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Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Russia
(1953-1991)
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1975 Introduction
The articles we are publishing here have all appeared in our party press before.
The first two appeared in our publications, namely: ’Why Russia isn’t Socialist’
(Le Prolétaire, nn. 75-84, 1970), and ’Marxism and Russia - Forty Years of
Organic Evaluation of International, Social and Historical Developments in
Russia’, (Programma Comunista, November 1957). There follows the ’Eight
Supplementary Theses on Russia’ which is an extract from our party text Dialogue
with Stalin (1953). It serves today, just as when it first appeared, as both a
conclusion and a resume of our Marxist interpretation (there is only one) of the
events in Russia; it serves, in other words, to clearly demarcate us from those
critics who move under the impulse of variegated democratic sentiments - even if
some of these do happen to declare themselves as belonging within our
proletarian and revolutionary camp. In the final article, and continuing a
long-standing party tradition, we publish a brief economic analysis which gives
empirical data derived from the development of Soviet production; how totally
capitalist Russia in fact is, is proved by comparing this data with the
development of other large global centres of capitalist accumulation.
The movement publishing these texts traces its origins back to the battle fought
by the left current of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) at the beginning of
this century; a battle which started within the PSI and went on to be fought out
within the executive of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) against the onslaught
of the latest counter-revolutionary wave. This wave, which would eventually
overwhelm us, we would brand with the name Stalinism. Later on, clandestinely
organized as a fraction abroad in the post-war period, a clear and homogeneous
doctrinal and organizational form would emerge which we still retain to this
day. During this time a number of periodicals were published, which, through a
natural process of selection were called respectively: ’Prometeo’, ’Battaglia
Comunista’, ’Programma Comunista’ and today, ’Il Partito Comunista.’
The party still defines itself today by the store of critical vision it has
inherited from classical Marxism. This heritage is validated, and is clarified
ever more rigorously, at every stage in Marxism’s victorious battle against
those periodic involutional tendencies which affect the class struggle and the
conscious organization of the proletariat; known as Anarchism, Reformism and
latterly, Stalinism.
The principal merit of the Left consists in having continued, in a coherent way,
the work initiated by Lenin against both reformism and participation in the
imperialist war; that is, those classical Marxist theses wherein the nature of
the State, the role of violence in class relations, and the relations between
the party and the spontaneous movement of the proletariat are defined. This
’doctrinal restoration’ was rendered an urgent necessity by the progressive
disintegration of the class politics of the 3rd International; which would
eventually drag down with it not only the proletarian power in Russia, but also
the entire world movement behind the threadbare banner of democracy, national
defence, peaceful coexistence, and finally competition amongst alleged different
regimes.
As one of the sections within the International, the ’Left’, then at the head of
the Communist Party of Italy, set out by putting its full organizational weight
behind the international movement, which, in line with the positions of the
Zimmerwald and Kienthal opposition, grew steadily and enthusiastically under the
impulse of the victory in Russia. In a second phase, the Left opposed from
inside the International those tactfully dangerous manoeuvres which were not
wholly in accord with communist principles, i.e., the political United Front
with the reformist parties. As far as the question of participation in
elections went, the Left’s proposal was the abstentionist solution; considering
that within the countries of old bourgeois parliamentarianism, grave
misunderstandings would result from any attempt to use parliament for propaganda
purposes. Events would confirm how well-founded this analysis was _ to the
extent indeed that now abstentionism is an irrevocable position of the party
applied to the Western countries.
In the years that followed the death of Lenin, our current was banished from the
leadership of the PCI and its task became that of denouncing, in ever stronger
terms, the degenerating politics of both the party in Russia installed in the
palaces of Moscow and all its foreign hangers on; and denying that there was one
iota of socialism in the economy, or anything remotely ’red’ or ’proletarian’ in the State power.
Following in the wake of the enormous toil of Marx’s and Lenin’s work, it was
our task then, as now, to unmask before the working class the phoney short-cuts
to socialism doled out to it in this latest, and worst, wave of opportunism.
The triumph of the proletariat and Marxism in Russia was attained by clearly
distinguishing and separating the interests, activity and political leadership
and organisation of the working class from other social strata, i.e., from those
peasants who were also ‘labourers’ or who were ’exploited’, or worse still,
petty bourgeois artisans, entrepreneurs and intellectuals. Today, however, a
sorry picture presents itself of the Russian ’communist’ party rambling on about
a classless ’people’ - just like in any other bourgeois republic.
With the sole revolutionary class at its head, the use of violence finally
culminated in the dictatorship represented by the one communist party; all
democratic illusions or uncertainties were rejected and seen as expressing,
consciously or otherwise, the submission of the immediate and the ultimate
interests of the proletariat to the sterile and restricted aims of the middle
and other classes; which for us by then were definitively counter-revolutionary.
In Russia the party would lead a violent revolution. Impelled, however, by the
demand of the immense peasant masses for land, and with the objective maturation
of the worker’s revolution in Europe, the party and the Russian communist
proletariat were propelled into the front lines of a civil war. At first, in
alliance with the peasants, the proletariat will fight against the Tsar under a
hail of cannon shot, then, alone, it will take power through force of arms. In
the West, the same attempt was made and was unsuccessful.
From the very moment that the International abandons the prospect of the
revolutionary path, the bourgeois myths of democracy, and of ’evolutionary’,
parliamentary, and partisan paths, become the only reference points for
proletarian activity and doctrine; instead of classes with irreconcilable
interests mustering on the battlefield for an all-out revolutionary
confrontation, they tell us there is an allegedly classless ’people’.
We define Internationalism as the strategy, carried out by one single world
party, of a class that is destined from its very inception to overcome the
nationalist inheritance of the bourgeoisie; rather different from attempting to
breath new life into the conception of nationhood as happens in the laughably
named ’Socialist countries’. After all, that ’The workers have no country’ is
clear for all to see in the Manifesto. Having said that, we wouldn’t deny for
one minute that we must take power in Russia again - as well.
Even before the outcome of the revolution in Germany was known, our doctrine
assured us, if the dictatorship of the proletariat occurred in a situation when
a simultaneous victory in all other countries wasn’t probable, that for
historical and military reasons we would have to organize and attack from the
inside of those territories where the bourgeoisie had been overthrown. On the
other hand, as long as States continue to exist, and even though the supremacy
of the proletariat will cause national separation and antagonisms to vanish, the
proletariat will have jurisdiction and exercise power over a given territory,
defined by borders and the populations that are resident there: ’Since the
proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the
leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far,
itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word’ (Manifesto). We
applaud the successes of the Red Army and never held it impossible that the
proletarian power could hang onto power in Greater Russia ’even for fifty
years’. In fact, the collapse that occurred was neither because of defeats on
the battlefield, nor for want of heroism on the part of the international
communist movement, which reacted in the wrong way, and too late, to the
national-bourgeois involution of the Russian Party. Those comrades who didn’t
betray the principles of communism would pay with their lives.
Our main objection, firstly, was that the politics of communism, both within and
outside Russia, were being submitted to the needs of the conservation of the
Russian economy and State, exchanging thereby the final outcome - the
international, historic defeat of capitalism - with a means, an instrument, that
is, the proletarian State in one country. Let us recall that ’one of the primary
conditions of the emancipation of the proletariat is UNITED ACTION, at least in
civilized countries’, let us therefore condemn both the excessive and
inopportune power of the Russian apparatus with its facile administrative
pressures on the entire International, and the party that ordained those actions
within the ’civilized’ countries. Secondly, after the idea of building Socialism
in one country’ had been hastily cobbled together, we declared that even to moot
the idea in the first place, let alone to put it into effect, was a ’masterpiece
of counter -revolutionary fraud’. The ’new’ idea was an obsolete and totally
false doctrine; neither Marx nor Lenin ever foresaw that new productive
relations could be stabilized except on the International scale at least in the
most materially developed countries. By jumbling up together the art of State
power and the productive super-structure they ’forgot’ all the writings of Lenin
in which even postrevolutionary Russian economy is described as at a stage that,
For the most part, had not attained the level of capitalism.
This notorious theory of ’Socialism in one country’ was custom built for all
later national, anti-imperialist, anti-feudal and democratic revolutions, i.e.
bourgeois revolutions, and set free all the repressed forces of capitalist
production. Such would be the case in China and in the third-world countries in
general (there are ample party texts to testify to this), and, in the light of
Marxism, this can be interpreted as nothing other than national capitalism
constructing itself on the backs of a betrayed and disillusioned proletariat. In
Russia, it meant along with the abandonment of any prospect of workers’
revolutions abroad, that the struggle of the already proletarianized State power
to oversee and control the nascent productive forces - that historically always
show a taste for liberty, markets and wage labourers - was also defeated.
These are the lessons we can draw from the Bolshevik - and our - victory, and
they are tragically confirmed by the consequences for international communism
when it attempted to ’go against the grain’. The revolution that will occur in
the major modern industrialized countries, where capitalism is worn out and
decrepit, will be ’like in Russia’ international, and led by the one and only
Communist Party that is the inheritor of the most inspired traditions of the 3rd
Communist International. It will use, once again, as in Russia, the methods of
direct action and its own State violence organised against the White resistance.
No partisan ’intermediate objectives’ between bourgeois dictatorship and
proletarian dictatorship are forecast or anticipated.
For nigh on fifty years we have had accusations of theoreticism heaped on us by
the opportunist parties, the very ones indeed which disguise their betrayals of
the working class with ’flexibility’ of principles and tactical manoeuvrism.
Because of this accusation of ’theoreticism’, we feel bound to repeat that the
entire vast and important work of materialist and dialectical explanation of the
historical process - running from Red October and Lenin to the present dismal
state of dispersal of the class in all countries led by the reactionary parties
- is not just abstract theory but is party work. The aim of reproposing the
revolutionary doctrine in its entirety is party work (despite it being a small
nucleus at the present time) in that it prepares the only compass that will
enable us tomorrow to guide the revived and powerful communist party through the
social cataclysms and the material conditions of whatever economic crises may
present themselves on the horizon; we leave it to the paid hirelings of academia
to busy themselves with historiographical contests. It is an unfortunate fact
that at present our duty to outline the revolutionary path can only be embryonic
and minimal, enabling us in this brief pamphlet only to show in barest outline
those general issues which affect all aspects of our social life.
Only with the same revolutionary programme as before, the same manifesto of the
communists, the Bolsheviks, and later of the Left alone, will the party be able
to attract the proletariat, disappointed and dispersed, back to its tradition of
assaults on the entire world of its enemies. Having determined to follow this
path, which wasn’t chosen by us, we, like Marx and Lenin, will never seek to
measure its validity in terms of days or half-centuries or indeed in terms of an
isolated Russia. We refuse to sacrifice on the false altar of the ’here and now’
even one aspect of an identity which we derive from the same old deeds of the
past. Our tendency has always been to re-stabilize those frail and fleeting
links with the class which social reality allows: whenever the slightest crack
appears in the capitalist facade which allows us to launch an attack, however
small, we struggle beside the workers against the bosses and opportunists
manoeuvrings in the ranks of the workers.
We make no apologies for retaining above everything else an absolutely clear
demarcation, both organizational and tactical, between ourselves and any other
movement, grouplet, or partylet which confusingly declares itself to stem from
the workers or from the ’Left’. And the very worst amongst them are those who
stake claims to our tradition, when in fact, they are totally outside it. The
fact of the matter is that for a long time now the western proletariat has been
revolutionary only on one condition: if and when it has been led by the single
integrated programme of communism, and the party which represents it. This means
to the exclusion of other programmes and all other parties.
On this road, as always, we stubbornly continue to work.
1991 Introduction
The present publication contains translations into English of some of the many
texts that have appeared in our party press dedicated to "The Russian Question". They were first published together in 1975, as they appear here, in the
Italian language under the title "Why Russia isn’t Socialist". We have changed
only the title and added one more short artide "Communism is Dead - Long Live
Communism!" which was written in the light of the final, and complete,
confession of capitalism by the Russian ruling classes (who now talk of selling
Lenin’s corpse!). Apart from that, nothing has been changed apart from slight
alterations to ‘The Party’s Work of Economic Research into the Historical Cycle
of Capitalism" which has been updated in order to include statistical
information up to 1987.
Our main intention in presenting this work is to accelerate the dismantling of
the widespread myth of Russian socialism. The collapse of this myth has often
been indicated by the party as one of the necessary conditions for the
re-affirmation of the Communist revolutionary program, and thus, a retrenchment
of the proletarian International on positions of revolutionary class struggle.
Today the myth is being dismantled by the Russian government itself, but this
does not prevent the bourgeoisie from launching a huge counter-revolutionary
propaganda campaign: basing its conjectures on Stalinist and post-Stalinist
falsifications, it gloats about the historical failure of Communism, when in
reality the failure of Stalinism means neither the failure of Marxism as a
scientific doctrine, nor the failure of the keystone of Marxism - the domination
of the State by the proletarian class. The fact of the matter is that within
Russia and its satellites the only thing that has really failed is the falsified
versions of the Marxist doctrine, and the lie that would have us believe that
proletarian State domination is impossible: it is only the myth of the
possibility of a centralized, rational and socialized regulation of the
capitalist mode of production that has really been exploded.
The real crisis exists for that poisonous dogma, whether it appears in the guise
of social-democracy, fascism and Stalinism, which would have us believe that
State capitalism, or State control of capitalism, is something fundamentally
economically different from... capitalism: that rotten, catastrophic and
ubiquitous economic system that underlies all those forms of administering it.
This is the economic structure in Russia as it stands:
Large-Scale industry: –
State-owned, with production ordained, along with price regulation and an
absence of free competition but not exchange-values; salaries are related to
either production or hours; profits are kept.
Small-Scale Industry: –
Whether co-operatively or individually owned, both are de facto privately owned;
buying and selling takes pIace freely in the marketpIace; wages are paid;
profits are kept.
Agrlculture and the Kolhozian Hybrld: –
within this sector we find the real nucleus of the reproduction of mercantile
relations and the accumulation of capitals.
Commerce: –
Partly conducted by State businesses using wage-Iabor, but for the most part by
privately owned co-operative societies.
The Russian type of economy is distinguishable from that found in the West in
terms of quantity, but not by economic category or social relations. For
instance, the practice of administering prices and production quotas for
large-scale industry, i.e. steel and grain, occurs throughout the western world.
Monopoly in the West exists under the two aspects of concentration of finance
and as attempted central planning. Planned capitalism isn’t socialism though and
socialism isn’t State organization of mercantilism and sale of labor power; and
nor is socialism to do with co-ordinating different businesses, all with their
own profit and loss accounts, and acting as a go-between between them and the
State.
So why then all the fuss about changing this system? The fact is that capitalism
requires and aspires to a maxirnum concentration and centralization of different
capitals, whilst, meanwhile, it rebels against the required unitary discipline.
Capitalism requires not only competition, but also the most unbridled struggle
to select not its best, and/or most technically efficient parts, but rather the
worst. Therefore Russia suffers, if that’s the right word, from a capitalism
which is so close to the ideal capitalist structure that it can’t function: in
order to exploit the proletariat with sufficient ruthlessness, Russian capital
requires unemployment and the suppression of businesses which don’t treat their
employees like slaves etc, etc.
Perestroika effectively means more freedom for capital, and therefore for
individual capitalists, to bring the State into total subjection to their needs,
just as happens in the West.
Whilst on the one hand Stalinism has been able to assume the modern form of
bourgeois government, that is open dictatorship, on the other, post-Stalinism -
post-fascism in the west, - certainly doesn’t mark a return to pre-fascist
democracy or to February 1917. It presents us rather with incontrovertible proof
of the irreversible triumph of fascism; a fascism moreover which subordinates to
itself the same old familiar democratic forms (like the center parties) and the
same old parties and unions of the working class - all under the banner of one
and the same nationalist and capitalist program. Finally, we find parliamentary
cretinism with liberal doses of self-seeking individualism dressed up as
politics.
Over the last few months, the evolution of the Russian economy confirms our
diagnosis of it having ’come of age’ as another decrepit modern capital with all
its attendant crises, e.g., with production increasing at a rate that runs in
inverse proportion to the increasing misery of the proletariat - a canonical
capitalist law - we find already a million unemployed Uzbeks.
The difficulties that are being encountered by the various economic reforms of
businesses, property, and land management, find their explanation in Russia
society itself, within the latent opposition and open struggle of the Russian
proletariat. The fact that grocery shops managed by the State are empty, whilst
the market stalls of the kolkhozians groan under the weight of produce, set at
prices, moreover that are out of reach for families or workers, represents a
flashpoint of class struggle which the State is loath to confront openly. The
groundswell of class struggle is confirmed both by references in the press to
continual strikes, which resulted in 7.5 million working days lost in the first
eleven months of 1989, and also by the existence of ‘The United Workers Front"
about which we only know that it has declared itself for a long time ’an enemy
of Perostroika’.
What is lacking in fact in the Russian bourgeoisie’s power structure are secular
structures for the parties and opportunist unions; all the better for them to be
able to declare themselves formally opposed to the State whilst in reality they
are dedicated to democracy and the defense of the regime. Unlike the outcome for
the Polish bourgeoisie, helped as they were by intellectuals and priests, we are
not sure how much the Russian proletariat instinctively mistrusts the democracy
of the reformers and middle classes. The central problem posed for the Russian
government remains, i.e., to subdue the proletariat, and as yet it hasn’t
succeeded.
All that remains of the debate on economy is the inevitability of the arrival in
Russia, as in the rest of the world, of a plurality of property forms; with the
State and big banks rigging prices; with the treasury, credit and investment
neither projecting or planning for the future. All that remains, in other words,
is the permanent crisis within a system that is no longer any use to the human
race as a whole. A system which will have to be destroyed in Russia just as
everywhere else.
October 1991