The collapse of the Soviet Empire heralded political crisis for those Stalinists and Trotskyists groups who applauded the Moscow regime and saw it in varying degrees as “non-capitalist” or even “post-capitalist”. These groups are faced with the problem of explaining how a “workers’ state”, is able to transform itself into a “bour geois state” by a series of reforms imposed by the political leadership, without any resistance from the working class. How can socialism be transformed to capitalism without any significant class struggle? No serious explanation of the Soviet collapse which is remotely compatible with Marxism has been presented by these groups. The question can be reduced to the following alternatives; either the Soviet Union was not a “workers state” and was not socialist, or Marxist theory is incorrect. Despite all their squirming the Trotskyist and Stalinist groupings cannot avoid this dilemma. For the Italian left communist tradition the system of production which arose on the ashes of the October revolution was one of “State Capitalism.” This is the key to understanding the history of the 20th century. Russian state capitalism necessarily produced Russian imperialism and the defeat of Russian imperialism by its US rival led to the reform of the system of state capitalism to the present arrangement. There is thus no conflict with the theory of Marxism.

The crisis, caused by the Soviet Union’s collapse, manifested itself in hundreds of variants with some organisations simply maintaining their systems of labelling and preserving their precious memories of their dear Stalinist states that had sadly departed this world. We have in the past commented on organisations like the Alliance for Workers Liberty who suddenly discovered how wrong they and their fellow Trotskyists had been for some four decades and instead decided that the Stalinists had really been a new class, dynamic enough to take over significant parts of the world and then disappearing as mysteriously as they arrived. Others searched for hope in the remaining bastions of Stalinism - the Castro fan-club centred on the Socialist Workers Party of USA being a somewhat grotesque example. Others, such as the Sparticist tendency blamed the later generation of Gorbachevite Stalinists for having abandoned what they bizarrely claimed to be part of the “gains of October” - such as the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall.

The list of attempted explanations was endless as was the list of collapsed organisations. For the organisations which survived to provide capitalism with its left wing one major conundrum remains. All those organisations remain committed to solutions which mean passing off state capitalist remedies as socialism. The advocacy of nationalisation and state intervention remains the cornerstone of the illusions which they peddle.

What cannot be escaped is that a political vision of the state apparatus defending and developing its national industry is no different to capitalist systems which existed throughout the last 100 years. They existed in the advanced capitalism of Western Europe throughout the post-war reconstruction. Most uncomfortably for the leftists the same system existed in a particularly grotesque form in the Stalinist states. The degree to which the overt state function became interlinked with the “economic” dynamics of capitalism varied only in degree and, in some respects, in appearance between Stalinist, fascist and democratic states.

Those parallels between the form of capitalism which existed in Russia from the 1920’s onwards and in the rest of the world poses an ever-recurring problem for the leftists. Each time they turn to their recipes for state intervention they, either consciously or unconsciously, hark back to the statification which was most complete in Russia after the political heritage of 1917 had been left isolated and transformed into its own negation.

A particularly unpleasant response to this conundrum appeared in the Socialist Worker of 1 4th September. The article serves as a useful illustration for those who wish to understand the politics and practice of the Socialist Workers Party - the biggest force of the British capitalist left and the main mover behind the Stop the War Coalition.

The Socialist Workers’ Party: school of falsification

The article, written by one Charlie Kimber, is headlined as “A counter to Martin Amis’s new book”.

The book “Koba the Dread” may well be worth countering but Amis does not pose as an advocate of revolutionary socialism. Kimber, on the other hand, poses as precisely that but produces an article which exposes the left fully trapped in falsification and contradiction.

Kimber’s method is to rewrite history to exonerate Trotsky as an individual and vilify Stalin, albeit with some bizarre and sickening quirks which we’ll return to later.

The key to Kimber’s rewriting of history is contained in his throwaway reference to “1928-9, the year when Stalin consolidated his rule”. Kimber’s choice of the start of the First Five Year Plan is not accidental. The date is chosen because it coincides with Trotsky being exiled and losing all prospect of winning the faction fights within the Russian state bureaucracy, in reality a re-emerging national bourgeoisie, which had already eradicated all remnants of working-class political control.

The critical airbrushing of history which Kimber repeats is to demonise Stalin by identifying the repressive state capitalist regime with him and his followers. They blithely ignore the role Trotsky and his followers played as a “loyal opposition” (temporarily even allied with Zinoviev) desperately trying to win the faction fight within the Soviet bureaucracy long after the life-blood had been drained from the Soviets and any vestige of working-class power had disappeared.

In trying to exonerate their mentor Kimber and company actually outdo “the old man” himself in avoidance of responsibility. Trotsky acknowledged that the process of overturning proletarian power (although he only ever accepted that power had been lost politically but, bizarrely, not economically) had been completed several years before 1928. Indeed, in an unguarded paragraph he wrote in 1935 that:

The Thermidor [a confusing attempt to draw a parallel with the loss of revolutionary vigour following the French Revolution] of the Great Rus sian Revolution is not before us but very far behind. The Thermidoreans can celebrate, approximately, the tenth anniversary of their victory.

As we outline in our pamphlet “Trotsky, Trotskyism and Trotskyists” the paragraph was written as a belated admission that other non-Trotskyist oppositionists inside Russia such as the “Democratic Centralists” had understood the implications of proletarian power being lost for years while Trotsky and his followers continued to operate as a faction within the bureaucracy.

In fact the adoption of the Five Year Plan by the Soviet state capitalists caused great confusion amongst many of Trotsky’s followers (e.g. Preobrazhensky) at the time. The leading faction around Stalin, did indeed consolidate its rule by breaking its alliance with the faction around Bukharin and adopting policies based on increasing the pace of industrialisation... a cornerstone of the policies of the Trotskyist Left Opposition. To complete their theft of the Trotskyists’ clothes the ruling faction also adopted heavy doses of bogus “revolutionary” rhetoric... under the false premise of a new revolutionary upsurge, the “Third period”.

In that way Kimber’s potted history incorporates the falsifications shared by all the Trotskyists but he also, rather touchingly, shows his commitment to the SWP’s political inspiration, Tony Cliff. Kimber provides a neat list of...

Marxists such as Trotsky, Boris Souvraine, Victor Serge, CLR James and Tony Cliff [who] denounced Stalin when he was tolerated or feted by much of conventional opinion.

Critical Trotskyists such as Shachtman are airbrushed out because he broke with official Trotskyism in 1940 in protest at its continuing devotion to the Soviet state. In contrast Tony Cliff stayed with official Trotskyism for a further 10 years. During that period Trotskyism (including Cliff) supported the Soviet Union (already clearly state capitalist according to Cliff’s later system) during the Second World War, and then baptised the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe as “deformed workers’ states”.

However the great Kimber project has to repaint the history of the real opposition to the emerging Russian state bourgeoisie because otherwise he would have to acknowledge that Communists were fighting that struggle while Trotsky tried to keep his place in the Party faction fight. In the article already quoted there is a glimpse of that opposition when Trotsky recalls:

in 1926... the group of “Democratic Centralism” (V.M. Smirnov, Sapronov and others who were hounded to death in exile by Stalin) declared, “Thermidor is an accomplished fact!”

Another unacknowledged resistance is that of the emerging Italian Communist left - Bordiga’s resistance to the Stalinist faction at a Comintern meeting in 1926 further helps destroy the myth that the Trotskyists were the first, or only, coherent opposition in World Communism.

Stalin - The Socialist Workers’ Party’s more favoured butcher

Hitler ...

.

... and Stalin: both butchers of the working class for capital

If Kimber (or his editors) had stopped with the standard Trotskyist distortion of history the article could just have taken its place alongside thousands of other similar pieces. In reality, the article manages to plumb new depths in its final section when the SWP decides to persuade its readers that Stalin was an altogether nicer chap than Hitler.

The article finally loses any claim to anti-Stalinism as it collapses in its own contradictions when responding to “times in the book when Amis equates Stalin with Hitler”. Under the pressure of its ingrained anti-Marxist positions the SWP draws out the conclusions of its anti-fascism and its homage to the power of a state-run economy. For the SWP:

there were still important differences between them [Stalin and Hitler].

Kimber really should have added “Well, that’s alright then” after each of the following absurd assertions and irrelevancies as he compares Stalinist Russia favourably to fascist Germany.

Stalin carried through in a couple of decades what had taken 300 years to achieve in Britain. The result was a death toll enormously concentrated in time.

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The death toll in the [Stalinist] labour camps was probably much lower than that of the Atlantic slave trade, but took place over 25 years, not 250 years.

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The death toll through famine Ukraine and Kazakhstan was certainly lower than the famines that resulted from the British pillage of Ireland and India. [Italicised in the original for no apparent reason - possibly to mark it out as the SWP’s entry for the Beria prize for apologias for Stalinism].

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Stalin’s barbarism against the minorities was not genocide in the Nazi sense of the killing of a whole people because of their alleged ethnic characteristics.

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[...] The people who looked to Stalin, however misguidedly, wanted an end to Hitler’s barbarity.

Bizarrely, but in full consonance with their politics, the SWP present their article as countering Amis’s argument “that the reality of Stalin’s crimes has been largely ignored, especially by the left” and by the end of the article they are arguing that Stalin’s crimes were broadly on a par with British imperialism, but not nearly as bad as a short period in the history of German imperialism.

For those who managed to read the article and turned to the page opposite, the SWP provided their own unintentional irony. Having commented that:

Under Stalin Russia was a state capitalist society where the bureaucracy acted in accordance with the same dynamic of accumulation as the private owners of Western capital...

the opposite page carried a photo of the comedian Mark Steel carrying a placard for the SWP-supported Socialist Alliance.

Steel’s placard simply reads:

Defend Rover jobs... Nationalise NOW.

Oh, what a tangled web ...

(1) Writings of Leon Trotsky (1934-35), 2nd Edition (1974), Pathfinder Press, page 182.