The model is obviously Russia. In Russia, something very instructive happened: the working class legit overthrew the Tsar but was very close to giving in to moderates who were unambiguously going to reinstall the tsar as part of a constitutional monarchy, and carry out violent martial law via Kornilov to accomplish this.
The revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks was able to to defeat the capitalists and the tsarists, to “finish” the revolution, but what came after was a horrible civil war that destroyed what little productive capacity Russia had developed. Without factories, there’s no workers, without workers, there’s no workers councils (soviets) to hold power. What was left over was the bureaucracy that developed during wartime. This is the class that developed their own interests apart from the working class, effectively becoming a new bourgeois to administer the mixed economy of Stalinism.
Yes Anarchists should be wary of this, and yes “authoritarian statists” are IMO no more revolutionary than a moderate social bureaucrat. I just wish there was better discussion around the practical history of these movements. Even Paul Averich, the anarchist historian, blames events, not ideology, on the degeneration of the Russian revolution.
I think it’s reductive to claim soviet administrators formed a cohesive and distinct class, without justifying this. They gained their incomes from wages, and alongside the rest of the working classes were interested in continued collectivization of production and distribution. The problem wasn’t “Stalinism,” but instead the reforms under Khrushchev that facilitated the growth of a private economy that was not acknowledged by the state the way it is in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc, which led to the growth of bourgeois classes after Stalin.
Cowbee my friend, we are probably not gonna see eye to eye on this. Still mad respect.
The justification is also an accidental quirk of history. The administration of national sovereignty, especially during wartime, requires a layer of administrative workers. The og Bolsheviks were a pretty distinct org with their own character, made up of bourgeois educated intellectuals, a large bellicose element from Russian society, and since the Bolsheviks had the best penetration into the lives of the workers a significant proletarian membership that kept the party afloat during the years of severe tsarist repression from 1907-1912ish, that was itself blended between urban proletarians and peasants transitioning toward proletarianism. But when the time came to administer the Russian state, the intellectual Bolsheviks were spread extremely thin.
The period after the revolution saw a massive influx of members into the Bolsheviks. Were these members revolution hardened Marxists? No. The Bolsheviks were a micro minority up until the April thesis. They swelled in membership immediately prior to the revolution, but these new members were among the workers and soldiers. But after the revolution, they included intellectuals from all stripes: former Mensheviks, SRs and moderates (that is moderate toward the Tsar.) Many people resumed their former posts within the Russian government out of necessity for the state to function. The contradictions during this period were compounded again and again because of the civil war.
This moderate, self interested administrative body is what I refer to as “Stalinist”, since I don’t really consider the post revolutionary Russian bureaucracy a product of Stalin so much as I consider Stalin a product of this bureaucracy. Stalin and the bureaucracy became dynamically fused to one another via mutual self-interest. The banning of factions, one of the major fuck ups of the revolutionary government in 1921, only heightened these contradictions as the Bolshevik party became the primary avenue for naked opportunism.
The Russian revolution was revolutionary and proletariat via the soviets, but when the productive capacity was crushed and the soviets were banned, robbed of the productive base and therefore the concrete power of the workers, what was left? There was no proletarian power represented in the government, especially as Stalin started replacing the old Bolsheviks, who at least had an ideological commitment to worker power, with people loyal to him and the wider project. This bureaucracy had a bourgeois character because it was a middle administrative class ascentionist project, like we’ve seen historically overthrow and maintain power over aristocracies. And honestly I don’t hate this. Lenin would have accepted a bourgeois revolution that completely overthrew the Tsar over a socialist revolution that regressed back into Tsarism. Stalin was extremely moderate toward bourgeois revolution, and Trotsky would have been fine with it too if he had taken leadership. That was what existed, that was all that was left, and that is what persisted into the future. The ideological commitment to socialism was admirable but mixed in that where there was no material basis for socialism it could only exist ideologically.
Here we may run into conflict between definitions of socialism, since I know you define socialism in an AES kind of way, where as I define it as a practical progressive struggle. We’ve discussed this before. Socialism is a movement of the mass base for the class interests of this base, demcent is a way for the masses to appoint leaders in a transparent Democratic way, and communicate material conditions across the uneven development of the proletarian movement, not for leaders to institute top-down discipline. The leaders submit to the discipline of the mass movement, not the other way around, which is bourgeois centralism. In Russia, the proletarian mass movement was crushed by the Capitalists and Tsarists, and what was left over was admittedly much better than what would have come without the revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks. But when the base was crushed what was left was a deeply troubled state apparatus that had a distinct class character that could never have been proletarian. Like I said, this is a quirk of history, a consequence of a socialist worker revolution in a country that was deeply blended between peasant and proletarian in character.
My understanding comes from Trotsky’s works, so HRR, HRR through Brest Litovsk, and Revolution Betrayed; Paul Averich’s Kronstadt 1917; essays by Loren Goldner, and other sources. I find it a little annoying that you brought up the “justification” as if I’m just making shit up. I understand that my “left Trot” political orientation probably auto disqualifies me from a certain perspective. But I’ll def consider any other justifications, articles def appreciated if they pointedly address some of the points I’ve made.
There are more than a few problems I have with your portrayal of events and class composition. I respect your sticking to your principles, but I have some heavy departures, both theoretically and historically.
First, I am well aware that the composition of Bolsheviks became very mixed in a tumultuous wartime environment. This cannot really be denied, nor would I want to. What I want to push back on, however, is the notion that this resulted in a bourgeois character. The industrial base was destroyed, correct, and so it was rebuilt, first focusing on agrarian production, and next on industrial production. Soviets became the basis of the Soviet Union, and by 1936 the Soviet Union had established an industrial and agricultural base that far exceeded pre-war levels.
What happened was that soviet democracy was implemented, and the party became integrated and was composed of the working classes and the newly rejuvenated workers and peasants. Stalin was not some bourgeois figure, nor was the party in opposition to socialism. The bourgeois character did not appear until Khrushchev’s era, growing under Gorbachev and then succeeding in counter-revolution.
Second, the banning of factionalism was necessary and correct. Undermining democratic centralism and establishing wedges by which to break apart the unity of the socialist system would have been catastrophic, and the fifth column elements that existed within the Soviet Union represented a very clear demonstration of such a danger.
The actual class character of the CPSU was proletarian. The bourgeois elements of society, including kulaks, had been liquidated as a firm class by 1936 or so. The devastation of World War II severely weakened the Soviet Union, however, and these cracks grew into weaknesses exploited by the bourgeoisie that had risen again under Khrushchev, resulting in counterrevolution.
For recommended reading, I have 2 good, wildly different options. The first is This Soviet World, written in 1936 by a Statesian journalist named Anna Louise Strong. The earlier chapters are enormously beneficial for understanding the class composition of society and the party, how it integrated with the masses, their relationship, and more, though the whole book is great (mind the dated language surrounding ethnicity, though). The second recommendation is Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. Written after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Losurdo gives a very compelling analysis of the legend of Stalin, moreso than a history of the figure himself. Through this framework, it becomes much easier to see a retrospective on the entire Stalin era of the USSR. Both taken together give a multi-sided view.
OK I’m really not invested in relitigating the USSR, I don’t believe that differences in interpretations, often sourced totally differently, add up to a fundamental theoretical and political difference between mls and left socialists. The tasks before us are clear. I can’t fairly condemn bad behavior by any ML sect any more than I can condone bad behavior by any Trotskyist sect. The people who are committed to the work of socialism, building disciplined cadre, formation of a workers party, opposing colonialism and imperialism, building coalitions or entering authentic worker movements are being taken up by both our tendencies, as well as principled anarchist comrades.
But the industrialization of Russia leading up to 1936 was not a mass movement, it was a forced march. Perhaps necessary, mistakes were inevitable and being in a position to make these drastic but necessary changes is unenviable. But I just can not buy the idea that the Soviets of the late 1930s are proletarian in nature. 1936-1938 was the height of mass purges! How the fuck is the working class supposed to develop an independent working class movement with a literal gun to our head?
The only acceptable explanation is the shocking buy in for the purges across such a huge swath of Russian society. So, if it wasnt brutal dictatorship, then it was mass hysteria. In neither case is this a more progressive and rational society.
Granted, we are in the prewar period, with the greatest existential threat to progress festering practically next door. I’m not saying there aren’t reasons. I’m saying that as far as a proletarian character to the state, it just isn’t in Russia in this period. There’s concrete structural and historical reasons it isn’t there, I’m not really passing judgement so much as stating what I see as fact. International proletarian class hegemony was being strangled, and the imperialist fascist powers finished us off. The international industrial proletariat was the only thing that lent prole legitimacy to the Russian project, but even it had become deeply compromised by the extremely pro-Stalin loyalist Comintern. The third world and international socialism was all but abandoned.
In my estimation you can either say 1. The purges didn’t happen (they did) or 2. they were necessary. And maybe they were. But where I break left with my Trotskyist comrades is at Kronstadt. I think we can make arguments that these atrocities were necessary, that without them something much worse would have occurred, which I think bears out historically. But I just can not be convinced that there is a dominant proletarian character in a society carrying out mass murder/mass purges. The working class does not desire war and death, that is what the capitalists want for us. And I don’t believe that a state carrying out purges and mass executions is doing so in the interests of the international working class. And I think our movements are actually worse off because of them.
But thank you as always for the considerate and well informed response!
The model is obviously Russia. In Russia, something very instructive happened: the working class legit overthrew the Tsar but was very close to giving in to moderates who were unambiguously going to reinstall the tsar as part of a constitutional monarchy, and carry out violent martial law via Kornilov to accomplish this.
The revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks was able to to defeat the capitalists and the tsarists, to “finish” the revolution, but what came after was a horrible civil war that destroyed what little productive capacity Russia had developed. Without factories, there’s no workers, without workers, there’s no workers councils (soviets) to hold power. What was left over was the bureaucracy that developed during wartime. This is the class that developed their own interests apart from the working class, effectively becoming a new bourgeois to administer the mixed economy of Stalinism.
Yes Anarchists should be wary of this, and yes “authoritarian statists” are IMO no more revolutionary than a moderate social bureaucrat. I just wish there was better discussion around the practical history of these movements. Even Paul Averich, the anarchist historian, blames events, not ideology, on the degeneration of the Russian revolution.
I think it’s reductive to claim soviet administrators formed a cohesive and distinct class, without justifying this. They gained their incomes from wages, and alongside the rest of the working classes were interested in continued collectivization of production and distribution. The problem wasn’t “Stalinism,” but instead the reforms under Khrushchev that facilitated the growth of a private economy that was not acknowledged by the state the way it is in China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc, which led to the growth of bourgeois classes after Stalin.
Cowbee my friend, we are probably not gonna see eye to eye on this. Still mad respect.
The justification is also an accidental quirk of history. The administration of national sovereignty, especially during wartime, requires a layer of administrative workers. The og Bolsheviks were a pretty distinct org with their own character, made up of bourgeois educated intellectuals, a large bellicose element from Russian society, and since the Bolsheviks had the best penetration into the lives of the workers a significant proletarian membership that kept the party afloat during the years of severe tsarist repression from 1907-1912ish, that was itself blended between urban proletarians and peasants transitioning toward proletarianism. But when the time came to administer the Russian state, the intellectual Bolsheviks were spread extremely thin.
The period after the revolution saw a massive influx of members into the Bolsheviks. Were these members revolution hardened Marxists? No. The Bolsheviks were a micro minority up until the April thesis. They swelled in membership immediately prior to the revolution, but these new members were among the workers and soldiers. But after the revolution, they included intellectuals from all stripes: former Mensheviks, SRs and moderates (that is moderate toward the Tsar.) Many people resumed their former posts within the Russian government out of necessity for the state to function. The contradictions during this period were compounded again and again because of the civil war.
This moderate, self interested administrative body is what I refer to as “Stalinist”, since I don’t really consider the post revolutionary Russian bureaucracy a product of Stalin so much as I consider Stalin a product of this bureaucracy. Stalin and the bureaucracy became dynamically fused to one another via mutual self-interest. The banning of factions, one of the major fuck ups of the revolutionary government in 1921, only heightened these contradictions as the Bolshevik party became the primary avenue for naked opportunism.
The Russian revolution was revolutionary and proletariat via the soviets, but when the productive capacity was crushed and the soviets were banned, robbed of the productive base and therefore the concrete power of the workers, what was left? There was no proletarian power represented in the government, especially as Stalin started replacing the old Bolsheviks, who at least had an ideological commitment to worker power, with people loyal to him and the wider project. This bureaucracy had a bourgeois character because it was a middle administrative class ascentionist project, like we’ve seen historically overthrow and maintain power over aristocracies. And honestly I don’t hate this. Lenin would have accepted a bourgeois revolution that completely overthrew the Tsar over a socialist revolution that regressed back into Tsarism. Stalin was extremely moderate toward bourgeois revolution, and Trotsky would have been fine with it too if he had taken leadership. That was what existed, that was all that was left, and that is what persisted into the future. The ideological commitment to socialism was admirable but mixed in that where there was no material basis for socialism it could only exist ideologically.
Here we may run into conflict between definitions of socialism, since I know you define socialism in an AES kind of way, where as I define it as a practical progressive struggle. We’ve discussed this before. Socialism is a movement of the mass base for the class interests of this base, demcent is a way for the masses to appoint leaders in a transparent Democratic way, and communicate material conditions across the uneven development of the proletarian movement, not for leaders to institute top-down discipline. The leaders submit to the discipline of the mass movement, not the other way around, which is bourgeois centralism. In Russia, the proletarian mass movement was crushed by the Capitalists and Tsarists, and what was left over was admittedly much better than what would have come without the revolutionary leadership of the Bolsheviks. But when the base was crushed what was left was a deeply troubled state apparatus that had a distinct class character that could never have been proletarian. Like I said, this is a quirk of history, a consequence of a socialist worker revolution in a country that was deeply blended between peasant and proletarian in character.
My understanding comes from Trotsky’s works, so HRR, HRR through Brest Litovsk, and Revolution Betrayed; Paul Averich’s Kronstadt 1917; essays by Loren Goldner, and other sources. I find it a little annoying that you brought up the “justification” as if I’m just making shit up. I understand that my “left Trot” political orientation probably auto disqualifies me from a certain perspective. But I’ll def consider any other justifications, articles def appreciated if they pointedly address some of the points I’ve made.
There are more than a few problems I have with your portrayal of events and class composition. I respect your sticking to your principles, but I have some heavy departures, both theoretically and historically.
First, I am well aware that the composition of Bolsheviks became very mixed in a tumultuous wartime environment. This cannot really be denied, nor would I want to. What I want to push back on, however, is the notion that this resulted in a bourgeois character. The industrial base was destroyed, correct, and so it was rebuilt, first focusing on agrarian production, and next on industrial production. Soviets became the basis of the Soviet Union, and by 1936 the Soviet Union had established an industrial and agricultural base that far exceeded pre-war levels.
What happened was that soviet democracy was implemented, and the party became integrated and was composed of the working classes and the newly rejuvenated workers and peasants. Stalin was not some bourgeois figure, nor was the party in opposition to socialism. The bourgeois character did not appear until Khrushchev’s era, growing under Gorbachev and then succeeding in counter-revolution.
Second, the banning of factionalism was necessary and correct. Undermining democratic centralism and establishing wedges by which to break apart the unity of the socialist system would have been catastrophic, and the fifth column elements that existed within the Soviet Union represented a very clear demonstration of such a danger.
The actual class character of the CPSU was proletarian. The bourgeois elements of society, including kulaks, had been liquidated as a firm class by 1936 or so. The devastation of World War II severely weakened the Soviet Union, however, and these cracks grew into weaknesses exploited by the bourgeoisie that had risen again under Khrushchev, resulting in counterrevolution.
For recommended reading, I have 2 good, wildly different options. The first is This Soviet World, written in 1936 by a Statesian journalist named Anna Louise Strong. The earlier chapters are enormously beneficial for understanding the class composition of society and the party, how it integrated with the masses, their relationship, and more, though the whole book is great (mind the dated language surrounding ethnicity, though). The second recommendation is Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. Written after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Losurdo gives a very compelling analysis of the legend of Stalin, moreso than a history of the figure himself. Through this framework, it becomes much easier to see a retrospective on the entire Stalin era of the USSR. Both taken together give a multi-sided view.
OK I’m really not invested in relitigating the USSR, I don’t believe that differences in interpretations, often sourced totally differently, add up to a fundamental theoretical and political difference between mls and left socialists. The tasks before us are clear. I can’t fairly condemn bad behavior by any ML sect any more than I can condone bad behavior by any Trotskyist sect. The people who are committed to the work of socialism, building disciplined cadre, formation of a workers party, opposing colonialism and imperialism, building coalitions or entering authentic worker movements are being taken up by both our tendencies, as well as principled anarchist comrades.
But the industrialization of Russia leading up to 1936 was not a mass movement, it was a forced march. Perhaps necessary, mistakes were inevitable and being in a position to make these drastic but necessary changes is unenviable. But I just can not buy the idea that the Soviets of the late 1930s are proletarian in nature. 1936-1938 was the height of mass purges! How the fuck is the working class supposed to develop an independent working class movement with a literal gun to our head?
The only acceptable explanation is the shocking buy in for the purges across such a huge swath of Russian society. So, if it wasnt brutal dictatorship, then it was mass hysteria. In neither case is this a more progressive and rational society.
Granted, we are in the prewar period, with the greatest existential threat to progress festering practically next door. I’m not saying there aren’t reasons. I’m saying that as far as a proletarian character to the state, it just isn’t in Russia in this period. There’s concrete structural and historical reasons it isn’t there, I’m not really passing judgement so much as stating what I see as fact. International proletarian class hegemony was being strangled, and the imperialist fascist powers finished us off. The international industrial proletariat was the only thing that lent prole legitimacy to the Russian project, but even it had become deeply compromised by the extremely pro-Stalin loyalist Comintern. The third world and international socialism was all but abandoned.
In my estimation you can either say 1. The purges didn’t happen (they did) or 2. they were necessary. And maybe they were. But where I break left with my Trotskyist comrades is at Kronstadt. I think we can make arguments that these atrocities were necessary, that without them something much worse would have occurred, which I think bears out historically. But I just can not be convinced that there is a dominant proletarian character in a society carrying out mass murder/mass purges. The working class does not desire war and death, that is what the capitalists want for us. And I don’t believe that a state carrying out purges and mass executions is doing so in the interests of the international working class. And I think our movements are actually worse off because of them.
But thank you as always for the considerate and well informed response!