From the Declaration of the 25th CPNZ National Conference, Sept 1993
In January 1992, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of New Zealand came to the conclusion that the “capitalist counter-revolution” in Russia had begun in the Stalin era, not with Khrushchev in the 1950s as the CPNZ had previously asserted.
The Stalinist “bureaucrats” dominated the state apparatus and “coalesced into a new ruling class expropriating the fruits of the labour of workers and peasants”, the Central Committee declared.
These words are taken from the inner party circular of January 1992 announcing the Central Committee’s conclusions. Over the next year and a half, the CPNZ’s members and friends made a detailed study of events in Russia during the Stalin era.
The CPNZ’s 25th National Conference in September 1993 passed a resolution condemning Stalinism as the “gravedigger of the Bolshevik Revolution” and the “builder of state capitalism” in the Soviet Union. And Conference adopted the declaration on Stalinism which you are now reading.
The Stalinist bureaucracy built state capitalism in Russia on the ruins of working class state power. Because this counter-revolution was carried out in the name of “socialism”, however, it had such a devastating impact on the international working class that the effects are felt to this day.
The New Zealand working class cannot take up the struggle for socialism in a serious way until it knows exactly how and why the counter-revolution happened in Russia. This is the significance of the CPNZ’s investigation of Stalinism.
Like most things, the CPNZ’s break with Stalinism wasn’t the product of a sudden flash of consciousness. Practice came before theory. The increasingly antagonistic nature of the class struggle inside New Zealand over the preceding decade meant that neither the working class nor its Marxist party could carry on in the same old way. The CPNZ was compelled to more clearly sort out the relationship between party and class.
The CPNZ’s contribution to the growth of mass movements was based on the party’s commitment to helping the working class become the ruling class so it could pave the way to classless society. This was in opposition to Stalinism, which insists that the party – not the class – must rule.
As the clash of interests between capital and labour became more marked, the cleavage between the CPNZ’s mass-based Marxist practice and the bureaucratic anti-Marxist practice and the bureaucratic anti-Marxist concepts of Stalinism grew more apparent.
The inevitable occurred at the CPNZ Central Committee meeting in January 1992. Here, unconsciousness turned into consciousness, practice into theory, and Stalinism was rejected as an enemy of Marxism.
The First World War sparked off the revolutionary upsurge in Russia during 1917. Lenin’s slogan was “All power to the Soviets!” The Bolshevik Revolution placed effective power in the hands of the workers soviets in the industrial centres, particularly Petrograd (later re-named Leningrad) and Moscow. The soviets became the mass-based institutions of working-class rule.
While over 80 per cent of the country’s population were peasants, the tiny minority of industrial workers were concentrated in large factories in the main cities and their social weight far exceeded their numerical size. The industrial workers constituted the social base of the revolution.
After a brief interlude to gather its forces, the counter-revolution struck back. In all regions of Russia, the Soviets were attacked by White armies representing the capitalist employers, feudal landowners and state officials dispossessed by the revolution. The White uprising was supported by the troops of fourteen capitalist countries, including big powers like Britain, Japan, America, Germany and France.
By November 1920, the Red Army had beaten the White uprising and imperialist intervention. In the process, however, the revolution was bled dry.
Huge numbers of working class militants lay dead on the battlefields. Many others were absorbed into the state apparatus and posted to remote corners of Russia just to keep the country going, which broke their links with the main concentration of workers. All working class uprisings in other countries were defeated, leaving the Bolshevik Revolution isolated. An imperialist blockade choked Russia off from the rest of the world.
The country’s economy lay in ruins. Particularly hard hit was the Bolshevik stronghold of heavy industry, with manufacturing, mining and transport reduced to a tiny fraction of pre-war levels.
A massive fall in labour productivity undermined the economic authority of the working class. The poor educational level of workers made them unduly reliant on capitalist specialists hostile to the cause of socialism.
Grain production was devastated. Famine stalked the land, forcing a huge percentage of urban workers to migrate to the villages in search of food. The peasant masses surrounded the remnants of the working class with a petty capitalist atmosphere.
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The working class was decimated, disorganised and demoralised by catastrophic events beyond its control. The Soviets became empty shells, since they were no longer based on the mass mobilisation of workers, delivering a crippling blow to the social base of the revolution. The rule of the working class was simply beaten down by overwhelming odds, leaving the revolution momentarily suspended in mid-air.
Inevitably, this political vacuum was going to be filled by the strongest force outside the working class. This force was the Party bureaucracy.
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As a result of the working class being “largely declassed”, the outward shell of working class power was left behind, but its inner substance had disintegrated. The Soviets were still convened from time to time, but they were nothing more than a rubber stamp for the Party's politburo, since the dynamics of history had placed all power in the hands of the Bolshevik Party.
Particularly while Lenin was still at the helm, the Party tried to act as a stop-gap substitute for the loss of the mass-based rule of the working class.
As the 1920s rolled on, however, the impersonal logic of wielding a political monopoly over the country began to convert the Bolshevik Party from the servant of the working class into its master. This found theoretical reflection in Stalin’s insistence that the Party – not the class – ruled in the Soviet Union.
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[Trotsky] demanded that “secretarial bureaucratism” [referring to appointment by Stalin’s secretariat] be replaced by “party democracy.” ...
Trotsky told the politburo that he would spread his ideas to “every party member who I consider to be sufficiently prepared, mature, self-restrained and consequently capable of helping the party find a way out of this impasse without factional convulsions”.
This was the start of Trotsky’s opposition to Stalinist bureaucracy. Even at this early stage, however, his inability to take the struggle out to the working class was clearly evident. Despite coming up against a “bureaucratism of the party apparatus” that he considered to be “fully consolidated”, Trotsky pledged to confine his opposition to within the party – and not even the whole party, but just to those members he felt were “mature”, in a mirror image of the methods of “selection” he criticised Stalin for.
By not appealing directly to the working class, Trotsky sidelined the only force that could take the struggle against bureaucracy to a successful conclusion. Therefore, his desire for “workers' democracy” remained a pious wish devoid of practical content.
This found reflection in his refusal to approve the existence of political trends like the Workers Group or to protest at the arrest of their adherents. In essence, Trotsky believed the Bolshevik Party must retain its political monopoly over the state machine.
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With the defeat of the united opposition and the “peasant” faction, the way was clear for the Stalinist bureaucracy to totally subordinate workers and peasants to the sole objective of the accumulation of capital.
In the drive to industrialise Russia, the bureaucracy began to act as a “collective capitalist” in pursuit of the maximum accumulation of capital from the maximum exploitation of urban and rural toilers. The bureaucracy’s evolution into a ruling class expressed the ruthless logic of exploitation, which requires a privileged social class to manage and enforce it.
Under the banner of “socialism in one country”, the Soviet Union was transformed into a state capitalist country.
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...the cult of Stalin wasn’t primarily a product of the petty motives of the Great Leader and his cronies ... it was generated by irresistible impulses within the early stage of state capitalist development in backward Russia.
This is why similar “personality cults” accompanied the establishment of other state capitalist regimes, particularly in economically backward countries like China, ...
The state capitalist regimes of Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and Asia all functioned in a broadly similar way to Stalinist Russia. In addition, significant elements of state capitalism emerged inside other countries breaking away from colonial rule, such as India, Egypt, Indonesia, Algeria and Iraq.
Its global spread shows that state capitalism was more than an ideological deviation from Marxism rooted in the historical peculiarities of the Soviet Union. ... a response to pressing economic problems by poor nations with large peasant populations. They needed concentrated, high-tempo accumulation to create an industrial base and so compete with international capitalism.
Driving this process forward was a class of privileged bureaucrats who monopolised economic and political power in order to kick-start a backward economy.
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