A specter is haunting Afghanistan! But it is not, as some contemporary modernizers of Marxism hold, the specter of communism. It is the hideous specter of Russian imperialism, which celebrates its counter-revolutionary bacchanal on the bodies of peasants mass-murdered in their mountain villages and protesting school children cut down on the streets of Kabul by Red Army bullets. Though perhaps not on the same scale as the US colonization of Vietnam in the 1960’s, Russian “pacification” of Afghanistan is every bit as violent and thorough.
But our purpose here is not to describe the motives and mechanisms of “Soviet” imperialism in Afghanistan. Rather, we intend to expose the theoretical barrenness of the Spartacist apologia for Russian colonialism. This capitulation is justified by the peculiar contention that capitalism has been abolished in Russia to be replaced by a regime which is not yet socialist, but which merits the proletariat’s “unconditional defense”, since it rests upon “proletarian property forms”. We will show that the Spartacists lay claim to the legacy of “Trotskyism” only to defame the architect of the October insurrection. However dwarfed the Spartacists may be by the towering stature of Leon Trotsky, their treasonous position on the Soviet Union nevertheless flows from Trotsky’s own mistakes in his later years. Exiled and isolated in the 1930’s, Trotsky developed an analysis that was ambiguous, contradictory and untenable in the long run. In a sense, the whole of Spartacism was contained in Trotsky’s positions, and it represents one of the inevitable outcomes of his vacillations. To demonstrate this, it will be necessary to review some of Trotsky’s more categorical statements on the nature of the Russian state and its involvement in World War II.
In his article “The USSR in War” (1939), Trotsky demonstrates that, unlike the Spartacists, he was still aware that
“The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organization of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones.”
We will not comment here on the fact that he designates “defending former conquests” as a concrete objective of the proletariat at the time. Further on, we will deal with this position, which the Spartacists take to the absurd. However, we are in absolute agreement with this primary political criterion.
This is precisely the real criterion by which a party or state should be judged. Unfortunately, Trotsky was unable to hold to his criterion and instead introduced others. Why? Fundamentally because he considered that the nationalization of industry, or as he said “statification of property” constituted a measure “revolutionary in character”, a “progressive measure” no matter what the class nature of the state that undertakes it. But for us, and for Marx and Engels (who explains this clearly enough in Anti-Dühring) and Lenin, such a measure in itself does not go beyond capitalism, and is not progressive, does not constitute a step TOWARD socialism, unless it is undertaken by the dictatorship of the proletariat, unless it is the proletariat organized as the ruling class, which thus concentrates control of social production in its own hands. But Trotsky had begun to reverse the relationship between politics and economics: it is no longer the class character of the state (defined by the “primary political criterion”!) which gives nationalization its significance and content; rather it is nationalization which determines the class character of the state. Hence, Trotsky’s difficulty in defining the USSR, a dilemma which he left hanging in the hope that history would resolve it.
Here then is the source of Trotsky’s contradictions. On the one hand he states that
“Inasmuch as Stalin’s Bonapartist dictatorship bases itself not on private but on state property, the invasion of Poland by the Red Army should, in the nature of the case, result in the abolition of private capitalist property, so as thus to bring the regime of the occupied territories into accord with the regime of the USSR.”
And he argues that this measure is “revolutionary in character”. On the other hand, he recoils from the consequences of this statement and declares that
“Thus, we must first and foremost establish that the extension of the territory dominated by bureaucratic autocracy and parasitism, cloaked by “socialist” measures, can augment the prestige of the Kremlin, engender illusions concerning the possibility of replacing the proletarian revolution by bureaucratic maneuvers, and so on. This evil by far outweighs the progressive content of Stalinist reforms in Poland.”
But Trotsky is himself partly responsible for this “evil”, since he asserts that “the statification of the means of production is [in itself] a progressive measure”, and since, consciously or not, he gave credence to the Stalinist pretension of building socialism.
In various party texts, we asserted that Stalinism was in fact still revolutionary in the USSR, but in the bourgeois sense, and that if it had limited itself to claiming (as Molotov did until his death) that it was laying the foundations of socialism, it would have been entirely right: the foundations of socialism are nothing other than capitalism. But Trotsky had in mind the revolutionary or counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism in the proletarian sense. In reality, he had surreptitiously added to the perfectly correct “primary political criterion” another criterion which is not even economic but juridical, since it only refers to property forms. He forgot that as long as social wealth functions as capital, it is capitalist property. Trotsky tried to justify his position with historical analogies drawn from bourgeois revolutions. But there analogies are fallacious because, as we have often shown, bourgeois and proletarian revolutions by no means have the same character. If the likes of Czar Alexander II can abolish serfdom, if the likes of Bismarck can make a bourgeois revolution “from above”, if the feudal counter-revolution can be forced to become the executor of the bourgeois revolution, the proletarian revolution has no such surrogates. The task of destroying not only “property forms” but also capitalist relations of production, wage labour and all forms of commodity productions can only be accomplished by the dictatorship of the proletariat!
Trotsky’s inability to grasp the character of the Russian state is clearly present in his deeply flawed attempt at a detailed analysis of the Stalinized Soviet Union in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), a text which his epigones praise as a “classic” of Marxism. Setting out to refute the Stalinist claim that “we have already achieved socialism – that is, the lowest stage of communism” in the USSR, Trotsky first makes a fatal concession to the Stalinist version of the formula “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work”. He states that in the lower phase of communism
“In order to increase the productive forces, it is necessary to resort to the customary norms of wage payment – that is, to the distribution of life’s goods in proportion to the quantity and quality of individual labour”.
In other words, according to Trotsky, under socialism
“the distribution of life’s goods is carried out with a capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences ensuing thereform”.
including the circulation of “money as a measure of value, means of exchange and medium of payment”. Now these two ingredients, wage labour and the circulation of commodities by means of a universal equivalent, money, are precisely the defining characteristics of capitalism. On the other hand, under socialism, these characteristics have disappeared, as Marx states in the Critique of the Gotha Programme:
“Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as an objective quality possessed by them…”.
Of course, it is obvious that the dictatorship of the proletariat will not be able to abolish the market, wage labour and then money overnight. It was even less able to do this in Russia, where an enormous precapitalist sector still existed, and which it had to bring up to level of associated labour. But, on one hand, this is not a justification for confusing socialism with the transition period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. On the other hand, the fact that in an isolated Russia, the proletariat had to strive to raise the productivity of labour by socializing small production, does not at all mean that this task was specifically proletarian ; the counter-revolution – bourgeois and not feudal! – clearly had to undertake it as well, and in a much more ferocious way. Trotsky writes:
“It is exactly for the Marxist that [the question of state ownership] is not exhausted by a consideration of forms of property regardless of the achieved productivity of labour”.
With the introduction of this new factor, he proposes that “the universal historical conception of Marx” cannot be “mechanically” applied “to the particular case of the Soviet Union”, and modifies his formula to read: nationalization plus a high level of productivity equals socialism. And where does this leave Russia? Abandoning the Marxist principle of the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” as the “political transition period” between capitalism and communism, Trotsky concludes:
“It would be truer, therefore, to name the present Soviet regime in all its contradictoriness, not a socialist regime, but a preparatory regime transitional from capitalism to socialism”.
Thus, despite his magnificent battle against the theory of “socialism in one country”, Trotsky here makes a catastrophic concession to Stalin. Under the pretext that large industry was nationalized and that the productive forces were developing, he admits that the USSR is in a stage of transition between capitalism and socialism. Too bad for the “primary political criterion”! It is only logical while preaching the “defense of the USSR”. In reality, this conclusion is his premise: it is because he cannot admit that the counterrevolution had triumphed in Russia and that the proletariat no longer had anything to defend, that he indulges in these theoretical contorsions.
In his article “The USSR in War”, Trotsky continued to founder in contradictions, because he used not one criterion, but two, which, far from coinciding, can be opposed to each other. In a way, he was conscious of this. He had scarcely asserted that Stalinism performs “revolutionary” actions, when he became alarmed and drew back – this creates the illusion that“bureaucratic manoeuvres” can replace the proletarian revolution. Never! But he was not able to extricate himself:
“We must not lose sight for a single moment of the fact that the question of overthrowing the Soviet bureaucracy is for us subordinate to the question of preserving state property in the means of production in the USSR; that the question of preserving state property in the means of production in the USSR is subordinate for us to the question of the world proletarian revolution.”
Now he finds that
“From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution.”
Trotsky is caught in a vicious circle.
He is so aware of the contradictory character of this position, that he proposes it as provisional. Unfortunately it is not only his analysis that he puts to the test of fire, to the test of war, but all of Marxism.
“If, however, it is conceded that the present war will provoke not a revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains another alternative: the further decay of monopoly capitalism, its further fusion with the state and the replacement of democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime. The inability of the proletariat to take into its hands the leadership of society could actually lead under these conditions to the growth of a new exploiting class from the Bonapartist fascist bureaucracy. This would be, according to all indications, a regime of decline, signalling the eclipse of civilization.”
And
“The second imperialist war poses the unsolved task on a higher historical stage. It tests anew not only the stability of the existing regimes but also the ability of the proletariat to replace them. The results of this test will undoubtedly have a decisive significance for our appraisal of the modern epoch as the epoch of proletarian revolution. If contrary to all probabilities the October Revolution fails during the course of the present war, or immediately thereafter, to find its continuation in any of the advanced countries; and if, on the contrary, the proletariat is thrown back everywhere and on all fronts – then we should doubtlessly have to pose the question of revising our conception of the present epoch and its driving forces. In that case it would be a question not of slapping a copybook label on the USSR or the Stalinist gang but of re-evaluating the world historical perspective for the next decades if not centuries: Have we entered the epoch of social revolution and socialist society, or on the contrary the epoch of the declining society of totalitarian bureaucracy ?”
If one accepts the existence of a “new exploiting class”, one necessarily accepts a new mode of production unforeseen by Marxism. Or one admits that exploitation and oppression do not flow from relations of production but
from some kind of master-slave relation. Postulates of this type are a complete revision of the historical doctrine of Marxism. For Trotsky they remained conditional, but they have been developed systematically and in an affirmative way by a whole slough of Trotskyists since the war.
Equipped with an arsenal of theoretical distortions, the heirs of Trotsky – foremost the Spartacists – are so brazen as to insist that wage slavery has been abolished in the Soviet Union. Of Trotsky’s two criteria, the Spartacists have rejected the essential political criterion, retaining only the juridical criterion, which they confuse with the economic or social criterion. Whereas Trotsky only spoke of the “abolition of capitalist private property” in the part of Poland occupied by the USSR in 1939, the Spartacists speak of the abolition of capitalism in countries like China, Yugoslavia, Cuba and… Albania, not to mention the rest of Eastern Europe. But Trotsky still knew that the abolition of capitalism is much more than statified property forms. While Trotsky was caught in the void between the “progressive content” of Stalinist reforms and the “political evil” they produced, the Spartacists break out of the dilemma by ignoring the “political evil” to exalt the “progressive content”. They take the reversal Trotsky had only suggested to the absurd: because the economy has been nationalized in East Germany, (for example), the German Democratic Republic is a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat! “Communism means state-controlled economy”, pontificate the bourgeois ideologues, East and West; “Yes, yes, by Trotsky’s beard!”, echo the Sparticists, joining the chorus to condemn Marxism to oblivion and disarm the working class.
The Spartacists glorify the “progressive” exploits of the Russian invasion force in Afghanistan – which “everyone recognizes… is one of the few stabilizing features in a dangerously unstable situation” (!) – even though they state clearly that it does not carry out socialist measures, which are not on the order of the day, but merely eradicates certain pre-capitalist economic, social and political relations. While in fact admitting – though not in so many words – that the Russians are acting in accordance with sordid imperialist motives, they exalt the actions as “progressive in spite of themselves”. Hail Red Army that liberates Afgani women… no doubt the same way it liberated” German women in 1945! To be sure, this is far from Trotsky’s position, stated thus: “We do not entrust the Kremlin with any historic mission”. But his position was contradictory, since, though not “entrusting” Stalin with any historic mission, he thought that the latter could and even had to carry out measures “revolutionary in character”, measures which the proletariat would then have to defend. In fact, if Trotsky did not entrust Stalin with a historic mission, he nonetheless admitted that objectively Stalinism had a mission. The Spartacists take the consequences of this capitulation to the extreme, which leads to the complete liquidation of the Marxist conception of history.
By eliminating the essential political criterion, the Spartacists have eliminated the class struggle as the motor of history. Instead of working toward the “growing union of the workers” (Marx), the consciousness and organization of the proletariat, as Trotsky said, they have given priority to “progressive measures” implemented by just about anyone for just about any reason. This position in certainly not new. We can overlook Lasalle for the moment (although it would be instructive to compare Lasalle’s attitude to Bismarck and the Spartacists’s servility toward the Kremlin) and recall the social-democratic right wing’s capitulation to colonialism. Claiming that colonialism merely exported “democratic civilization”, i.e. capitalism, it vacillated between a benevolent neutrality and open support. Reading the justification the Spartacists give today for the Red Army occupation of Afghanistan is like hearing ossified democrats and reformists extol the virtues of the civilizing mission of the British conquerors in India (where they undermined the horrible caste system!) or reading the English newspapers from 1841-42 when the British army was defeated at Kabul. And don’t forget the glories of the gunboats that brought monstrous Asiatic despotism to its knees in China, or the beneficence of the French army when it “pacified” Algeria. Oh, let us sing praises to colonialism, which “liberated” the poor barbarians and savages from their traditional masters to initiate them into the pleasures of bourgeois society! What craven idiocy!
Why don’t the Spartacists bother to read the pages from Marx where he exalts the Taipeng revolt against the English invasion, or Rosa Luxemburg’s writing on the colonization of Algeria ? They would see what an abyss separates them from Marxism. But it is not enough just to see their betrayals and denounce then. We must expose the arguments they adduce to justify their pseudo-proletarian colonialism.
At the root of Spartacist betrayals is an anti-dialectical vision of history, and in particular of the “progressive” role of the bourgeoisie and capitalism. It cannot be denied that by destroying pre-capitalist relations of production and social relations in whole continents, imperialism moves history forward. But the proletariat cannot solidarize with the colonialism of its own bourgeoisie without destroying itself as a class. On the contrary, it must combat colonialism to the death, solidarize with the struggle of the peoples oppressed and exploited by “its own” state, and integrate their struggle (even the Taipeng and Mau-Mau struggles) into the general fight for the overthrow of bourgeois rule.
In a general sense, it can be said that the march of capitalism toward more “modern”, more concentrated – in short, fascist – economic and political forms moves history in the direction of the proletarian revolution. But the proletariat cannot give its support to this bourgeois “progress”. Its purpose is not to create the objective conditions of its class struggle for state power, but to create the subjective conditions, in other words, its organization as a revolutionary class. This subjective condition is so important that, even in a situation where the bourgeois, national-democratic revolution has not been completed, the proletariat must not tail the bourgeoisie. Not only must it maintain its class independence, but it must try to conquer the leadership of the radical struggle for still bourgeois objectives, striving to become the ruling class both locally and internationally. This has been clear to us since the Manifesto of 1848, but the Spartacists have forgotten or denied it. After entrusting Stalin with erecting the dictatorship of the proletariat in Germany, Poland, etc., they entrust Brezhnev with liberating Afghani women!
They greet Russian imperialism with cries of “Hail Red Army”, revealing that they have erased the boundaries and differences between the bourgeois revolution and the proletarian revolution, between the historical tasks of the bourgeoisie and the historical tasks of the proletariat. Everything that moves, that advances, that constitutes “progress” is labelled socialist, and this leads to the most astonishing paradoxes. Diligently repeating Trotsky’s (somewhat excessive) condemnation of the bourgeoisie’s historical inability” to accomplish its national-democratic revolutionary tasks, the Sparta-cists then claim that capitalism has been abolished by petty-bourgeois nationalists in countries like China, Yugoslavia, and (dare we mention) Albania. The bourgeoisie is dismissed as incapable of accomplishing its own historical tasks, and the next moment it is able to carry out the proletariat’s tasks. And this leaves the proletariat with no further mission except, perhaps, to introduce democracy! If just about anybody can “abolish capitalism”, i.e. introduce communism, then there is no longer any need for a revolution, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, for the party, or the class struggle !
Forgetten is the monumental formula of the Statutes and Rules of the First International:
“In its struggle against the collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act as a class except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes… This constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end – the abolition of classes”.
“The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves”.
Trotsky would have recoiled in horror at the Spartacists’s deformation of Marxism, at this monstrous parody in which nothing of Marxism remains. He would not have cried “Hail Red Army” or “Annex Afghanistan”. He would not have pronounced capitalism abolished in Cuba or Vietnam. He would not have entrusted enemy social forces with accomplishing the historical mission of the proletariat!
But as the preceding demonstration has proven, he did take the first steps in that direction. He did so with hesitations, retreats, little steps forward and great leaps backward, but he had waded into the Rubicon. And unfortunately, he gave full rein to fools who were compelled by history to go beyond the point of no return on the road that Trotsky had tested with the utmost caution. The Spartacists have become mere appendages of the Russian state, a modern version of the “Friends of the Soviet Union” so despised by Trotsky, incapable of grasping the independent class position of the proletariat, which they vilify as propaganda of the other imperialist camp.
It is impossible to criticize the Spartacists without criticizing Trotsky, without tracing the roots of their positions. In reality the Spartacists are beyond mere criticism. They deserve only to be denounced for what they are: rabid counter-revolutionaries. If, in severing all ties with his former collaborator, Parvus, Trotsky could devote a passage in his “Obituary on a Living Friend” to recalling the revolutionary past of the one who had helped Trotsky to discipline his enthusiasm, no such eulogy can be pronounced on the Spartacists. All that can be done is to show how this creature emerged from Trotsky’s experiments in spite of his intentions. We can only restore the primary political criterion which Trotsky always defended, and clear away all the false criteria forced upon him by defeat. In the course of our work, through decades of exile and the darkest period of counter-revolution, we have rejected the dead-ends in which Trotsky strove desperately to find an immediate escape from the counter-revolution.