In the period of decline, its not just the backward sections of the working-class that can be attracted to the siren calls of populism, and its easy, but always phoney solutions. Particularly for tiny groups, always facing extinction, the pressure to find relevance and reason to exist, let alone to seek recruits, drives them into opportunism – or worse, financing from alien class forces and states. They seek to make up for their own weakness and impotence by attaching themselves to the agenda of some more powerful force.
“The cumbersome bureaucracy, separating itself from the revolutionary class that conquered power, seized upon Stalin’s empiricism for his mercenariness, for his complete cynicism in the sphere of principles, in order to make him its leader and in order to create the legend of Stalin which is the holiday legend of the bureaucracy itself. This is the explanation of how and why the strong but absolutely mediocre person who occupied third and fourth roles in the years of the rise of the revolution proved called upon to play the leading role in the years of its ebb, in the years of the stabilization of the world bourgeoisie, the regeneration of Social Democracy, the weakening of the Comintern and the conservative degeneration of the broadest circles of the Soviet bureaucracy.” (p 300-01)
Earlier, the comparison with a worker cooperative was given. In Capital III, Chapter 27, Marx notes the transitional nature of both the cooperative and the joint stock company, as being both socialised capital. In the case of the worker cooperative, this transitional form is manifest, in the fact that, although it is still capitalist in nature, it is capital now owned and controlled workers. Yet, in a worker cooperative, there are numerous conditions in which the workers may not exercise control over the capital. For all those reasons, actual control may fall to the managers and administrators that the workers rely on, as a result of a division of labour. But, it does not change the fact that this is a worker cooperative that its capital is the collective property of the workers employed in it.
The same was true of the USSR. The workers had carried through the revolution, the landowners and bourgeoisie had been expropriated, and the means of production socialised, in different forms, just as socialised capital, in general, may take the form of a worker cooperative, consumer cooperative, a joint stock company, including a multinational corporation, and so on. The point about a transitional form of property, and a transitional society, based upon it, is precisely that it occupies a transitional space between capitalism and socialism, and so has the potential, no more, nor less, to move in one direction or the other.
With or without the entrenched position of the petty-bourgeois bureaucracy, in the USSR, a successful revolution, in Germany, in 1923, for example, would have given a powerful impetus, driving that transition in the USSR towards the socialist pole, and away from the capitalist pole. The opposite happened.
In those conditions, the sentiments of workers, in Russia itself, to take a breather, meshed with those of the bureaucracy and its mouthpiece, Stalin. As David Law set out, many years ago, it was not Trotsky who gained the backing of workers in the party faction fight, but Stalin.
“Besides considerable strength in Moscow, perhaps even an actual majority, the Opposition had managed to capture Party organisations in Ryazan, Penza, Kaluga, Simbirsk and Chelyabinsk. The Opposition’s strength in these provincial towns was plausibly attributed to there being, in those centres, a predominance of Party officials transferred as a reprisal for their dissident opinions. In Moscow the strength of the Opposition lay in the State administration (particularly in economic bodies), and student cells. The opposition was comparatively weak amongst the working class. No doubt this was partly a result of the past record of various members of the Opposition on questions of industrial management, and also partly because questions of immediate working class interest, such as wages, were not given any prominence. Whatever the reasons, in Moscow, at a time when it was gaining majorities among the students, the Opposition could only win 67 out of 346 cells of industrial workers.”
(David Law, “The Left Opposition in 1923” in Critique 2, 1973, p 47)
Trotsky, himself, in his later writings, described how the bureaucracy had first turned to him to represent them, not Stalin.
“Of Stalin it can be said: his defects proved to be to his advantage. The gear teeth of the class struggle meshed into his theoretical limitedness, his political adaptability, his moral indiscriminateness, in a word, into his defects as a proletarian revolutionist, in order to make him a statesman of the period of the petty-bourgeois emancipation from October, from Marxism, from Bolshevism.” (p 301)
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