How Revolutionaries Learn from the Stalin Period:

Challenge-Desafio, 

Never Believe What Bosses' Mouthpieces Say About the Fight for Communism!

Sixth and last article in the series refuting the fascist, anti-communist lies in the film "Harvest of Despair" and the book Harvest of Sorrow. Originally published in Challenge-Desafio, newspaper of the Progressive Labor Party, in 1987. 

Gorbachev's glasnost' ("reforms") is speeding up the growth of capitalism in the Soviet Union [Note: these prophetic lines were published on April 1, 1987, in Challenge-Desafio!!]. Since Khrushchev, all Soviet leaders have plunged to the right, attacking the "excesses" of the Stalin era. In this series of articles exposing the anti-communist lies around the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, we have shown how Stalin was not the monster all bosses and right-wingers make him out to be. The "mistakes" made by the Soviet government during the Stalin era were not that of a brutal dictator, but rather mistakes made in the process of building a new society. In the following article, the last of the series, we criticize these mistakes from the left. 

The concept Stalin had of socialism tended to equate it with building the economy using capitalist models and stressing production over ideology. It also tended to build authoritarianism ("do what the boss says") as an indispensable aspect of capitalist modes of production. It took years for this tendency to work to its full effect. American workers who went to the USSR in the 1930s -- including the Reuther brothers, later anti-communist bosses of the United Auto Workers Union -- testified to the much greater democracy and freedom from foreman and boss harassment Soviet workers enjoyed as compared to American workers (the Reuthers had worked in US auto plants before going to the USSR). 

But capitalist ideas gradually won out. From being a voluntary organization of dedicated communists, the Party became essentially a hierarchical organization whose leaders were economic managers. By the early 1950s this transformation was complete. The Soviet Union was capitalist in all but name. 

The Bolshevik Party had been split by dissention and factionalism during the 1920s, as the members struggled to learn how to construct the world's first workers' state. These disagreements were handled very responsibly, according to the principles of democratic centralism. The relatively few individualists who, like Leon Trotsky, continued to form factions to oppose carrying out the line of the Party, were expelled only after long, mass struggles had isolated them, and they had been given many chances to change themselves. By the late 1920s the party was more united than ever before. 

The trauma of the collectivization movement changed all that. Called by the Party a "revolution from above," it resembled a civil war in some areas of the country, including Asia, where the Party was especially weak. It produced many disagreements. Under these circumstances old factions, as well as some new ones, emerged. 

Yet none of these factions or dissidents broke with the Party's line to the left. None saw through the idea that "the material bases for socialism must be built first." Virtually all the factions advocated some form or another of capitalism, some kind of return to NEP (the New Economic Policy) which had proven unsuccessful in the 1920s. All of the "oppositionists" from Bukharin to Trotsky who are favored among "left"-wing anti-Stalinists today fit this description. 

The Bolshevik left wing, both in the USSR and around the world, stuck with the Party's line. But due to the erroneous notion that the `forces of production" had to be built to provide the "material basis" for socialism, this contradictions with the Party were handled very differently from in the past. 

During the 1920s there was a Party Congress and a Party Conference virtually every year, and thousands of lower- level meetings throughout the USSR. During these meetings the Party's line was thrashed out, debated fully, and decided upon. This is the way Trotsky and the other factionalists had been defeated. This process also accounts for Stalin's great prestige in the party, since Stalin represented the left wing in all these debates. His works written during the 20s, collected in his book On the Opposition, illustrate his ability to unmask revisionist ideas -- capitalism masquerading as communism -- and are still valuable reading for communists today. 

But the authoritarian style of work and of leadership that flowed from the idea of putting economics ahead of politics made it impossible for democratic centralism to operate as before. An authoritarian centralism, or "commandism" -- the leadership giving orders -- too over. "Material incentives" -- higher pay to some, lower pay to most -- to increase production followed close behind. In 1932 the "Party Maximum" was abolished. This was an important rule that stated that communists could not make more than a certain modest wage. Communists were supposed to be examples of selfless working for their class, not for themselves. This "partymax" had been intended to fight careerism, and to make sure that communists were an example for others. 

It was apparently abolished because it was thought to hinder the recruitment of technically-trained experts into the Party -- persons whose expertise was thought essential to the Five-Year Plan's crash industrialization programs. From then on, getting into the Party became the only route to a high standard of living. so the fact that collectivization was, to a large extent, forced upon unwilling peasants was a consequence of an incorrect idea of what communism was all about. 

The experience of the Rural People's Commune movement in China in 1955-56, which was a "revolution from below," from the peasant masses, shows that peasants can be won to communism. But the reversal of the Chinese revolution during the 1960s shows that a conception of communism that fails to eradicate capitalist differences in pay and living standards among the population will lead to a return of capitalist exploitation, regardless of the degree of mass support for that concept. In this sense, the fact that Soviet collectivization was largely forced is, finally, only a secondary factor in explaining the reversal of workers' power in the USSR. Without a change in the fundamental concept of what socialism was -- of how to advance to a classless, communist society -- a new capitalist, class society will evolve. 

The Chinese Communist Party's success in making communism a more mass goal did produce a huge and often violent rebellion against revisionist idea -- the Cultural Revolution. That experience and our own struggles have made it possible for our Party, the PLP, to advance our line and learn from the weaknesses of the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions. 

The Importance of a Communist Standpoint

We have seen through the lies about he "Ukrainian holocaust" with the help of recent research on the Soviet Union in the 1930s. These researchers wish to make good careers for themselves by applying to research on the Soviet Union the same standards of sources and evidence that most bourgeois scholars use about other periods of history. In addition, many of them are animated by a hostility for the Cold War and a desire for "detente" with the USSR. 

This is useful, but it is far from enough. These researchers are not interested in learning where the Soviets went wrong, from the viewpoint of learning how to build a communist society the right way the next time. Since they don't ask this question, they can hardly come to the right answer to it! Since their research serves the interest only of the diminishing sing of the capitalist class that holds out promise for detente, it doesn't gain much support or prominence. They have little impact. 

Until the late 1970s none of these researchers were around. Suppose the "Ukrainian holocaust" story had been pushed more vigorously at that time? A series of articles like this one, with detailed refutations of the dishonest sources used by the anti-communists and illustrated by the research of thorough bourgeois scholars, would not have been possible. 

The point here is, we cannot rely on bourgeois scholars, however well-intentioned, to refute anti-communist lies. The ruling class has thousands of "experts" like Conquest who can turn out anti-Communist slander far faster than we can hoe to refute them. The fat that, in the case of the "Ukrainian famine," we were able to do so is largely a matter of historical accident. 

Conquest can help us here. In the course of defending the US imperialist invasion of Vietnam, he once wrote as follows: 

The Vietcong lobby [he means the anti-war movement - ed.]do not, as a rule, believe (or at any rate expect other people to believe) such Vietcong allegations as that made by its official representative at a Stockholm communist women's conference last year, of children "gunned down in their thousands, beheaded, buried alive, quartered and thrown into the flames" by the Americans (The Times [London, England], 4 October 1966). But they do not draw the obvious conclusion that no information emanating directly or indirectly from such a source deserves credit. 1 

Ironically, the My Lai massacre and many other atrocities by US troops later showed Conquest was wrong about this particular case. But his general point is valid. "Researchers" like Conquest and the sources he uses or like Mace and the Ukrainian nationalists, have been exposed time and time again. Anti-Communists like Conquest have been proven to lie shamelessly to advance their goals. Nothing any anti-Communist sources write about the history of the Communist movement should be believed. 

We ought to promote among workers and among our friends -- and, first of all, within ourselves -- certain fundamental truths which are beyond question: 

The fight for communism in the USSR was a wonderful chapter in the struggle for a world of justice and equality that has animated most of humankind since the days of the slave empires of antiquity. The October Revolution of 1917 and the struggle to build communism is a great source of inspiration for the oppressed of the world. It proved for all time that the working class can and will overthrow the capitalists. It struck terror into the hearts of ruling classes everywhere, and it still does. 

It was inevitable that the first workers' state would eventually fail. The Bolsheviks' errors were made in an inspiring struggle to learn how to construct a communist society on the ruins of capitalism. Most of these errors were unavoidable. History proceeds by zigs and zags, never in a straight line of upward progress. 

The tremendous successes and errors of the Bolshevik Party are largely identified with the leadership of Joseph Stalin. Only those who, like we in the PLP, are striving to learn from the mistakes of our predecessors in the communist movement how to succeed where they ultimately failed, have the correct standpoint from which to objectively evaluate what is positive in their experience and what must be rejected. Capitalists and their "scholars" like Conquest or the Ukrainian nationalists are always attacking Stalin. As we've seen in this essay, they do so dishonestly. 

This is because they are not interested in the truth. They are interested in preserving capitalism, and will tell whatever lies are necessary to persuade workers, students, intellectuals and others not to fight for a communist society. The truth -- that the Bolsheviks achieved much, and that future communists will inevitably succeed where they failed -- is completely unacceptable to the capitalists. Regardless of the evidence, they will never acknowledge this. For this reason, all attacks upon the USSR under Stalin as "horrible," "totalitarian," and upon Stalin himself as a "power-hungry murderer," etc., must be seen for the lies they are. This is not a matter of personalities. Stalin had the loyalty of the working class of the USSR and of tens of millions of other workers around the world. 

As the leader of the world communist movement during most of its revolutionary history, Stalin was responsible for its successes and failures more than any other single individual. We should study and learn from them, but always with respect. There is no reason for us ever to apologize for them. Stalin and the Bolshevik workers he led fought the Revolution and built the world's first working class state. Under them the ideas of communism spread throughout the world. As their heir, we must go farther towards communism. This means building a mass movement for communism along the lines of Road to Revolution IV. That movement itself will be the only valid "criticism" of the period of Stalin's leadership. 

Notes

1. Conquest, "Arguing about Vietnam," Encounter, 30, No. 2 (February, 1968), p. 92. Characteristically, Encounter magazine was revealed during the `60s to have receive CIA funding, and it continues to receive it. Its main editor resigned as a result. Conquest worked for the British anti-Communist propaganda bureau; see part one of this series.