Rob Sewell: Crisis in Soviet Union

[Militant International Review, No 23, October 1982, p. 13-22]

Economy stifled by bureaucracy

After six and a half decades of breathtaking progress, catastrophe and upheaval, the USSR still remains for many workers an enormous paradox. On the one side are the colossal achievements; and on the other is the repression of a totalitarian police dictatorship. With the departure of Brezhnev in the offing, it is timely to ask: what is the Soviet Union and where is it going? The Revolution of 1917 constitutes without doubt the greatest event in world history. The overthrow of tsarism and capitalism – of the class rule of the bankers, industrialists, and landlords –and the coming to power of the toiling masses brought the vision of socialism from theory into the realm of reality.

With a nationalised planned economy, despite the mismanagement and corruption, the Soviet Union has emerged as a leading world power. Despite all the upheavals, zig-zags, purges, dislocation, and world war, the nationalised economy has demonstrated its superiority. The following figures illustrate the advances:


191319701981
Coal29 m tons433 m tons(655 m tons in 1978)
Oil10 m tons353 m tons609 m tons
Steel4 m tons116 m tons156 m tons
Electricity2 bn KW740 bn KW1,325 bn KW

Whereas in 1913 Russia had 28,000 doctors, today there are over 1,000,000 – a third of the world’s total number (the majority being women)! This year alone, higher and secondary institutions will turn out about 2.1 million specialists. In 1916 two-thirds of the population were illiterate and only 130,000 went into higher education. Sixty five years later, ten years’ education is compulsory for all. There are more than 5 million students and a third of the total population is said to be taking some kind of educational course. Last year 2 million new apartments were completed; at the same time in Britain, there was the lowest number of houses built since the 1920’s!

Despite the Soviet Union’s colossal progress workers in the West rightly point to the lack of democratic rights and to police repression

Yet despite this colossal progress, workers in the West rightly point to the lack of democratic rights and police repression. What is the reason for all this? To understand it we have to look at the processes taking place in Russian society and glance at the important developments since the Revolution.

In 1917, the Russian workers and peasants, under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, struck a blow against capitalism not only in Russia but internationally. It was seen as the beginning of the world socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks well understood that socialism could never be constructed in the confines of a single country, especially within the borders of backward semi-feudal Russia. Internationalism was regarded as a life-and-death question. At all costs the revolution had to be spread to the advanced industrialised West.

On the 23 April, 1918, Lenin stated in the clearest terms: „Our backwardness has put us in the forefront, and we shall perish unless we are capable of holding out until we receive powerful support from workers who have risen in revolt in other countries…“ (Collected Works Vol 27 p. 232) Lenin repeated this idea a hundred and one times: “It was clear to us that without the support of the international world revolution the victory of the proletarian revolution was impossible. Before the revolution, and even after it, we thought: either revolution breaks out in the other countries in the capitalistically more developed countries immediately, or at least very quickly, or we must perish.” (Collected Works, vol 32, p. 480)

The defeat of the socialist revolutions between 1918 and 1923 in Germany, Hungary and elsewhere – due to the betrayal of the social democratic leaders – was a shattering blow to the young workers’ state.

In the early years, the Soviet economy had been largely destroyed by war, civil war, famine and disease. Between 1918 and 1920, twenty-one armies of foreign intervention attempted to crush the revolution, in which many of the most self-sacrificing young workers were killed. By 1921 the population of Moscow and Petrograd was halved. In one year, six million people starved to death and cannibalism was reported in certain areas. Jacques Sadoul, an eye witness of that period reported: „In the districts away from the centre, frightful poverty prevails. There are epidemics of typhus, smallpox, children’s diseases. Babies are dying en masse. Those one sees are weak, fleshless, pitiful creatures.”

This was the level of barbarism to which the young Soviet state was reduced. How under these conditions could a new harmonious socialist society be built? It was as much as the Soviet government could do to keep society from disintegrating. Lenin described the situation as a revolution „besieged in a fortress”’. They had to hold on for as long as possible until help came from the proletariat of the West. In 1921, to gain a valuable breathing space, concessions were granted to capitalism and the rich peasant in the form of the New Economic Policy. The fate of the revolution hung in the balance.

Capitalism was first eliminated not in an advanced industrialised country, as Marx had expected, but in the weakest link of world capitalism

Karl Marx, sixty years earlier, had explained that the historical justification of capitalism had been to lay the material basis for socialism and the abolition of the exploitation of man by man. This material foundation did not, and could not, exist in one particular country. Capitalism had developed the world economy, and it was only on this scale that the material basis for a classless society had been laid. The contradiction of the productive forces, hemmed in by private ownership and the nation state, exploded in the First World War. It was proof that the overthrow of capitalism had not just become ripe, but had turned somewhat rotten. However, capitalism was to be eliminated at first not in an advanced industrialised country, as Marx had expected, but in the weakest link of world capitalism: Russia. The isolation of the revolution in terrible economic backwardness resulted not in „a classless society based upon solidarity and the harmonious satisfaction of all need” (Trotsky), but in a chronic deformation of the revolution.

The longer hours that the Soviet workers were forced to labour, the exhausting, superhuman efforts, the terrible shortages and rations, all created the conditions for the growth of bureaucracy. As Leon Trotsky, in his brilliant book Revolution Betrayed, explained: „When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy.”

The bureaucracy itself represented the pressure of alien class forces on the young workers’ state. With each defeat or set back for the Russian workers, the bureaucrats in the state, unions and party grew in number and strength. Like an uncontrollable cancer bureaucratism spread throughout the country. Stalin, who had wormed his way into the general secretary’s position in 1922, increasingly began, under the pressure of this conservative caste, to express its interests. By the mid 1920’s he had become the powerful representative of the bureaucratic reaction.

Through zig-zags and convulsions, the Stalinist bureaucracy wrested political power from the workers and constructed a totalitarian regime. A river of blood separated Stalin’s regime from the regime of Lenin

Through zig-zags and convulsions, the Stalinist regime wrested political power from the hands of the workers and peasants and constructed a totalitarian regime. This took place over a period of time, as the links with the October revolution were severed one by one. By 1930, the Stalinists had purged both the Left and Right Oppositions and crushed all democratic rights. By the end of that decade, a series of frame-up trials were staged involving the systematic murder of all those who had any connections with October. Lenin’s closest collaborators, who organised and led the revolution, were shot as „counter-revolutionaries”’.

Millions perished by firing squad and in the harsh conditions of the labour camps. Despite the lies of the Stalinists and their falsification of history – and despite too the present-day academics and professors who attempt to link the regime of Lenin to the regime of Stalin – a river of human blood separated them.

This ‘one-sided civil war’ completed the consolidation of the rule of the bureaucracy. All the vestiges of workers’ democracy were completely destroyed. All the equality of the Leninist years, was replaced by privilege, rank, and pomp. Yet the Stalinist reaction did not go as far as the return to capitalism, as Lenin had feared. As a parasitic caste, the bureaucracy derived its income from the nationalised property rights, which it was forced to ‘defend’ in its own fashion.

According to Engels, the state as a product of class society can be reduced to ‘armed bodies of men’ in defence of private property. It emerged historically as classes came into existence as a special instrument for the suppression of one class by another. Both Marx and Lenin explained that when the working class came to power they would not require a special force for the suppression of the old dispossessed capitalist class. The victorious workers would create a “semi-state” that would begin to die away as soon as it comes into being.

The state, with all its apparatus, officialdom and bureaucracy is an enormous parasite “‘stopping up the living pores”. In his State and Revolution, Lenin explains that the old state apparatus had to be replaced by a new democratic form, where its official functions would be rotated and under constant control. To prevent the growth of bureaucracy, drawing on Marx’s lessons from the Paris Commune, Lenin outlined four main proposals:

* There must be regular election of officials, with the immediate right of recall.

* All officials to be given the average pay of a skilled worker.

* No standing army with an officer caste separate from the population, but an armed people.

* The ‘immediate introduction of control and supervision by all, so that all may become ‘bureaucrats’ for a time and that, therefore, nobody may be able to become a bureaucrat.”

In 1956 the Hungarian workers, during their uprising against the bureaucracy, spontaneously adopted Lenin’s four points of 1919. Yet out of their own bitter experiences of totalitarianism they added a fifth point: that never again would they allow a one-party regime. Political parties must be permitted to operate, providing they accept state ownership of production and do not take up arms against the revolution.

From its very beginning it therefore ceases to be a ‘state’ in the old sense a special coercive apparatus for holding in subjection the majority of the people.

The state rose above the class it was supposed to represent, resulting in the political expropriation of the Russian workers

In the transition from capitalism to socialism, Marx explained the ‘state’ was a necessary evil. Society could not immediately jump from capitalism to a classless society. In its early stages, due to the cultural survivals of capitalism and the impossibility of immediately providing for everyone’s needs, inequality would remain. The productive forces would not have been capable at that time of satisfying all the needs of society. The state under these circumstances acquires a dual role: the protector of the nationalised planned economy . and at the same time, the guardian of these ‘bourgeois’ differences until the development of the productive forces can eliminate them.

The role of this transitional regime would be to also stimulate production through wage incentives – still maintaining differentials, although based on increased living standards. As society advanced differentials themselves would disappear. In Russia after 1917, wage differentials were pegged at not more than 4 : 1, although due to the chronic shortage of specialists the Bolsheviks were forced to increase it to 8 : 1 in some cases. Lenin recognised this as a necessary concession to ‘capitalist differentials’ to be speedily eliminated as material assistance came from the workers of the West.

As long ago as 1875 Marx pointed out: „… defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right (or Law) can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”’ (Critique of the Gotha Programme)

In explaining this dual character of a transitional regime, Lenin said: „… bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law. It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!“ Lenin didn’t develop this idea further as he expected the problem to be resolved by the spread of the revolution.

Nevertheless, therein lies the dangerous germ of a bureaucratic degeneration. That is why, according to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, it was essential for the working class to participate democratically in every level of society including the state. In 1919, Lenin advised the leaders of the Bavarian and Saxon [?] Revolution to introduce immediately a seven-hour day to allow workers time to run industry and the state.1

The four points of Lenin against bureaucracy, long abolished under Stalin, were an attempt to act as a check against degeneration. Particularly in Russia, with the terrible economic backwardness, the workers’ state was extremely weak: Lenin spoke honestly of the situation, unlike the bureaucrats in the Kremlin today: “Our state apparatus is to a considerable extent a survival of the past and has undergone hardly any change…“ (Collected Works, vol 33, p. 487)

Lenin’s last years were a constant battle against bureaucratism. His last political bloc was with Trotsky – „the most capable man in the present C.C.“ – against Stalin and what he represented. In Lenin’s Testament, which was suppressed from the party, he demanded the removal of Stalin as general secretary. Just before he died he broke off all personal relations with Stalin.

The beginning of 1924 witnessed a double blow against the revolution: the death of Lenin and the failure of the German Revolution. It was the end of that year, under the pressure from the conservative bureaucracy, that Stalin announced his ‘theory’ of ‘Socialism in One Country’. This anti-Marxist concept, that somehow socialism could be constructed in a single country, and a backward one at that totally isolated from the world economy, became the cornerstone of the Stalinist struggle against Marxism. Nobody, not even Stalin himself up until 1924, had ever mentioned such a utopian scheme, which reflected the desires of the bureaucracy for a quiet, stable life. The adoption of this theory, stated Trotsky, would see the national, reformist degeneration of the Communist International. Such a prognosis has been graphically borne out by the policies of the separate national „communist“ parties of today.

By the 1930’s, the relative equality under Lenin and Trotsky was replaced by rank and privilege. Instead of the withering away of the state, the opposite process has taken place: a monstrous totalitarian regime has been created. Under Stalin all the checks against bureaucracy were ended. In the Red Army all the privileges of the officer caste were reconstructed on the old tsarist lines. In reality the state rose above the class it was supposed to represent, resulting in the political expropriation of the Russian workers. A Bonapartist regime was created, but based on nationalised property forms.

Since the death of Stalin in 1953, the bureaucracy has made certain cosmetic changes at the top and dismantled the more hated organs of Stalinist repression, from fear of any moves towards political revolution from below.

The top bureaucrats live the life of rouble millionaires, with lifestyles the Soviet masses can only dream about

With the gigantic growth of the Soviet economy, despite all the waste and mismanagement, living standards have improved remarkably. But far from solving the social problems, new contradictions have emerged. The increase in the productive forces has resulted not in more equality and the withering away of privilege, but a drastic increase in inequality between the masses and the bureaucratic elite. The differentials today are greater in the USSR than in the capitalist West. The top bureaucrats live the life of rouble millionaires, with life-styles which the Soviet masses can only dream about. In a recent book, The Final Days, a study of Nixon’s downfall, by Woodward and Bernstein, a small glimpse of the life-style of Brezhnev and the bureaucracy is given:

“The President (Nixon) had his usual present for Brezhnev – an American automobile for the Secretary’s extensive collection. Their first two summits, in 1972 and 1973, had yielded two $10,000 models, a Cadillac limousine and a Lincoln Continental. This time it was a $5,578 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, not very impressive in a garage that already housed a Citroen-Maserati speedster, Rolls Royce and Mercedes sedans, and Brezhnev’s favourite, a new Mercedes 300SL roadster. But Brezhnev had learned that the Monte Carlo was named ‘Car of the Year’ by Motor Trend magazine, and he had let it be known that he would like one.”

Again in a recent book, We Will Bury You, by Jan Šejna, a top Czech bureaucrat who defected to the west some time ago and recently published his memoirs, we see: “Brezhnev is very fond of vodka, and of Pilsen beer, which we used to send to him direct to Moscow. He also loves Western clothes … Whenever he came to Prague, the Director of our Politburo shop (!) – where the elite could buy luxuries unavailable to lesser men – would have to fly to Italy and West Germany before his arrival, to lay in a special stock for him.”

And about his own predecessor, Alexej Čepička, Šejna writes:

“He had a huge personal fortune, worth millions of dollars, for which he never accounted, and which he spent on magnificent luxuries – villas cars, jewellery – for himself and his friends. His wife, for example, owned 17 mink coats.”

In the absence of workers’ democracy in the USSR (and other Stalinist states like Czechoslovakia), with no control or participation by the working class, the bureaucracy has accumulated enormous powers and privileges. Sometimes, to maintain the general position of the bureaucracy, certain officials will be reprimanded or punished for their ‘excesses’. Inevitably in such a society, with no democratic check, corruption, bribery, mismanagement, and pilfering are epidemic. Such was its scale that in 1963 the death penalty was introduced for ‘economic crimes’.

As a result, reports of executions regularly appear in the Soviet press for theft of state property, misappropriation of state funds, and acceptance of bribes on a large scale …

Recently, the mayor of the Black Sea resort of Sochi escaped execution, but was sentenced to 13 years imprisonment for accepting bribes. He was the proud owner of an American Ford and kept a small fortune in jewellery at his house where the police also discovered a water fountain in his living room!

Again a recent scandal touched the tops in the Kremlin when Anatoli Kolatov was dismissed from his post as head of the Russian National Circus. He and his accomplice, Boris Tsigan, gave circus performers permission to join troupes abroad – in return for diamonds and hard currency. Diamonds worth more than a million dollars were found in a raid on the circus director’s flat. The scandal shook the Kremlin as Boris turned out to be the lover of Brezhnev’s daughter Galina. In January, Brezhnev’s brother-in-law, the deputy chief of the KGB, is believed to have shot himself after a dispute over high level corruption.

In April, Pravda announced the execution of Vladimir Rytov, the deputy Fisheries Minister, for his part in a major illegal sale of caviar. Two hundred people in the Ministry of Fisheries were involved! The State Prosecutor added that the former Finance Minister of Georgia was also being investigated for embezzlement!

Another director of Social Security office for industrial enterprises in Baku amassed two large apartments, a dacha (villa) with a swimming pool, orange grove and black swans … Thirty-four kilos of gold was found in his possession on his arrest!

The Soviet bureaucrats receive enormous perks and privileges on the backs of the Russian workers. On top of their inflated salaries they have their spacious apartments, dachas in the country, access to special shops where scarce goods are available, better medical facilities, comfortable places in Crimean holiday resorts, chauffeur-driven cars and opportunities to travel abroad. It is a life-style any Western capitalist would envy.

As the economy becomes increasingly sophisticated, bureaucratic command becomes intolerable. It has reduced economic growth to a snail’s pace

It is this existence of a privileged elite, which is a parasitic growth, that prevents the USSR moving towards socialism. Sixty-five years after the October Revolution, the Russian workers have less democratic rights than their counterparts in Western Europe! The bureaucracy which played a relatively progressive role in developing the economy in the past (but at three times the cost), is now an absolute fetter. As the economy becomes increasingly sophisticated, bureaucratic command becomes intolerable. It has reduced economic growth to a snail’s pace, as the following figures illustrate:

Gross Industrial Production Growth

1951-551956-601961-651966-701971-751976-80
13.1%10.4%86,00%8.5%7.4%4.7%

By 1982 (the first six months) output grew by only 2.7% (expressed as an annual rate) – the lowest first-half year results since the war!

Bureaucratic planning has meant enormous wastage for the Soviet economy. Western estimates believe it takes an average of eight to thirteen years for a major Soviet investment project to pass from the planners to final production. A classic example is the huge car factory imported from Fiat of Italy. Construction began in the second half of the 1960s; it took until the late 1970s for the plant to come to full production – when it was declared obsolete!

A nationalised economy requires democracy as the human body requires oxygen

The Russian press is full of instances of mismanagement and corruption. A recent example was given of a Ukrainian factory in Donetsk which produced 138,000 pairs of sunglasses – so dark were they that the wearer could look directly at the sun and see nothing! It also produced 3,000 plastic footballs which burst when kicked. In June this year, the Soviet trade union newspaper, Trud, stated that the USSR had kept up with the production target for jam jars, but added that for years they had forgotten about making the lids!

There was the notorious case two years ago when auditors discovered that a new tractor repair factory supposedly in operation near Leningrad, handling 14,000 tractors a year, had in fact not even been built! Every bureaucrat involved had participated in the fiction by submitting false production figures and inventing the records!

Workers’ democracy is not a sentimental dream but a vital component in the movement towards a harmonious socialist society. Trotsky long ago explained that a nationalised economy required democracy as the human body requires oxygen. Every worker in Britain knows of the corruption, mismanagement and waste that exists in capitalist firms and the undemocratic, nationalised corporations. Without the democratic involvement and participation of the workers in running industry this is inevitable. Given the clash of class interests, this is impossible in capitalist countries. But in Russia where the economy is state owned, and the check of the market abolished, then workers’ democracy is absolutely vital for the harmonious development of industry and the move towards socialism.

Agriculture is the Achilles heel of Soviet society

In the sphere of agriculture lies the Achilles heal of Soviet society. It has never really recovered from the forced collectivisation of the Stalin period. The peasants, in a vain hope of escaping the measures, slaughtered millions of livestock, which resulted in a colossal famine and 10 million dead.

From 1951 to 1975 grain production on state farms and collectives rose from an average harvest of 90 million tons to more than 200 million, providing a per capita increase of about 2% a year. This was due largely to the enormous amount of investment undertaken: for the last 18 years more than 25% of entire investment undertaken went to agriculture. Yet despite this, private plots, which account for only 1.5% of farmland, still account for a quarter of USSR’s farm production.

The lack of productivity is graphically illustrated when today 25% of the Russian workforce remains on the land, compared to less than 4% in America. According to official Soviet statistics, productivity per farmer is five times higher in the USA than in the Soviet Union!

The results of the 1981 harvest were so poor that the figures were never officially given! It was the fourth year running in which the USSR failed to meet its harvest target. According to the International Wheat Council, last year’s harvest was around 170 million tons – 70 million down on the target. Therefore Russia may need to import a record 46 million tonnes from the West this year.

Milk production in 1981 was 88.5 million tonnes, the lowest since 1973, and the output of butter declined as well. Meat supplies were down on the 1978 figure. The Russians produce twice as many potatoes as the Americans but uses 14 times the acreage to do so – then it has been estimated that more than half, due to old, inefficient machinery is wasted en route from field to storage!

“In twenty years, why haven’t we been able to improve the woeful packaging machines or design something new and better?“ demanded Literaturnaya Gazeta.

More investment is planned. In the new eleventh Five Year Plan more will be put into agriculture than in the whole period 1918 to 1970 combined! Yet it will be in vain as bureaucracy clogs up every pore. With these huge investments, every year Russian factories turn out 550,000 tractors, but each year almost as many are scrapped after only a short working life! A high percentage of available tractors, combine harvesters and other expensive equipment are always out of action because of insufficient quality control, lack of spare parts and servicing facilities!

Izvestia recently pointed out that it was common to see one freight train loaded with timber heading east while another train with a similar load heads west. „Why does it happen?” asked the newspaper. „The distribution of 300 million tons of cut timber and forest products is scattered with no justification whatsoever among more than 61 ministries and departments and 12 union republic state planning committees”!

Those who put forward the idea, that with increasing living standards the bureaucracy would gradually disappear, failed to grasp the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy

The Soviet bureaucracy, guarding its privileges and income, has created a totalitarian regime and cannot allow democratic rights. In Poland the bureaucracy introduced martial law and dissolved the ‘Solidarity’ trade union because of the danger it posed to its privileged position. Those who put forward the idea – repeating Isaac Deutscher – that with increased living standards, the bureaucracy will gradually disappear, fail to grasp the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy. It is a privileged parasitic caste whose layers extend from the Kremlin hierarchy down to the local, functionaries which is entirely incompatible with workers’ democracy. Its privileges and income has swelled in proportion to the growth of the economy, and not the other way round.

Terrified by the Polish events, Brezhnev has called upon the bureaucrats in the tops of the Russian ‘trade unions’ to start defending their members interests! The panic in the bureaucracy about the workers’ cynicism towards the official ‘trade unions’ resulted in March in the dismissal of the union boss, Alexei Shibayev only days before the opening of the trade union Congress!

In an attempt to overcome the situation, workers have been given the chance to question their bosses in the factories and collective farms. They were invited to submit a question and an ‘open-letter day’ was organised to hear the answers! Many stories were reported in the union paper, Trud. When the management from one firm attempted to avoid an answer, nobody was convinced and the “hall began to buzz”! When a transport official claimed that nobody had to wait “hours” for a bus because they ran every 22 minutes, it provoked „incredulous laughter”. Shouts and cat-calls became so frequent that sometimes officials and managers refused to attend!

The bureaucracy will do everything for the working class except get off their back!

The Stalinist idea of ‘Socialism in One Country’, as Trotsky had forecast has been dealt a severe blow by events. The ruling section of the bureaucracy, in the post-Stalin period, attempted to overcome their contradictions by participating on the world market. As a result, in the first quarter of 1982 the USSR’s exports to the West increased by 35%. According to recent figures, her reliance on foreign trade has risen from 15% of the national income in 1960 to almost 33% this year. In 1981, Russia’s export of gold (the source of 50% of hard currency earnings) increased from 90 tonnes to an estimated 300 tonnes. Her debt to the West stands at a ‘manageable’ $20 billion. Thus the linking of the Soviet economy to the world economy has not brought the stability expected. In reality it has opened a pandora’s box: as the capitalist West is convulsed with crisis, so this also infects the Russian economy.

The growth in living standards in recent years has gone hand in hand with accumulating social, economic, and political contradictions. The bureaucratic repression has resulted in increased cynicism about the Soviet way of life. As a direct result, in despair, sections of the population have turned to vodka as an escape. With spirit consumption the highest in the world, alcoholism has reached epidemic proportions. In 1925 only about 16% of under-18s drank alcohol, while the figure today is 93%! It has been estimated that alcoholic drink accounts for about a third of the value of goods sold in the food shops. Youth has moved towards a variety of activities to escape from this monstrous caricature of ‘socialism’: pop music, yoga, karate, an even eastern religious cults. Crime and hooliganism amongst the youth are also on the increase, reflecting the social malaise of Stalinism.

The revolution developing in the Stalinist states will clean out the bureaucracy and introduce workers’ democracy and the participation of the working class at all levels of administration, industry and the state

The impasse that Soviet life now finds itself is preparing enormous explosions. The crisis in Poland is in reality a mirror of the general crisis facing the Stalinist states. The bureaucracies have become an absolute fetter on any further development. Their narrow nationalism has resulted in border battles between ‘socialist’ Russia and ‘socialist’ China, and the Balkanisation of Eastern Europe. Under a genuine workers’ democracy, these countries would come together as a Socialist Federation, commonly dove-tailing their economies to the needs of the populations.

Yet what is clear is that the bureaucracies will not hand over their power, privileges and income without a struggle. As Trotsky once explained: „No devil ever yet voluntarily cut off his own claws. The Soviet bureaucracy will not give up its position without a fight. The development leads obviously to the road of revolution.”

The revolution developing in the Stalinist states will not be to return back to the horrors of capitalism, but will be a political revolution on the lines of Hungary 1956. Its aim will be to clean out the bureaucracy and introduce workers’ democracy and the participation of the working class at all levels of administration, industry and the state. The establishment of a genuine workers’ democracy in the USSR would sound the death knell of all the Stalinist dictatorships and trigger off revolutionary waves in the capitalist West. A Socialist United States of Europe leading to a Socialist World Federation – the aim of Lenin and the Bolsheviks –would usher in a new epoch of super-abundance for the world’s masses.

Within 10 to 15 years, a world plan of production would completely transform the planet. As society progressed towards socialism and a classless society the state, together with all the left-overs of capitalism, would wither away, giving way to the simple administration of things. A harmonious socialist society, using the colossal advantages of modern science, would result in an unparalleled increase in the productive forces, and allow society to give, in the words of Marx, „from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs“. As mankind developed to undreamed of heights, capitalism and Stalinism would be relegated to their rightful place – the dustbin of history.

1Actually „the six-hour working day with two or three-hour instruction in state administration“


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