Throughout its history, all the fundamental political decisions made by Progressive Labor have been determined by two main factors: (1) PL’s own immediate, narrow, sectarian interests, and (2) the interests of the Chinese regime, as interpreted by PL. When the needs of the world revolution and socialism come into conflict with those of the Peking bureaucracy or PL, the cause of the world revolution gets short shrift. Cuba, Vietnam, the Afro-American struggle, Hazard, Monroe– whether the issue is national or international, whether it involves the lives and safety of few or of millions, the basic political pattern remains consistent.
Progressive Labor is not the first group in the history of the working-class movement to be marked by such politics. Long before PL broke from the American CP or before the Maoist leaders broke with the Kremlin bureaucracy, the same basic considerations determined the political line of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and the parties of the post-Lenin Third International. While the Maoists broke with one tendency in the Stalinist movement, they never broke from Stalinism itself.
“Stalinism” is not an epithet used indiscriminately against one’s opponents the way PL uses “revisionist” or “counterrevolutionary” or “racist.” It is a term that describes a historical phenomenon of fundamental importance that first emerged in the 1920s and continues to exist to this day.
The first victorious socialist revolution took place in Czarist Russia, an extremely backward capitalist country with vestiges of feudalism and a huge peasant population barely one generation out of serfdom. The country was devastated by World War I, civil war and invasion by the armies of 14 capitalist nations. The entire revolutionary vanguard was decimated by the war and epidemics and many of the most brilliant and far-sighted of the leaders of the revolution, including Lenin himself, died in the early years. The expectation of major aid from a victorious revolution in Germany–or in one of the other more advanced Western European nations–faded as the revolutionary wave of the postwar years subsided. Hemmed in by blockade and facing enormous problems, the first workers state had to count largely on its own resources to survive.
At that time – unlike later grotesque carricatures of Bolshevism – there were still numerous political tendencies within the Soviet Communist Party. Sharp debates occurred over basic policy decisions in every realm of Soviet life. Trotsky unquestionably emerged as the leader of the Leninist, proletarian tendency while Stalin spoke for the growing petty-bourgeois forces within the party. To the right of Stalin was yet another current, whose policies tended more clearly than Stalin’s towards capitalist restoration. As general secretary of the party, Stalin was in a position to consolidate his power over the party apparatus, which he did through manipulation, coercion and the violation of all the norms of democratic centralism.
It was not Stalin’s personal characteristics, however, that were decisive in the ultimate victory of his faction over both the left and right oppositions. Great political struggles are essentially battles between contending social forces and material interests, and each camp finds leaders in its own image to conduct the struggle on its behalf.
Stalin’s faction represented not the bold and courageous forward march of the revolution but the inevitable relapse that has followed every revolution in history. As Trotsky explained in The Revolution Betrayed, “It is for the very reason that a proletariat still backward in many respects achieved in the space of a few months the unprecedented leap from a semifeudal monarchy to a socialist dictatorship, that the reaction in its ranks was inevitable. . . . After an unexampled tension of forces, hopes and illusions, there came a long period of weariness, decline and sheer disappointment in the results of the revolution. The ebb of the ’plebian pride’ made room for the flood of pusillanimity and careerism. The new commanding caste rose to its place upon this wave.”
As the privileged, bureaucratic caste acquired total power in the Soviet Union with Stalin at its head, the Leninist proletarian opposition was crushed, its supporters exiled, expelled from the party and murdered.
The Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky promoted the welfare of the workers and peasants and the world socialist revolution; Stalin’s party was quite different. Stalinism, as a political current in the working-class movement, represented the interests of a special small layer of Soviet society, the privileged upper crust served by a ruthless ruling bureaucracy in a stale where capitalist property relations had been overturned.
As Stalinism emerged it spoke not for the interests of the working class but for the petty-bourgeois layers of Soviet society. Initially this was primarily the middle and rich peasantry, the small property owners who were concerned with maintaining their own little plot of land, their markets, their profits. Subsequently, it became based more and more on the most privileged workers, managers, administrators, and favored nationalities.
The petty-bourgeois Stalinist tendency rapidly became fixed in the form of a privileged caste, with its own political logic, needs and interests. As a middle-class current within the workers’ movement it invariably subordinated the needs of the working class to the needs of the bureaucracy, thus playing a counterrevolutionary role through and through. But the Stalinist bureaucracy had a double problem. Its privileged position depended upon the preservation of the nationalized property, development of a planned economy, a state monopoly of foreign trade–i.e., defense of the basic conquests of the revolution.
But simultaneously, new advances of the world revolution posed a threat to the bureaucracy from two opposite sources: (1) from the hostile imperialist countries which might seize upon new revolutionary advances as a pretext for intensifying counterrevolutionary activity and undertaking military aggression against the Soviet Union, and (2) from the emergence of revolutionary currents which would challenge the authority and privileges or the Kremlin rulers.
Thus the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy and those of the world revolution diverged sharply from the late 1920s on. As a bureaucratic caste based on a privileged layer in Soviet society, its policies were thoroughly nationalistic. The Soviet rulers and the Communist parties around the world subordinated the needs of the working masses in Spain, France, Germany, China, the U. S. and every other country to the interests of “building socialism in one country” by pursuing the will-o-the-wisp of “peaceful coexistence,” as it is known today.
One of the characteristic features of Stalinism is its political zig-zag course between ultraleft adventurism and right-wing opportunism, depending on the particular needs of the moment either nationally or internationally. This is reflected in the policies of the pro-Moscow CPs around the world as well. Thus, in the U.S., the American CP, in the pre-World War II period, swung from the ultraleft sectarianism of the “Third Period” to support for the Roosevelt wing of the capitalist class in 1936, to denunciation of Roosevelt during the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1940, and back to fervent wartime support for Roosevelt after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
In another about-face, in the Eastern European countries following World War II, Moscow first tried to crush the popular anticapitalist movement and maintain capitalist ownership, and then reversed policy and abolished capitalist property and power when the nascent cold war convinced Stalin the USSR needed the protection of a “buffer zone.”
Representing the interests of the bureaucracy rather than the working class, Stalinism necessarily means a turn away from the masses, a distrust of them, a fear of open democratic political confrontation of programs and ideas within the working-class movement. The organizational methods of the Soviet regime simply reflect the dual character and political interests of the bureaucratic caste. It must bridle the right-wing currents whose policies would lead precipitously toward capitalist restoration and suppress its revolutionary opponents who would establish genuine socialist democracy and abolish bureaucratic privilege.
Thus the Stalinists branded all opponents within the workers’ movement as “counterrevolutionaries” and “class enemies,” and introduced the methods of physical intimidation and even assassination for dealing with working-class political opponents, both inside and outside the Soviet Union.
The Maoists never analyzed, never understood and never repudiated any of these basic political and organizational characteristics. On the contrary, they wholeheartedly agreed with them. Far from attempting to guard against the bureaucratic deformation of the Chinese revolution, the Stalinized CP that took power was itself already a heavily bureaucratized organization.
From the beginning, the leaders of the Chinese CP modeled the institutions of Chinese society on the Stalinist pattern in the USSR. The significant aid which the Soviet Union extended China in the early years of the revolution was conditional on their doing nothing that would antagonize or cut across the policies of the Soviet leaders. This also helped foster a strong bureaucratic caste which as it extended and consolidated itself became as nationalist minded as the mentors in the Soviet Union.
The rupture between the Soviet and Chinese leaderships occurred only when the national bureaucratic interests of the new powers in Peking came into sharp conflict with those of the Soviet bureaucracy.
An understanding of the nature of Stalinism is essential for anyone who hopes to comprehend both the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese revolution, or the convoluted history of the defenders of the Chinese bureaucracy abroad like PL. Whatever differences may exist between them, the present Chinese regime is not essentially different from the Soviet regime–a privileged, nationalist-minded bureaucratic caste dominates a country in which capitalist property relations have been abolished and the foundations of a socialist society established. Surrounded by the hostile forces of imperialism, it is steering a course both domestically and internationally which is designed to meet the immediate needs of the ruling bureaucracy.