the coming revolution in Russia should not stop at the bourgeois stage but should continue on towards ‘socialism’, Trotsky called ‘the theory of permanent revolution’. He borrowed this phrase from Marx at a time when the latter was under the illusion that the 1848 revolutionary wave would see a bourgeois revolution in Germany rapidly followed by a socialist revolution (an illusion soon abandoned).

Trotsky was not saying that socialism could be established in Russia alone (as did the Narodniks) but only that steps could be taken in this direction while awaiting the socialist revolution in the West. This was an opinion he held for the rest of his life, and was the basis of his later analysis of the Russian revolution. According to him, the Russian revolution of 1917, starting as a bourgeois revolution in March with the overthrow of the Tsar and ending as a ‘socialist’ revolution in November with the Bolshevik seizure of power, was the permanent revolution he had predicted in 1906. Russia under the Bolsheviks, according to Trotsky’s analysis, had started to move towards socialism but would not be able to complete this transition until the socialist revolution had occurred in the rest of the world too.

Actually, the measures which Trotsky regarded as ‘socialist’ (essentially state ownership and management of industry) were really of a state capitalist character. And in fact throughout his life Trotsky failed to make any distinction between state capitalism and socialism. Even during the periods when Lenin was frankly referring to Russia as state capitalist — in 1918 and again after 1921 — Trotsky refused to employ this term. For him, the state industries of Bolshevik Russia were basically socialist, not state capitalist, a view shared by Stalin (the disagreement between Trotsky and Stalin was not over this but over whether or not Russia in the 1930s had completed the transition to socialism).

Trotsky, then, with his theory of ‘permanent revolution’, was expressing a point of view which had more in common with Narodnik views about Russia being able to avoid capitalism. Trotsky had held this view even before 1917, and of course believed that after 1917 Russia actually had avoided capitalism. In short, he never really understood Marx, though he was an astute theorist of the Russian anti-Tsarist revolution. If we understand his reference’s to ‘socialism’ as references to state capitalism, then well before 1917 he foresaw that the Russian revolution was not going to be a simple bourgeois revolution, and that those who overthrew the Tsar could establish a state capitalism rather than a liberal capitalism as in the West. Lenin did not come round to this view until 1917, when Trotsky, for his part, overcame his misgivings about Lenin’s ideas on organisation. Lenin and Trotsky together can be said to have been the theorists of the Russian state capitalist revolution, with Lenin providing the theory of a centralised and highly disciplined vanguard party and Trotsky the theory that state capitalism rather than private capitalism could be established immediately in Russia.

But Lenin and Trotsky were not just theorists. They were also practical revolutionaries. Trotsky was in fact the chairman of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, in whose name the Bolshevik seizure of power was carried out. This is what makes his History of the Russian Revolution fascinating reading, in fact essential reading for anyone studying this event. For it is not the work of some historian studying in a university library but an account — and a well-written one — by a person who had played a key role in the event. It is also revealing in that it again shows to what extent Trotsky was not a Marxist. For, as Trotsky saw it, insurrection is an ‘art’; leaders attempting an insurrection must know the right slogans to put forward to mobilise the masses and exactly the right ‘psychological moment’ to launch the call to insurrection. He even suggested that the Bolshevik insurrection might not have been successful had it not been for one man: Lenin. A return to the Great Man theory of history if ever there was!

After the Bolshevik coup, Trotsky became a leading member of the government, first as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, then as leader of the Red Army, which under his command had by 1921 successfully defeated the counter revolutionary White Russians and their allies (including Britain, France and Japan). Trotsky carried over the military approach he had learned here to economic matters and advocated that the labour of production should be militarised, should be forced labour under military discipline. It was he who personally supervised the crushing of the Krondstadt uprising in 1921. Particularly revealing as to his frame of mind at this time is the pamphlet he wrote in 1922, Terrorism and Communism (first published in Britain under the tendentious title In Defence of Terrorism), in which he defends the use of terror against the Bolsheviks’ political opponents.

Trotsky quite clearly played a leading role in laying the foundation for Stalin’s later dictatorship, of which he was to be one of the first victims. Eased out of power in 1925, expelled from the Bolshevik Party in 1927 and exiled to Alma Ata near the Chinese border, he was finally forced to leave Russia in 1929. In exile Trotsky set out his analysis of the Russian revolution and its outcome in Revolution Betrayed. The Russian revolution, he argued, had been a capture of political power by the working class; under Lenin (and, of course, Trotsky) Russia had been developing towards socialism (state capitalism); the coming to power of Stalin represented the usurpation of political power in Russia by a bureaucracy but had left unchanged the social basis established by the Bolsheviks in 1917 — the state ownership and planning which Trotsky had always regarded as being in some way ‘socialist’. For him, Russia was a ‘degenerate Workers’ State’ in a period of transition between capitalism and socialism.

The theory is of course nonsense. It brings out once again Trotsky’s failure to make any distinction between state capitalism and socialism — in fact he actually says in Revolution Betrayed that state capitalism is impossible as a full society (chapter IX). This book is, however, still worth reading, since apart from being written by someone who had been prominently involved in the construction of the Russian regime, it became the starting point for the discussion that went on in the 1930s and 1940s about the nature of Russian society (and which still goes on in the Trotskyist sects). This polemic eventually led to some correctly coming to see Russia as state capitalist, a view Trotsky combatted until his murder in 1940 by an agent of his ‘degenerate Workers’ State’.

Trotsky himself took an active part in these discussions, and there is something genuinely pathetic in the sight of a man who had once been a leading anti-Tsarist revolutionary reduced to the leader of just one of many Trotskyist sects, to the level of a Tony Cliff or a Gerry Healy.

In conclusion, Trotsky is best seen not as a Marxist, nor as a theorist of working class revolution, but as a Russian revolutionary, as an exponent, in theory and later in practice, of the anti-Tsarist revolution which cleared the way for the further development of capitalism in Russia in the form of state capitalism. In urging the working class to adopt tactics that had proved successful in this non-socialist, state capitalist revolution, Trotsky helped in no small measure to sidetrack a part of the workers’ movement in Europe and North America and hence to delaying the coming of the world socialism to which he claimed to be committed.

Adam Buick

(A later article with the same title - and by the same author -  was published in August 1990)

Vanguards, get lost (2025)

From the July 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Maybe it’s because our offices are situated there and it’s done to annoy or provoke us but the street furniture in Clapham High Street in South-West London is frequently the object of posters and stickers adorned with a hammer and sickle saying ‘Join the Communists’. Following the internet links given reveals they come from the ‘Revolutionary Communist Party’ and the ‘Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)’. Recently they have been joined by a third, ‘Communist Vanguard’, apparently a split from the ‘Revolutionary Communist Group’.

All these, and perhaps up to 53 other varieties, claim to stand for an oxymoron they call ‘Marxism-Leninism’ and use the hammer and sickle as their logo. How oxymoronic they are can be seen by comparing what they say with what Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto:

‘All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority’.

This is how ‘Communist Vanguard’ introduces itself:

‘Our main task is to forge the future Communist Party, the revolutionary vanguard of the working class and the only organisation capable of leading the fight to destroy capitalism. For a Marxist-Leninist organisation, building the Party is inseparable from organising the working class. Only the proletariat, as the gravedigger of capitalism, possesses both the objective interest and the collective power to carry out a revolutionary transformation of society. To guide this process, we aim to create communist cadres capable of weaponising their theoretical understanding of capitalism and scientific socialism, clarifying central political questions for the working-class movement, establishing roots in labour organisations, and developing the theoretical and practical foundations necessary for revolutionary transformation.’

Pure Leninism: workers, incapable of organising themselves to overthrow capitalism, need a vanguard and its cadres (‘a small group of trained people who form the basic unit of a military, political, or business organisation’) to lead and guide them in this.

So it’s ‘the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority’ (Marx) versus ‘the revolutionary vanguard … the only organisation capable of leading the working class … To guide this process … communist cadres…’ (Lenin).

The contrast could not be starker and explains why ‘Marxism-Leninism’ is as much an oxymoron as a ‘square circle’.

The hammer and sickle was the logo of the Bolshevik Party which seized power in Russia in November 1917. This was a typical historical minority movement and led not to socialism but to state capitalism with the section of the cadres who won the internecine struggle that followed Lenin’s death in 1924 emerging as the new, privileged ruling class.

Capitalism wasn’t overthrown in Russia in 1917. It couldn’t have been as, in the absence of a world socialist revolution, it was ripe only for the further development of capitalism. How economically backward Russia was then was reflected in the Bolsheviks’ logo of a hammer to beat metal and a sickle to cut wheat.

It is difficult to see why the rival vanguards think that an ideology and logo that emerged over a hundred years ago in an economically backward part of the world could be attractive for workers today living in an advanced capitalist economy. Both ideology and logo are completely irrelevant.

The vanguards evidently have a high opinion of themselves to appoint themselves the leaders of the working class. The workers need them like they need a hole in the head. The answer of the working class to this arrogant pretension is simple: get lost.

Seeing through the Russian myth (1974)

From the June 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 70th anniversary issue of the Socialist Standard carried throughout its pages a series of snippets from old Socialist Standard articles highlighting the SPGB's unique position on issues of the day. Where possible, I've provided a link to the full article.

The Bolshevik leaders told us that the workers of the world were ripe for revolution and their support of Bolshevism was expected and depended upon. Now that it is plain that workers do not understand socialism and fight for it, Lenin is pandering to the ignorance of the world’s workers. In defence he says that by supporting the pro-capitalist Labour Party and helping to establish a Labour Party government, the workers will learn the uselessness of the Labour parties. If that policy is to be adopted, then it is necessary for the workers to follow every false road, to support every reactionary measure, and to join every movement and learn from their mistakes—in other words, exhaust every possible evil before they try the right road. If this policy is right why did not Lenin support Kerensky’s policy of capitalism for Russia and let the workers painfully learn its uselessness? Such nonsense as supporting parties and Governments to gain power to learn their misdeeds is not the road to Socialism, it is the path to apathy and despair, and lengthens capitalism’s life.

[From “The Super-Opportunists. A Criticism of Bolshevik Policy”, Socialist Standard, August 1920]

Marxism: Past and Present – pt.2 (1955)

Book Review from the September 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

Marxism: Past and Present by R. N. Carew Hunt. (Published by Geoffrey Bles)

Nothing more crucially establishes contrast between Marx and Lenin than their views on the nature and function of class-consciousness. Marx saw it as a development of class-awareness of the true position in a system based on antagonistic productive relations. Lenin viewed it as the intellectual prerogative of a political intelligentsia. Marx and Engels never tired of proclaiming that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. Lenin never tired of denying it. Marx and Engels came to hold that long and patient work was necessary to fit the workers for the task of social transformation. Lenin lived in the hectic expectation of “imminent revolution” and “the psychological moment.”

Lenin, like many “intellectuals” and certainly all dictators, had a naively sublime faith in the powers of leadership. It was the Bolsheviks, in fact, who classically taught the “leader principle” which later produced star pupils like Mussolini and Hitler. While Lenin in his more expansive moods spoke of the masses being the historic instrument for the achieving of Socialism, he never relaxed his iron belief that only an élite could provide the intellectual and organizational means for its accomplishment. To the workers he never conceded more than a trade-union consciousness as the upper limit of their mental development. “The mass,” he contended, “have no independent movement of their own.” (Collected Works, Vol. IV. Part III pp. 222 and 235.) He also said: “Left to themselves, the masses become enslaved to bourgeois ideology.”

Marx and Engels saw the working class as the representatives of a new and larger aspect of mankind. Lenin regarded them as political raw material which the Bolsheviks would work up into the finished article. Docile acceptance of Bolshevik plans Lenin taught as the cardinal virtue for the workers. When they demurred, the Kronstadt incident, among others, was a reminder that Bolshevik authority was not something to be lightly disregarded. “Lenin knows best” was the phrase he wanted to hear lisped most from the lips of the infant Russian working class.

Not even so accomplished a literary ventriloquist as Mr. Carew Hunt can make Lenin a convincing mouthpiece of Marxism. Actually he was a mouthpiece, but a mouthpiece of certain social forces in Russia making for a bourgeois revolution. Politically Lenin was not a Marxist but a Jacobin revolution-monger. Not unjustly did a contemporary dub him “the Russian Marat.” It is not surprising, then, that he so earnestly studied “the Jacobinic dictatorship” of the great “French bourgeois revolution” in order to discover techniques for his own. That he veiled his Jacobinic pretensions with Marxist phraseology has deceived shrewder observers than Mr. Carew Hunt.

Essentially Lenin’s dictatorship theory was an inflexible belief in the dictatorship of a party or a State. In spite of his dialectical pose, this constituted an absolute political principle applicable at all times and all phases of economic development. This is in flagrant contrast to the principles of the Communist Manifesto, which states: “the practical application of the principles will depend everywhere and at all times on existing historical conditions.” This political premise of Lenin is still enshrined in Communist doctrine, for we are asked to: believe that everywhere Russian domination extends “Socialism” has come into existence.

Little wonder that Lenin declared: “Majority rule is a constitutional myth.” (“Constitutional Illusions,” Aug. 1917, Collected Works, Vol. XXI, Book I.) At the first All-Russian Soviet Congress, where his party was but a fraction, he announced their readiness to take over immediately. He added: “Maybe we shall hold power a few weeks and then die at the barricades”—a whimsical notion, for Lenin, intended to be no martyr à la Thomas Müntzer. Power at all costs was writ large in Bolshevik belief.

Many, out of piety to Lenin, believe he forsook Marxism when he thought the end of the first world war would see the end of capitalism and that a Socialist, not a bourgeois, revolution, would be the order of the day. But such a view was always implicit in Lenin’s political theory, as we have seen, even if at times it conflicted with assumptions derived from Marx’s economic doctrines. In line with his Jacobinic assumptions, he had always held that it was possible to seize power during the course of a bourgeois revolution in Russia and by holding it control its corresponding economic phase and “steer” it in a Socialist direction. Even as far back as 1908 he said: “The victory of the bourgeois revolution will as a victory for the bourgeoisie be impossible.” (Collected Works, Vol. XII, p. 252. Quoted from Bolshevism. R. Sprengler, International Review Publishers.)

It might also seem that when Lenin identified State Capitalism with Socialism he sought to hide from himself the cruel historic truth of the limits of his own revolution. Yet again this identification was always implicit in the views he held as to the role his party would play in the Russian scene, culminating in a bourgeois revolution. When he said “State capitalism run in the interests of the whole people is nothing but Socialism” The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat it (Sept. 1917), it was Lenin who first perpetrated the myth of “Socialism in one country.” He thus finally revealed himself as the anti-Marxist adherent of that Bolshevik prototype, the Narodnik. It was these old Russian national revolutionaries who maintained that Russia would bypass capitalism and achieve a uniquely Russian Socialism. Stalin’s formulation of “Socialism in one country” via Lenin’s state capitalism, itself a by-product of Narodnik political influence, was under its ideological trappings but Russian nationalism come to ripe maturity.

Ironically enough the Russian “February Revolution” caught the Bolshevik élite on the wrong foot. It was the workers who took the initiative, not they; just as it was the ordinary soldiers who encompassed the fall of the reactionary Miliukov government. But the small, relatively backward working class of Russia could not decide or direct the course of the revolution where 80 per cent. of the population were peasants. It was the upsurge of the black discontent of the latter, coupled with the adroitly unscrupulous tactics of the Bolsheviks, which swept Lenin into power.

The Bolsheviks did not and could not represent the interests of the Russian working class. Even if they had vainly sought to do so, Engels had a word for them in envisaging a situation much more favourable than the Bolshevik seizure of power. In The Peasant War in Germany he expressed himself thus: “The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to take over a government in an epoch where the situation is not ripe for the domination of the class he represents … in the interests of the movement itself he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class . . . with the assertion that the interests of an alien class are their interests. Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.”

While Marx’s and Engels’s writings show apprehension as to the reactions of the ruling class to any threat to their social privileges, to darkly hint, as the author does, that they were ruthless politicos incipiently formulating the techniques of modern dictatorships seems to show that the edge to his criticism can only be sharpened on the whetstone of malice. Yet even a cursory acquaintance with the works of Marx and Engels reveals a social vista incomparably superior to the motley crowd of purblind politicians and ideologists who clutter the band-wagon of “Western Democracy.”

The author assumes that Marx and Engels held that Socialism would automatically, even naturally, convert the Capitalists into a depressed minority. We have found no evidence for this in their writings. Mr. Carew Hunt might do well to ponder on capitalism’s own long and odious record of minority treatment.

The author refers to the role of force in Marx’s political doctrine, but only in so far as to vaguely equate it with insurrection and civil war, leading possibly to political terrorism. Marx and Engels certainly saw their “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a force—not, however, a destructive physical force but a socially organized power of a politically mature working class. If they argue that an enforcement of that power may be needed to implement a majority decision, this is not inconsistent with democratic precept.

Moreover, Mr. Carew Hunt’s objection to the force of socially organized power is inconsistent with his support of capitalism. Capitalism as a system of private property relations generates class conflicts which require the force of the State, with its control of the armed forces to provide the physical sanction for its continuance. Are we to conclude that the author’s acceptance of this makes him anti-democratic? Again, the present order produces the most pernicious form of force in the shape of the organized violence of war (latent in re-armament; actual in war itself). If Mr. Carew Hunt’s ideological defence of western capitalism is extended to military defence as well, must we rate him as a ruthless ideologue? And if he supported the last war and consequently “our glorious ally Russia,” was not he, even if for the period of war only, a supporter of Stalinism? We do not suggest this: it is merely a sample of the author’s own logic.

The rest of Mr. Carew Hunt’s book is pointless pin-pricking. This is his second book on Marxism. We wonder why. Cold print often produces chilling doubts. He may yet try again on the assumption “third time lucky”!

Ted Wilmott

(Concluded)

Blast from the past (2024)

Book Review from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Communist Dissidents in Early Soviet Russia. Five Documents translated and introduced by Simon Pirani. Matador, 2023.

When the state-capitalist one-party dictatorship in Russia finally collapsed in the early 1990s the state’s archives were opened to the public. Researchers have since dug out material from the period immediately after the end of the civil war in 1921 when working-class discontent was high and some freedom of discussion was still allowed inside the Communist Party,

None of the documents here have been translated into English before though one was published in Russian, outside Russia, in 1923. They reveal the personal and political disappointment of some Communists that the Russian revolution had not lived up to its claims and their expectations that it would bring about ‘the emancipation of the working class’ but had led, rather, to the emergence of a corrupt and self-serving ‘new bourgeoisie’ made up of full-time Communist Party officials.

The most interesting analysis here is that of the ‘Collectivists’, a group inspired by the ideas of the Old Bolshevik (and old opponent of Lenin) Alexander Bogdanov. Their basic position was that the working class had to have prepared itself ‘culturally’ to run a socialist society before it could be established. Starting from the position that the Russian revolution had been an attempted workers’ revolution they came to the conclusion that it could not have led to socialism since this condition for it was not present:

‘We accept that before the war the proletariat in its majority was not socialist, but began to change under the impact of the war. The socialist revolution began in the working class; the revolution arose in the formation of its consciousness of struggle; the proletariat found the will to overthrow the bourgeois order and to try to seize power. But that socialist revolution in the proletariat is far from complete. Not all of it has a consciousness of struggle. And the organisational consciousness of the whole proletariat has not been formed. New organisational methods, the entirety of which is a product of proletarian culture, still have to be worked out and integrated into working-class consciousness. Without this and before this, a socialist revolution in society is in our opinion impossible’.

Basically, no socialism without socialists. This was part of a wider argument that classical capitalism was collapsing and that the world was heading for a state capitalism ruled by a technical intelligentsia (what was later called ‘the managerial revolution’). This, they said, was what was happening in Russia under the Communist Party. Socialists there should personally take part in developing or implementing modern technology, another essential precondition for socialism.

The two other groups whose views are presented here — the Workers’ and Peasants’ Socialist Party and Workers’ Truth (Workers’ Pravda)— made the same analysis, though in a less worked-out form, that Russia was developing towards a state capitalism ruled by a new bourgeoisie.

The two personal views are only interesting as providing some context. It is striking how many of those mentioned in the book were, according to the footnotes, murdered by the Stalin government in the 1930s.

It’s a pity that such criticisms from inside Russia were not widely available during the time when ‘the nature of the USSR’ was a burning issue; they were way ahead of Trotskyism. Today they are only of historical interest. Pirani, in his introduction, hints at this when he writes that ‘social revolutions in this century may have as little in common with the Russian revolution as it had with the French Revolution of 1789.’

Adam Buick

The Russian Revolution recalled (2008)

From the November 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even 90 years after the Russian revolution there are still some who claim that the event shines as a beacon for socialism. We were able to say at the time that whatever was happening in Russia it was not a socialist revolution.

In August 1918 the Socialist Standard pointed out that, while there were industrial towns in Russia, the country was largely agricultural with about 80 per cent of the population still living on the land. The answer to the question whether “this huge mass of people” (about 160 million), which indeed included some industrial and agricultural wage slaves, was “convinced of the necessity and equipped with the knowledge requisite for the social ownership of the means of life?” was “No!”; beyond the fact that the leaders in the November movement claimed to be Marxian socialists there was no justification for terming the upheaval in Russia a Socialist Revolution.

Our analysis of the situation was based upon Marx’s definition of capitalism as a relation of wage-labour and capital and on the conditions necessary for that relation to be ended and replaced by socialism. Before “the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production”, as the Communist Manifesto put it, can happen, there must be a sufficient development of the productive forces, and the class which has to sell its labour power in order to live – the working class – must fully understand what is involved and be ready to take the necessary political action.

The conditions envisaged by Marx to be necessary for the ending of capitalism and establishing socialism did not exist in Russia in 1917, so why have the events been claimed as socialist?

Russia in 1917

The country had suffered huge losses during the war against the more heavily industrialised Germany, the economy was in a mess and there were food riots. The Tsar had been forced to abdicate in March 1917 – while both Lenin and Trotsky were out of the country – and the situation was confused. There was a provisional government which included capitalist and landowning representatives. In July Kerensky became leader with support from the Committee of the Duma (the Russian parliament) but with increasing support from the councils of Workers and Soldiers – the Soviets. However he continued with the war despite its unpopularity.

There was widespread discontent with soldiers, workers and peasants reacting against the adverse conditions, which the Bolsheviks were able to take advantage of the discontent. They gained control of the Soviets using slogans like “All power to the Soviets”, and crucially “Peace! Bread! Land!” In other words, this was what the war-weary, hungry workers and peasants wanted – they were not after socialism. That there was not a majority ready for socialism would not have concerned Lenin. The situation fitted his vanguard theory that the working class by its own efforts is only able to develop trade union consciousness and needs to be led by professional revolutionaries. There were enormous difficulties including the backward state of the country and the civil war; also the expected uprisings in other European countries did not take place. The development of capitalism was all that could happen and the Bolsheviks as the new rulers would have no choice but to do their best to aid it.

That it was a minority revolution is illustrated by the way in which Lenin dealt with the political situation. The All-Russia Soviet Congress had met in November 1917 and had passed resolutions in favour of peace, ending landowners’ rights to possession of the land, and the setting up of a ‘workers and peasants’ government, headed by Lenin and dominated by the Bolsheviks, pending the election of a democratic ‘constituent assembly’.

However when the Constituent Assembly was elected the Bolsheviks did not have a majority and it was dissolved. Trotsky’s excuses for this are instructive – the election had taken place too soon after “the October Revolution” and news of what had taken place spread only slowly. “The peasant masses in many places had little notion of what went on in Petrograd and Moscow. They voted for ‘land and freedom’”. Precisely, for that, not socialism. So, not only did the Bolshevik takeover not have majority support, majority support for socialism not present either.

By the middle of 1918 the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks were now called) had firmly established its dictatorship and freedom of the press and assembly were restricted. The All-Russia Soviet Congress had ostensibly taken all power to itself but this was a façade. The Congress elected the 200 members of the Central Executive Committee but the credentials of delegates to the Congress were verified by Communist Party officials. Lenin claimed that what he called “Soviet Socialist Democracy” was “in no way inconsistent with the rule and dictatorship of one person; that the will of the class is at times best served by a dictator” and this was approved by the Central Executive Committee in 1918 (Martov The State and the Socialist Revolution, p.31).

Labour discipline

Raising the productivity of labour was a priority. In an address before the Soviets in April 1918 (The Soviets at Work) Lenin declared that not only was it necessary to halt ‘the offensive against capitalism’, they also had to employ capitalist methods which included strict discipline at work. They should immediately introduce piece work and measures which “combine the refined cruelty of bourgeois exploitation and valuable attainments in determining correct methods of work.” The previously stated aim of equal wages for all was abandoned and a “very high remuneration for the services of the biggest of the bourgeois specialists” was agreed. State control was seen as the “means to establish the control and order formerly achieved by the propertied classes” and he chided those who considered the “introduction of discipline into the ranks of the workers a backward step”.

In January 1920 the Bolshevik government abolished the power of workers’ control in factories and installed officials who were instructed by Moscow and given controlling influence. Democratic forms in the army had also been abolished.

The need to use capitalist methods to control and discipline workers in order to increase production, illustrates the absence of the absolute pre-requisite for socialism – the conscious participation of the majority of the working class.

State capitalism

In 1921 the Bolshevik government adopted a New Economic Policy. In proposing it Lenin argued that permitting some private industry and allowing peasants to keep surpluses were not dangerous for socialism. “On the contrary, the development of capitalism under the control and regulation of the proletarian state (in other words ‘state’ capitalism of this peculiar kind) is advantageous and necessary in an extremely ruined and backward peasant smallholder country…in so far as it is capable of immediately improving the state of peasant agriculture.”

Our criticism of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks is not that they did not achieve what was not possible at the time, i.e. socialism. It is rather that they adjusted theory to suit the circumstances: seeing the necessity for capitalist development they claimed that state-monopoly capitalism was socialism. In Can The Bolsheviks retain State Power? Lenin wrote about the “big banks” as the “state apparatus” needed to bring about socialism. “A single state bank…will constitute as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus”.

It was also Lenin who said in The State and Revolution in August 1917 that the first phase of communism was usually called socialism, when Marx made no such distinction between the terms. (In the 1888 Preface Engels refers to the Communist Manifesto as the most international of all Socialist literature). In Marx’s conception of the first phase of communism there was still common ownership, an end to buying and selling, and no money. (Marx mentions the possibility of labour time vouchers despite their obvious drawbacks). What happened in Russia did not qualify even as a “first phase of communism”.

Contemporary Trotskyists still call their aim of state capitalism socialism. The former Militant Tendency (now called SPEW) think that nationalising 150 big corporations would express in today’s language the demand in the Communist Manifesto for the “abolition of private property”. They also support Lenin’s vanguard theory that a revolutionary minority can by their leadership turn protest movements into a ‘socialist’ revolution. So it is hardly surprising that they claim the events in Russia in 1917 to have been a socialist revolution, blaming the backward state of the country, civil war and Stalin for what went wrong.

Both Lenin and Trotsky thought that democracy was not appropriate to their situation. Having taken power in a minority revolution they had to rule by force. This included the use of secret police – the Cheka. Trotskyists excuse Lenin’s red terror on the grounds that it was the outcome of civil war necessity, likewise with the measures taken to deal with the problems of production. However, it was precisely the conditions and the absence of a majority for socialism that made capitalism the inevitable outcome.

The rule of Lenin supported by Trotsky paved the way for Stalin. The legacy of the Russian Revolution, of Lenin and Trotsky, is that socialism/communism has come to be identified with state capitalism. It was not a victory for the working class, but a tragedy since it brought socialism into disrepute and diverted attention away from the vital need to reject capitalism in whatever form.

Pat Deutz

Editorial: Retrospect (1954)

Editorial from the September 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

The first number of the Socialist Standard came out in September, 1904, a few years after the Boer War had ended and before World Wars had come into the picture. At that time the German Social Democratic Party had the support of millions, the Socialist Party of America was strong enough to put forward a candidate for the Presidency, in France, Austria and Italy, there were strong parties claiming to be Socialist, and even in the East the movement had spread—Russia, China and Japan, had small parties. Labour Parties and Welfare States had not yet emerged from the reformist womb, and the emptiness of nationalisation as a panacea for social ills had yet to be demonstrated.

To the uncritical it looked as if Socialism was “just round the comer.” What they overlooked was the weakness of the parties that claimed to be Marxian and the futility of those that did not. All of them were tied to reform programmes that ultimately put out the fire of revolution they had lighted; all of them were dominated by the fatal principle of leadership and all of them collapsed under the blow of the first Great War.

On the first page of the first number of the Socialist Standard there was an article from which we take the following paragraphs

“ In the Socialist Party of Great Britain we are all members of the working class, and cannot hope that pur articles will always be finely phrased, but we shall at least endeavour to lay before you on every occasion a sane and sound pronouncement on all matters affecting the welfare of the working class. What we lack in refinement of style we shall make good by the depth of our sincerity and by the truth of our principles.”

. . . 

“In dealing with all questions affecting the welfare of the working-class our standpoint will be frankly revolutionary. We shall show that the misery, the poverty, and the degradation caused by capitalism, grows far more rapidly than does the enacting of palliative legislation for its removal. The adequate alleviation of these ills can be brought about only by a political party having Socialism for its object. So long as the powers of administration are controlled by the capitalist class so long can that class render nugatory any legislation they consider to unduly favour the workers.”

That has been the outlook of the Socialist Standard during the past fifty years.

The leading article of the first number set down in detail the position of the workers under Capitalism and the only solution to their problems. On another page our Declaration of Principles was printed, and it is exactly the same as has appeared in every issue since.

Everything of fundamental importance that had a bearing on Socialist policy has been thoroughly examined and discussed in the Socialist Standard over the years.

The position and function of Trade Unions and the Socialist attitude towards them was the subject of discussion that appeared during some months of 1906. Industrial Unionism was the subject of numerous articles and correspondence from 1904 almost to the present day.

When the first Great War broke out in 1914 we printed our War Manifesto, in September of that year, in which we proclaimed our opposition to war, set forth the causes of war in the modern world, and pointed out that victory or defeat left the position of the workers, as a subject class, untouched.

When the Russian Revolution occurred in 1917 we printed an article which examined what lay behind that upheaval and stated, what subsequent history made plain, that it was not, and could-not be, a Socialist Revolution. As information came along later we demonstrated from the facts available the accuracy of our original statement.

In 1926 we showed the weakness of the General Strike and urged that, if the workers came out on strike they should do so in a body; if not successful within a short time they should go back in a body and not drift back. We pointed out that if they drifted back they would undo the work of years. In fact they were let down by the leaders they trusted and the masters were enabled to get rid of many limitations on their profit hunting that the workers had previously achieved.

In 1939, when the second Great War broke out, we reiterated the position we had put forward in 1914. In both wars our propaganda efforts suffered heavily. In the first war our speakers were arrested and our Head Office raided. In the second war we fared a little better but our Head Office suffered from bombing and it and much of our literature and records were destroyed.

In recent years we have put forward candidates for Parliament and our election literature has been reprinted in the Socialist Standard.

In the course of fifty years the Socialist Standard contains a faithful record of our work and our progress. In its columns will be found a mass of searching theoretical and historical articles that cover the main facts, principles, and policies, that are useful to the workers in their struggle to emancipate themselves from their subject position and to achieve the aim that we have unflaggingly put before them, the establishment of Socialism—a new form of society in which each will give according to his capacities and take according to bis needs.

When the workers understand, accept and act upon the views we have been pressing to their notice the social ills they suffer from today will vanish like a bad dream.

Tiny Tips (2023)

The Tiny Tips column from the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Klimt’s Lady with a Fan, which became the most expensive work of art sold in Europe. The portrait of an anonymous woman, also known as Dame mit Fächer, fetched £85.3 million from a Hong Kong collector at Sotheby’s auction house in London" (tinyurl.com/279ubrrk).

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"Mecca pilgrimages are a major source of income for Saudi Arabia, which is embarking on an ambitious plan to overhaul its largely oil-dependent economy. The hajj and year-round umrah rituals generate an estimated $12 billion annually" (tinyurl.com/4cem98ej).

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"The most tantalizing feature of the ancient Indus Valley remains is what they appear to lack: any trace of a ruling class or managerial elite. This defies the longtime theoretical assumption that any complex society must have stratified social relations: that collective action, urbanization, and economic specialization only develop in a very unequal culture that takes direction from the top, and that all social trajectories evolve toward a common and universal outcome, the state. Yet, here was a stable, prosperous civilization that appeared to remain that way for centuries without a state, without priest-kings or merchant oligarchs, and without a rigid caste system or warrior class. How did they manage it?" (tinyurl.com/2ewf2run).

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"Decades of social mobility research has come to the same conclusion: we are born into an economic caste system and our future success is largely determined by our parents’ income and by the nature of the neighbourhoods in which we grow up. Race is not the determining social factor in individual success: it is, at best, a poor proxy for the real causes. Privilege is very real. But it’s based on class, not race" (tinyurl.com/4sr9cudz).

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"The state that absurdly claims descent from the ideas of Marx and Engels anachronistically boasts of 969 billionaires, putting even the epicentre of capitalism in the shade (691 billionaires in the US)… Workers’ democracy was never part of the agenda under Mao or any of his successors in the new People’s Republic. The post-1949 regime would evolve into a state-capitalist formation, paying lip service to Marxism but primarily committed to making China a self-sufficient state that could ultimately compete with the other great powers" (tinyurl.com/mr24kzye).

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‘The Russian Revolution’ is something of a misnomer as, strictly speaking, there were two such eruptions in 1917: a genuine, spontaneous revolution in February, and the planned coup d’etat by the Bolsheviks in October that founded the Soviet state… It was Lenin, not Stalin, who founded the Cheka (the secret police), who first extorted grain from starving peasants and insisted that revolutions could only be made by firing squads. The machinery of repression and mass murder was in place by the time he died in 1924. All Stalin had to do was use it" (tinyurl.com/yc3dkb4b).

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"Zelensky has banned opposition political parties

He arrested political opponents

He banned all unfriendly media

He shut down Orthodox churches

And now there will be no Presidential election next year

At what point we call him what he is?

A dictator (tinyurl.com/2t469msb)."

From Lenin to Stalin (1953)

From the April 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although Stalin is dead there still lingers about him a larger than life aspect, This is hardly surprising when we consider his antithetical role of an angel of light and prince of darkness. While such a black and white study might serve as a popular form of entertainment it reveals nothing about Stalin as a man and politician. For our part we are prepared to remain on ground level and try to evaluate Stalin by examining the social and economic soil from which he grew and – if we may use the word – flourished.

One cannot, however, begin to understand Stalin without bringing in Lenin and the Bolsheviks who for many years formed a section of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Indeed that body of dogma, eclecticism, opportunism, and self-contradictory ideas which goes under the name of Stalinism is in essence a more explicit form of what was always implicit in the theories and tactics of Lenin and his Bolshevik Party. While Stalin in his self-appointed role of Philosopher-Statesman sought to extend and amplify Leninism – the alleged Marxism of the 20th century – he never attempted to infringe his master’s copyright on the subject.

Stalin himself was an old Bolshevik and not one of the least that Lenin led and inspired. He formed with Lenin a vital link in a chain of political ideas whose first phase culminated in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Certainly Stalin was more attuned to the intellectual and political atmosphere of the disciplined and conspiratorial Bolshevik Party than ever Trotsky was, a fact no doubt of crucial value in his struggle for power with the latter. Leninism as a political creed was itself born out of the leadership notions and essentially undemocratic ideas of the early Bolsheviks. Stalinism was its inevitable and tragic fulfillment.

Yet when the Bolshevik Lenin first appeared on the Russian political scene he accepted the views of people like Plekhanov – whose acknowledged pupil he was – Axelrod, Deutsch and others. Lenin’s first important work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, published 1899, put forward the view that Capitalism was developing in Russia and nothing could stop its continuance. This development he argued was historically progressive in relation to the then existing semi-feudal economy of Russia. While one could not oppose this development he said, nevertheless workers should organise to resist its evils and steps should be taken to prepare for its eventual supersession.

Lenin’s book was part of an ideological campaign which the Russian Social Democratic Party were waging against the Narodniki (Populists) who maintained that Russia had a social development which was peculiar to itself and therefore did not have to pass through a normal and full capitalist development which other countries had experienced. In fact they averred that Capitalism was a kind of Western disease against which the people of Russia could and should he inoculated. Let us, they said, get rid of the tyranny of Czarism and we can, on the basis of our rural collectivism (the Mir), establish Socialism, i.e. free peasant communes and cooperatives of workers.

“Socialism in one Country” has then a much longer history than the Stalinist formulation of it. It is an ironical footnote on the earlier activities of Lenin and Stalin that the very theory they sought to combat was the one which in the end they made their own.

In fact it was Lenin who after the meagre achievements of “War Communism” re-introduced the idea of a home-grown Russian Socialism when he announced his “New Economic Policy.” It was the “Marxist” Lenin who proclaimed the myth that State Capitalism although a step backward from the earlier Bolshevik aims had in it, nevertheless, socialist implications. It was Lenin who repeatedly put forward the view that a Soviet State could be both the means and guarantee for realising Socialism in one country, and the further myth shared by both Stalin and Trotsky that what was taking place in Russia then was different from anywhere else in the world.

Lenin’s own views on Marxism had through the years undergone considerable change from his earlier standpoint. How much so could be seen in the attitude he adopted in the closing years of the 1914-18 war. Lenin had come to believe more and more that Capitalism was doomed. that it would be unable to finish the war it had started. Peace was to come by a victorious proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. For that reason the traditional difference between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions had for him lost significance. Given the right leadership in Russia a socialist revolution not a bourgeois one would be the order of the day. At the first All Russian Congress of Soviets, of which his party was only a small minority, he declared their willingness to take over immediately. In the August of that year he flatly asserted that “majority rule was a institutional illusion.”

Lenin’s predictions of what was going to happen to capitalism were falsified by the actual events. The capitalists did finish the war and no proletarian revolution took place. So Lenin’s main justification for a socialist revolution went by the board.

It is true the Bolsheviks did come to power in Russia. But it was neither with the acclamation nor assent of the Russian people. It was in the quiet of the early hours of the morning of November 7th that Bolshevik military cars occupied the centres of business and communication in Petrograd. This sealed the fate of Kerensky Provisional Government and assured the Bolsheviks of political power. Thus did the population of Petrograd discover when they woke a few hours later that their “Proletarian dictatorship” was an accomplished fact.

That the Bolsheviks concluded peace with Germany, dispossessed the private capitalist and against their own judgment gave the land to the peasants is a matter of history. They were successful because in war-weary, exhausted Russia they conceded to the inevitable. Behind the facade of their concession they planned however a new discipline and developed the latent forces for a new social order – new to Russia – but, in its exploitation based on wage labour, as old as capitalism itself.

Nor was the undemocratic seizure of power by the Bolsheviks merely the fortuitous result of filling the vacuum caused by the indecision and incompetence of Kerensky’s Government. Such action by the Bolsheviks was in keeping with their political ideas which the circumstances arising from the collapse of Csarist Russia enabled them to exploit.

The Bolsheviks, mainly recruited from the Russian bourgeois intelligentsia, had long regarded themselves as the born leaders of the Russian people, an illusion they shared with the Fabians and other reformist parties. By identifying themselves with the aims and aspirations of the non-socialist mass and securing their confidence the Bolsheviks believed that, with such backing, they could ride to political power at an opportune moment.

Because they believed themselves to be the commanding officers of the politically less conscious majority it is easy to see why the spreading of socialist ideas was subordinated to the preoccupation of tactics, unity of command and the strict discipline of party organisation. Within such a party it was obvious that freedom of individual action and opinion were gravely limited. Ideas for them were not something to be accepted because of their integral and logical structure but as an ideal means for successfully waging political struggles. Theory for the Bolsheviks, as it became later for the various Communist Parties meant a creed a dogma to be inflexibly held against all comers.

That the Bolsheviks adopted Marxism not only saved them the trouble of formulating theories of their own but as a well-established doctrine, it provided an admirable ideological basis to which changes and shifts in policy could be ultimately referred and by which they could be justified. This is the true significance of Lenin’s oft repeated phrase, echoed and re-echoed by Stalin, “Theory is a guide to practice.” For the Bolsheviks these dogmas set the limit to and decided the nature of freedom of discussion. Whatever differences may exist between Roman Catholicism and “Communism” there is at least this much in common.

It is from the mental and political outlook of the Bolsheviks we can trace the evolution of that pernicious scholasticism by which Stalin and his party not only conducted their purges but sought to hide from the world and perhaps themselves what was really taking place in “Socialist Russia.”

It would also account for the reason why men like Lenin and Stalin were at one and the same time, rigid doctrinaires and flexible, opportunistic politicians. Perhaps for dictators there is an emotional need for dogma. Many tyrants have justified their evil work on the assumption that it was ultimately for the good of mankind. Even Stalin explaining that Soviet Russia is not exempt from economic laws indulged in turgid Marxist phraseology and quotes from Engels who it appears plays a similar role in Soviet theology to that once played by Aristotle in the Catholic Church.

In such an organisation as the Bolsheviks it is not surprising that the dictum, the end justifies the means, was raised to a ruling principle. Long before the revolution they held that any means were permissible against political opponents; after the revolution it was but logical step to ensure that all means were justifiable.

The Bolsheviks themselves however became the victims of their own anti-democratic pressures. From “all power to the Soviets” it passed to “all power to the Communist Party.” The checks and balances of ordinary democratic procedure were absent. The struggle of rival groups had to be carried on within the Communist Party. Intrigue and plotting under ideological disguises became the effective means for realising political ambitions. Because of years of unbridled power the Communist Party was mentally and politically incapable of resolving the struggle by democratic means. Maintenance of power at any price became for them a matter of life and death. On a chequer board of political tactics the old Bolshevik “moved, mated and slayed” until the assumption of power rested in one man – Stalin; which compelled the fashioning of a mighty repressive machine to ensure his own preservation and that of the ruling faction which he represented.

While Stalin was prepared to make concessions to the Russian people and even grant a “New Constitution” he was incapable of granting them political freedom. Whatever may have been Stalin’s claims for what he achieved in Russia he was never prepared to submit them to normal political competition. For Stalin that would have been the end of Stalinism.

It was Stalin who completed the work begun by Lenin, the turning of Marxism, a revolutionary doctrine into its opposite an authoritative ideology of State Capitalism on a par and at times competing with other state ideologies, i.e. Hitler’s National Socialism and Mussolini’s Corporate State.

The Bolsheviks in spite of their Marxist language and at times idealistic phrases were never socialists. They served instead as spokesmen of a new ruling class in Russia, a class itself the outcome of the very economic tendencies existing in Russia, the tendencies towards State Capitalism. In the furnace of the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks were themselves forged into an instrument of class domination. In that sense was Joseph Djugashvili a man of steel.

Ted Wilmott