Howe Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
From Labor Action, Vol. 10 No. 46, 18 November 1946, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Before an audience of over 700 people, who packed New York’s Hotel Diplomat, Max Shachtman, national chairman of the Workers Party, debated Liston Oak, managing editor of the New Leader, on the subject: Does Stalinism Flow from Bolshevism? last Friday night, November 8. Oak took the affirmative and Shachtman the negative.
This debate took place on the 29th anniversary of the Russian Revolution – the first in history in which the workers established their own government – and if was entirely fitting that Shachtman, as a spokesman for the American revolutionary socialists in and around the Workers Party, should make an eloquent and effective defense of this revolution in this debate. For the principles of the great October Revolution remain the principles on which the Workers Party stands.
Liston Oak, who spoke as a Social Democrat, began his speech with an admission that there were great differences between Leninism and Stalinism, but asserted that Lenin and Trotsky had used similar, “dictatorial” methods as has Stalinism, and that the Stalinist regime was the “logical outgrowth” of the “one-party dictatorship established by the Bolsheviks.”
Oak saw Bolshevism as a kind of terroristic conspiracy on the part of a tiny, disciplined minority group, ruthless in its fanaticism and readiness to resort to violence, and unscrupulous in the means it used to reach its ends. Though Stalin is “cruder” than Lenin, he said, they are both in the Bolshevik tradition, Stalin continuing the amoral methods of Lenin. Stalinism is the result, in Oak’s view, of the unwillingness of the Bolshevik leaders to work with or unite with any of the other socialist groups in Russia. Having established a minority dictatorship, Oak continued, the Bolsheviks could only resort to terror and thereby pave the way for Stalin.
To buttress his case, Oak quoted from Social-Democratics like Kautsky and Plekanov, who were opposed to the Bolshevik revolution; from Marxists like Luxemburg who supported the Bolshevik revolution even though disagreeing with certain of Lenin’s tactics; and from Trotsky’s early writings at the turn of the century in which he polemized against Lenin. Oak attacked Lenin’s conception of the party as leading to a conspiratorial clique of “professional revolutionists” who seek to manipulate the masses as if generals of an army. The Social-Democratic or Menshevik conception of a party, on the other hand, is, he said, a loosely-knit democratic organization.
Oak supported the pre-Lenin policy of the Bolsheviks which called for a coalition government with the bourgeois parties. (What was amusing about this, though Oak didn’t seem to notice it, was that it was Stalin – whom Oak now professes to hate so heartily – who favored this policy which Lenin denounced upon arriving in Russia.)
Oak then denounced the Bolsheviks for illegalizing the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, though he did not mention why this was done. He denounced, further, the dissolution by the Bolsheviks of the Constituted Assembly which had been elected several months before the Bolshevik Revolution and represented the pre-revolutionary sentiments of the masses when they were still hesitant about supporting the Bolsheviks.
Turning to our day, Oak rejected the conception of revolution, which he believed would inevitably fall under Stalinist control, and came out in favor of gradual reforms since he considers that capitalism still has certain progressive functions to fulfill.
Max Shachtman opened his presentation by emphasizing the historical background against which the debate was being held: “Capitalism is bankrupt. To support it is equivalent to the suicide of society ... What is Bolshevism? Bolshevism is the planned and organized attempt to mobilize the working class to take over state power in its own interests in order to use its political supremacy for the purpose of establishing a classless society.”
“If,” continued Shachtman, “it can be proved that Stalinism is the natural and inevitable product of Bolshevism, then you will have proved that the working class cannot take and hold socialist power and that any attempt to do so can lead only to its degradation under totalitarian dictatorship. I say this because Bolshevism is the only road to working class power and socialism.”
Shachtman then proceeded to an historical examination of Bolshevism. The truth about it has been obscured first by the propaganda barrage by the bourgeoisie which would identify it with dictatorship, he pointed out, and secondly by the Stalinists ... who would also identify it with dictatorship. He traced the origin of the Bolshevik movement in Russia, its struggle to overthrow the Czarist autocracy, its demand for democratic rights for the Russian masses. He differentiated Bolshevism, which placed its faith in the working class and peasantry, from the Mensheviks, who wanted a coalition with the liberal capitalists. And he further pointed out that the actual experiences of the Russian revolution confirmed the Bolshevik point of view, and showed it to be in harmony with the most profoundly democratic aspirations of the masses – for that was why the masses turned to Lenin.
The Bolshevik Party, attacked by its enemies as dictatorial, was in reality a highly disciplined organization for it was serious in its objective to destroy Czarism and capitalism; but at the same time it was the most democratic organization in bistory, for in no other party was there such freedom and fullness of discussion, such intellectual loyalty toward scrupulous regard for the rights of minorities. Only the Stalinist debasement has misled people to identify Bolshevism with internal party dictatorship.
“You will not find one party in modern times,” stressed Shachtman, “in which there was such free discussion, such rich and fruitful interchange of ideas.... The whole internal history of Bolshevism is a history of free discussion and debate, not conducted in a dark comer, but openly, in the press of the party itself.”
Shachtman laid particular stress on this last phrase.
“You need only read the works of Lenin,” continued Shachtman, “to see reflected there the vigorous, rich and fertile intellectual life, the favorable atmosphere for the development of revolutionary thought, that always prevailed in the Bolshevik party. Read these works and see if so much as a seed of Stalinism can be found in them!”
Shachtman then pointed out that on three essential touchstones of democratic and socialist standards the Bolshevik party was unsurpassed: its attitude toward national minorities; its attitude toward imperialist wars; and its attitude toward revolutions. He noted how the Bolsheviks granted freedom to Finland as soon as they acquired power and then made a devastating contrast with the behavior of the English Social-Democrat, Arthur Henderson “who sat in the British Cabinet as Privy Councillor when the British bombed and shelled Dublin in the Easter uprising of 1916 and murdered the Irish socialist martyr James Connolly!”
Shachtman, by this time going full guns, launched into a contrast between the war records of the Bolsheviks – who denounced World War I as imperialist and spread no illusions ‘about it among the masses – and the war record of the Social-Democrats, each section of which supported its own imperialist rulers. “There is your road to socialism,” he turned to Oak, “Ad astra per Hohenzollcrn and Churchill! To the stars through Hohenzollern and Churchill!”
Shachtman contrasted the attitudes of the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks toward the Russian Revolution itself: how the former wanted to limit it to a democratic capitalist state unable to solve any basic problems, while the latter pushed through to state power. He challenged Oak to tell the audience what the Mensheviks and SRs did during the civil war, how they worked with international capitalism against the young workers state.
Shachtman proceeded to show how Bolshevism and Stalinism were mortal enemies and complete opposites; how Stalin had launched a campaign of extermination against the old Bolsheviks; how, in fact, many of Oak’s Menshevik heroes had become belated supporters of Stalin; and how Oak himself had during the war supported an alliance with Stalinist totalitarianism.
“We say,” concluded Shachtman, “Stalinism grew out of Bolshevism only because the social democracy destroyed the hopes of the isolated Russian Revolution by trying to keep capitalism alive in Europe. The central lesson in the rise of Stalinism is not the abandonment of Bolshevism but the abandonment of reformism and insistence on the struggle for international socialism.”
In his first rebuttal, Liston Oak stressed a few main points:
In turn, Shachtman drove home the following main points in his rebuttal:
In his final rebuttal Oak rephrased his point of view in more general terms, constructing an abstract argument about totalitarian means and ends. The hall in which the debate was held was decorated with signs advertising Labor Action forums. Some $50 worth of Workers Party literature was sold.
Howe Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 19 July 2020