Permanent Revolution, Socialism In One Country and Stages Theory In Practice
The Anglo-Russian Committee
The application of the theory of building Socialism In One Country, as against Permanent Revolution, meant that the USSR and the Comintern sought diplomatic arrangements with the imperialist powers, and they sought to obtain them via “pressure” applied by the workers of these countries, as against them undertaking their own revolutionary activity. To this end, the soviet bureaucracy sought to operate through the petty-bourgeois labour bureaucracy in each country, for example, the leaders of the TUC in Britain. The vehicle for this was The Anglo-Russian Trades Union Liaison Committee.
The principle of the United Front can be expressed as unity from below, or “unity with the workers always, with the workers leaders sometimes.” The whole point, here, is that the United Front is intended to unite the working class in action, and is, thereby, differentiated from purely parliamentary alliances. It was necessary, in countries where the Communists represent only a quarter, third or half of the working-class, which leaves the majority still affiliated to the reformists and centrists. Unity of the working-class, in action, requires, in practice, a unity, in action, of these different organisations, and thereby, with their leaders. But, such unity, in action, does not mean unity with the leaders of those other parties on the basis of their politics, nor organisational unity with them. On the contrary, it means that, whilst undertaking joint activity, the Communists dissociate themselves from the reformist and centrist politics of the leaders of those other parties. If fascists are attacking a neighbourhood, communists do not have to agree with the politics of the leaders of a reformist party in order to fight alongside the workers who still have illusions in those leaders, so as to defeat the immediate enemy. On the contrary, such joint activity is the best way of winning those workers away from those leaders, and their reformist politics, but it requires that the communists use the opportunity to expose those politics and explain the necessity of their own, for that to happen.
In place of unity from below, which would have led communists to have warned the British workers about the bourgeois nature of the politics of the TUC leaders, who would sell them out in the General Strike, the Stalinists, instead, led the workers to place faith in those very leaders, in order to retain a purely diplomatic alliance with them. The experience of the Anglo-Russian Committee, during the General Strike, also illustrates the point about the need for the proletariat to occupy the lead role, and that, in such conditions, it cannot be a matter of simply seeking to achieve limited goals, and then trying to implement an artificial halt to the class struggle. That point is made clear in Aneurin Bevan's account of the General Strike. The strike was always bound to fail, because of the liberal bourgeois politics of the TUC leaders, who would not push forward to a workers' seizure of power. He writes about the meetings that the TUC leaders had with the Government. The Government said to them “Well gentlemen, you have won. The question is are you prepared to run the country instead?” Bevan reports that, at that point, the TUC leaders knew they had lost, because they were not prepared to take over.
For the strike to have succeeded, the Communists needed to have armed the workers, in advance, of that inevitable act of betrayal. They needed to have been developing workers councils, ready, indeed, to have run the country instead, and so on. But, the Stalinists had failed to do any of that, and instead had sowed illusions in the bourgeois liberal leaders of the TUC. The result was not only that the workers did not move forward to take power, but that, even the General Strike, and its limited aims, was defeated, setting in place a period of reaction for years to come.
The Chinese Revolution
Trotsky and the Left Opposition repeatedly called for the communists to break with the TUC leaders, but Stalin refused. This experience was totemic, because it symbolised the method that Stalin would use also in China in 1927, in its revolution, and his instruction to the Chinese Communists to form an alliance with Chiang Kai Shek, and the Kuomintang. In essence, he had now reverted to the stages theory that he, Zinoviev and Kamenev had applied in February 1917, in relation to the provisional government, whereby, they saw the need for society to pass through a long period of bourgeois democracy before socialism became possible. Such alliances are not a manifestation of the United Front of workers parties, but of a Popular Front, a cross class alliance in which the interests of the workers are always subordinated, and which invariably lead to the bourgeois forces within them turning on the working-class.
Part of the reason for Stalin's attempt to continue the diplomatic alliance with the TUC leaders was, indeed, the hope that it might facilitate the Chinese Revolution, as a bourgeois-democratic revolution, whilst Stalin also wanted to reassure the imperialists that his objective was merely such bourgeois national revolutions, and no desire to go beyond them to socialist revolution. In fact, the trajectory was predictable. The social-imperialists like Citrine who had been opposed to the Bolsheviks in 1917, and some of whom organised Labour Battalions to fight alongside the Whites against the Bolsheviks, were hardly going to be reliable allies for the Chinese revolution. At a time of its choosing, the TUC leaders themselves broke with the Anglo-Russian Committee, and at a time of his choosing Chiang Kai Shek broke with the Chinese Communists.
At the time, in 1927, Trotsky and the Left Opposition were allied with Zinoviev and Kamenev in the United Opposition against Stalin, following his rightward turn in alliance with Bukharin. Trotsky points out, later, that, as a result, the criticism of Comintern policy in China was muted, in order to obtain the agreement of Zinoviev and Kamenev, who themselves still held to their 1917 positions in relation to the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry.
Trotsky points out that Lenin, in The Theses on the National and Colonial Questions had said that it was necessary not to allow the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie to cloak the anti-colonial struggles under the banner of communism. It was necessary for communists to retain political and organisational separation from such forces, But, Stalin and Bukharin, in the same way they had formed a disastrous diplomatic alliance with the leaders of the TUC, not only formed such an alliance with Chiang Kai Shek, but also, on his insistence, allowed the Kuomintang into the Communist International. They did this at the very moment when the Left Opposition, and Trotsky were being expelled from it! At the time of his choosing, however, Chiang Kai Shek repaid Stalin by organising a coup and turning his forces on the Chinese Communists who were murdered in their thousands. Unable, to admit their mistakes, Stalin then repeated it, forcing the Chinese communists into an alliance with the “Left Kuomintang” of Wang Ching-wei.
As with the failure of the British General Strike, the consequence of these disastrous positions was not just that the Chinese workers failed to take power, but that even the limited objective of the bourgeois-democratic revolution failed. It opened the door to Japanese Imperialism, in the run up to the outbreak of a new imperialist war. The same mistake was to be made in Spain a decade later.
The Spanish Civil War
The aim of Stalin's policy was to avoid a military intervention in the USSR by imperialism, an intervention that had taken place at the time of the Civil War, but which had ended as a result of a combination of circumstances that affected the imperialist powers. Stalin had sought to assure the imperialists that he had no intention of encouraging international revolution, a position that was, in fact, in accordance with his own reversion to the stages theory, and concentration on building socialism in backward Russia. But, as Trotsky points out, Stalin began to fret that such assurances were not working.
In China, the failures led to a sharp reversal, and turn into an ultra-Left position. The bourgeois democratic demands were dropped, and Chinese communists were urged into a serious of adventures to set up soviets out of thin air. Trotsky had been exiled, and the Left Opposition subdued or expelled. Fear of renewed intervention prompted a drive for break neck industrialisation and collectivisation that brought its own contradictions and crises. The alliance with Bukharin and the Right was dissolved, and Zinoviev, Kamenev and other sections of the Left Opposition such as Radek and Preobrazhensky were drawn back. This ultra-left turn meant that all alliances were now rejected. So began the lunacy of the Third Period.
But, it too inevitably resulted in disaster. It came in the form of the coming to power of Hitler. Hitler lost no time in bringing together the fascist regime of Mussolini in Italy, along with the regime of the Emperor in Japan, to create an “anti-Comintern Alliance”. This could only further encourage the idea that military intervention was at hand. In Britain, the Monarchy of Edward VIII had demonstrated its clear pro-Nazi sentiments, and the government of Chamberlain continued to negotiate with Hitler. Negotiations between Britain and Germany resulted in a naval agreement that was signed in 1935. In the wings, the Nazis negotiated with Lord Halifax, as a potential new Tory Prime Minister, who favoured a peace deal with Germany that would have allowed Hitler free rein to attack Russia.
Stalin had to rush to make another swift change of course, back to the Popular Front strategy of the previous period.
The Spanish Revolution begins in 1931. The Third Period ran from 1928 to 1934. As a result of Stalin's apparent left turn, the United Opposition dissolved, with Zinoviev and Kamenev returning to the Stalinist fold. They were to be repaid when Stalin once more made an abrupt turn to the Right. In 1935, they were executed as the Stalinist show trials got under way. In 1931, Republican parties, in Spain, win majorities in elections, and almost immediately face opposition from the fascists (falangists).
The Republican government is a Popular Front comprising the Socialist Party, as largest party, and bourgeois-liberal, republicans. The Left Republican, Manuel Azana, became Prime Minister. As is the nature of such governments, it acts to demobilise the workers' struggles themselves. A general strike in Seville, in July-August 1931, is crushed by military force by the republican government. As a result of the Stalinist Third Period, the Spanish Communist Party refuses to offer any support for the Republican government against the growing fascist threat. In August 1932, there is an unsuccessful Monarchist coup, and in the municipal elections, the following Spring, rightist forces show big gains. Another big change in 1933, is that, in Germany, Hindenberg makes Hitler Chancellor. Hitler begins to remove opposition to him in the Reichstag, organising the Reichstag fire as pretext to remove the Communists, and secure a majority. Germany joins with Japan, and Italy in forming an “anti-Comintern Alliance”.
This is the start of Stalin's switch back to the former position, as he now seeks to win support from the camp of “democratic imperialism”, i.e. Britain, France, and the US against Germany, Japan, and Italy. He seeks to do this by convincing the former that he has no intention or desire to ferment or support proletarian revolution anywhere in the world, but seeks to promote and defend bourgeois-democracy against the rising threat of fascism. In fact, Stalin also in secret, worked with the fascists to destroy his enemies to the Left. When Trotsky moved to Norway in 1935, the GPU worked with the fascists to break in and steal his archives, for example. But, this shift back to the Popular Front strategy was formalised by the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935. It is codified in Dimitrov's definition of fascism, which is used as the basis for promotion of the return to the Menshevist strategy of subordinating the workers to the liberal bourgeoisie, via the Popular Front.
In September 1933, Azana resigned as Prime Minister. The following month, the fascist Falange Espanola was founded in Madrid. In the November elections, the rightists and Monarchists won a majority in the Cortes, as the Anarchists of the CNT abstained. The following year, this right-wing government, which has been repealing the reforms previously introduced by the republicans also acts to crush a rising strike wave by both industrial and rural workers. It calls on Franco to crush the rising of Asturian miners. In the aftermath, 5,000 are killed in a vicious reprisal reminiscent of the aftermath of the Paris Commune, and 30,000 political prisoners are incarcerated.
But, it is a pyrrhic victory for the Right, as it provokes a new upsurge. Elections, in February 1936, bring the Popular Front back into government, and now the Spanish CP, is providing uncritical support to it. However, at this time, the Spanish CP is tiny. In 1931, it had only about 800 members, which had grown to around 10,000 by the beginning of 1936, but this number was overshadowed by the 40,000 members of the centrist POUM, let alone the 1.5 million members of the anarchist CNT. The Spanish Socialist Party, which was on the left of most of European social-democracy, had several hundred thousand members. The Trotskyists of the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninist group were tiny. The Stalinists and bourgeoisie attempted to portray the centrists of the POUM as Trotskyists, but they were not. They were centrists wavering between reformist and revolutionary politics, that led them into providing support for the Popular Front, which led to disaster.
Understanding the disaster of the Popular Front strategy in Spain requires examining it from the perspective of the attitude of the centrists of the POUM and Anarchists, as well as from the perspective of the Stalinists to the bourgeois-democratic parties themselves. The former made a terrible mistake that Trotsky had warned them against, in a calculation that they could draw revolutionary forces to their side, and in overestimating their own social and political weight as against the CP, which, as stated above, was in 1936, still small in comparison.
By the end of the Civil War, the Stalinists had become by far the biggest element of the Popular Front, whilst those to its Left had been destroyed. They failed to take into account, as Trotsky pointed out, that the Spanish CP had the full might of the USSR standing behind it, and of its ability to mobilise from amongst global Stalinist parties, reflected in the International Brigades. By contrast, the position of the Stalinists was not one based upon error, but one based upon being the active executioner of proletarian revolution, as it sought an alliance with democratic imperialism to fight Germany and Japan in particular. The Stalinists were more concerned to defeat their political opponents to their Left than defeating the fascists, as a number of writers described.
“To [the CP], winning the war meant winning it for the Communist Party and they were always ready to sacrifice military advantage to prevent a rival party on their own side from strengthening its position.”
(Gerald Brennan, The Spanish Labyrinth)
“[The infantry were far worse armed than an English public school Officers' Training Corps with worn out Mauser rifles which usually jammed after five shots; approximately one machine gun to fifty men; and one pistol or revolver to about thirty men. These weapons so necessary in trench warfare were not issued by the government and could be bought only illegally and with the greatest difficulty...
A government which sends boys of fifteen to the front with rifles forty years old, and keeps its biggest men and newest weapons in the rear, is manifestly more afraid of the revolution than of the fascists.”
(George Orwell, Controversy, August 1937)
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