Trotsky explains the sharp left turn made by Stalin.
“To see in this episode – and the left zigzag with all its significance will nevertheless go down into history as an episode – a contradiction to what has been said, can be done only by very near-sighted people who are foreign to an understanding of the dialectic of human consciousness in connection with the dialectic of the historic process.” (p 302)
The episodic nature of The Third Period was confirmed, in 1934, when Stalin swung back to the opportunist politics of the Popular Front.
“The decline of the revolution as well as its rise does not move along a straight line. The empirical leader of the down-sliding of the revolution – ”You think that you are moving but you are being moved” (Goethe) – could not help at a certain moment but take fright at that abyss of social betrayal to the very edge of which he was pushed in 1925-27 by his own qualities, utilized by forces half-hostile and hostile to the proletariat. And since the degeneration of the apparatus is not an even process, since the revolutionary tendencies within the masses are strong, then for the turn to the left from the edge of the Thermidorian abyss there were sufficient points of support and reserve forces already at hand.” (p 302-3)
Moreover, as described earlier, the nature of Bonapartism is that it must choose to base itself upon, and promote, one form of property, one class or another, because, although its social base is the petty-bourgeoisie/middle-class/peasantry, these heterogeneous and transitional classes are not a stable social base for a mode of production, and cannot form the ruling class. In the age of imperialism, a bourgeois state must look back towards capitalism, or forwards to Socialism, to the bourgeoisie or proletariat.
In the USSR, with its need for rapid industrialisation, the dynamic led, inevitably, towards the latter. If the state and the bureaucratic caste was to survive, it had to industrialise fast, and the most assured means of that resided in an extension of statisation and planning. The Maoists were confronted with the same reality.
“The turn assumed a character of panicky jumps, precisely because this empiric foresaw nothing until he had reached the very brink of the precipice. The ideology of the jump to the left was prepared by the Left Opposition – it only remained to utilize its work in bits and fragments, as befits an empiric. But the acute paroxysm of leftism does not change the basic processes of the evolution of the bureaucracy, nor the nature of Stalin himself.” (p 303)
The same was true with Mao, following the disaster of The Great Leap Forward. In China, the swing to industrialisation, following Nixon in China, was an earlier swing to the capitalist road, signalled by Deng Xiaoping.
Stalin had no theoretical abilities nor imagination, but he was an effective bureaucrat, which is how Lenin had used him, for organisational purposes. Stalin had no means of coming into contact with Lenin on political issues, and, when he did, for example in February 1917, he simply faded into the background.
“But for all that, Lenin very often had practical organizational-moral conflicts with Stalin, frequently very sharp ones, precisely for those Stalinist defects which Lenin, so carefully in form but so mercilessly in essence, characterized in his “testament”.” (p 303-4)
Lenin's intellectual capacity allowed him to surround himself with able partners, so that ideas were thrashed out, in debate, but Stalin's lack of such capacity meant he always felt threatened by debate, and in need of “yes-men”.
“Stalin is surrounded, particularly after the liquidation of the right wing group, by accomplished mediocrities, devoid of any international outlook and incapable of producing an independent opinion on a single question of the world labour movement.” (p 304)
The ossified sects of the “left” have a similar quality, operating more like gangs and cliques than political organisations of the working-class. They rely on cult like loyalty from their members, and respond to any external challenge to their ideas, in the same kind of rude and abusive manner of Stalin described in Lenin's Testament. They depend upon keeping their members secluded from such challenges, by the creation of “safe spaces” for their bankrupt ideas, unable to actually defend them intellectually, and upon physical or bureaucratic “no-platforming” of any oppositional viewpoint. It is a psychological trait of petty-bourgeois insecurity and narcissism.
“Stalin’s leadership in the Chinese revolution is just the fruit of the combination of theoretical, political and national limitedness with huge apparatus power. Stalin has proved himself incapable of learning. His five phrases on China at the Sixteenth Congress are permeated through and through with that same organic opportunism which governed Stalin’s policy at all the earlier stages of the struggle of the Chinese people. The undertaker of the second Chinese revolution is preparing before our very eyes to strangle the third Chinese revolution at its inception.” (p 304)
And, so it was. The only difference, today, is that the “Left” has no state power, nor even any effective apparatus. That, in many ways, is a blessing, but it has exacerbated the way these groups have, even more than Stalin, pinned their colours to the mast of more powerful class forces, to hitch a ride. Unfortunately, that ride is taking them in the opposite direction to the international socialist revolution.
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