VII. Extent and limits of the
new revolutionary gains
Trotsky’s prediction that the
Second World War would end in a revolutionary upsurge even
greater than the one after the First World War, and that it
would generally escape from the control of the traditional
organisations (especially the Stalinist parties), turned out to
be inaccurate. But neither was it totally contradicted by what
actually happened historically. There was a revolutionary
upsurge, but it was more limited than expected, in Italy and
France. There were new revolutionary victories but not in
predominantly industrial/proletarian countries. These
revolutions were led by parties of Stalinist origin (except for
Cuba), but they had to break with Stalinism in order to lead
these revolutions. These revolutionary victories have deepened
the crisis both of the international imperialist system and of
Stalinism but they have not led to the overthrow of either. This
was the general historical context of the period stretching
roughly from the end of’ the Second World War to May 1968.
The most infantile way of
responding to the unforeseen turn of events was to deny it ever
took place at all. Some comrades even went so far as to deny
there had been a social revolution of unparalleled magnitude in
China. Others, when pushed on it accept that there had been
something like “a revolution.” But since it was not
“the” pure proletarian revolution we had been waiting for
then it was not a “true” social revolution that broke with
the imperialist/capitalist system. Instead we were dealing with
the seizure of power by “petty-bourgeois” nationalists, or
even by a “new ruling class” (which did not apparently exist
until the moment it seized power!).
There is no point here in
dwelling too long on these circumstantial analyses’
idealistic/normative character that departs from Marxism
methodology or on the sectarian self-justification underpinning
them. A social revolution is characterised by a fundamental
change in property and production relations. Can one seriously
deny that such a change took place in Yugoslavia, China, or in
Vietnam? A social revolution is also defined by the destruction
of ruling class power. Can one seriously assert that in
Yugoslavia, China, or Vietnam power is held by the same social
class that held it in 1940? On what facts can one base the
proposition that the petty-bourgeoisie, i.e., the peasants,
artisans, the “petty-bourgeois intellectuals,” are in power as
a class in these countries?
But once you recognise these
revolutions are authentically social and anti-capitalist ones
leading to the development of new transitional societies between
capitalism and socialism, albeit bureaucratised, and the
creation of new bureaucratised workers’ states (these two
concepts are synonymous for us) another theoretical difficulty
arises. Trotsky said that Stalinism had definitively gone over
to the side of bourgeois order in the capitalist countries. Now
here we had three authentic popular revolutions involving the
mobilisation of millions of men and women (tens of millions in
China) which had certainly been led by parties of Stalinist
origin. [18] Was Trotsky
therefore mistaken on this question? Should all the traditional
analyses of Stalinism by the Fourth International be revised?
Your answer to a large extent
depends on the very definition given to Stalinism. This has to
be materialist and not ideological. [19]
Stalinism is the subordination of the interests of the
proletariat and the revolution of each specific country to the
interests of a privileged bureaucracy. Clearly, with their line
of the revolutionary overthrow of the ruling classes the
Yugoslav, Chinese, and Vietnamese CPs did not subordinate the
interests of the revolution and the proletariat of their
countries to those of the Soviet bureaucracy. It is also clear
that neither did they subordinate these interests to those of
some privileged Yugoslav, Chinese, or Vietnamese bureaucracy
that did not exist at that time. Consequently these parties
ceased to be Stalinist parties from the moment they decided to
take a line of working towards the revolutionary conquest of
power at the head of a powerful mass movement.
Furthermore, they were not only
able to seize power because they had broken in theory and
practice with Stalinism since they had refused to subordinate
the revolutionary struggle to the interests, the injunctions and
“theories” of the Kremlin, and they did this years before
the seizure of power. Saying these turns were due just to the
“pressure of the masses” reduces to nothing the decisive
role of the subjective factor in the victory of a revolution.
Indeed such a line of reasoning leads to a paradoxical
conclusion: was it then the insufficient pressure of the masses
which lies behind the defeat of the revolution in Greece,
Indonesia, Chile as opposed to victory in Yugoslavia, China, and
Cuba? Responsibility would then fall on the shoulders of the
masses and not on the traitorous leaderships.
Reality is quite different.
There was not less pressure from the masses (nor less severe
counterrevolutionary threats) in Greece than in Yugoslavia, in
Indonesia than in Indochina or China, in Chile rather than Cuba.
There were parties which acted differently. On one side they
consciously worked towards the revolutionary seizure of power,
and on the other, (including the Stalinist Cuban CP, as opposed
to the 26th July Movement) they deliberately refused to do so,
invoking the theory of revolution by stages.
The fact that the Yugoslav,
Chinese, and Vietnamese CPs broke with Stalinism to lead the
revolution in their countries without having revolutionary
Marxist parties must not be blotted out of the analysis on
the pretext that the only thing that counts is the seizure of
power. The partial and not total break with their Stalinist past
meant the leadership of these parties still held bureaucratic
organisational positions both in terms of their internal regime
and their relations with the masses. Consequently these
revolutionary victories were not accompanied by the
institutionalisation of direct (soviet) workers’ and
people’s power. From the beginning the party apparatus was
identified with the state. Bureaucratisation and
depoliticisation of the masses – both of which were reinforced
by the rapid emergence of exorbitant material privileges of a
new bureaucracy – become more and more firmly established. So
we can legitimately speak of socialist revolutions
bureaucratically manipulated and deformed from the start. True
such definitions are unwieldy and a little complex but they do
give a better account of a real historical process in all its
complexity.
The non-revolutionary Marxist
character of these parties has gradually become an obstacle to
further necessary progress of the revolution both domestically
and internationally. While the victory of the Chinese revolution
severely upset the relationship of forces on a world scale,
dealing a mortal blow to the colonial system as it existed in
1940 and as imperialism still wanted it restored in 1945, the
actual political/ideological forms the victory took contributed
a great deal to the defeat of the Indonesian revolution and to
the paralysis of the revolutionary movement in India. On a more
modest scale, the pole of attraction represented by China,
combined with the political/ideological confusion produced by
Maoism (including in its final form of the cultural revolution),
helped divide and weaken the revolutionary forces emerging in
the imperialist countries out of the 1960s’ youth
radicalisation, particularly after May 1968. In the same way
they lessened the possibilities opened in this period of a
broader recomposition of the international workers’ movement
and politically destroyed dozens of thousands of revolutionary
(or potentially revolutionary) cadres in Europe, Japan, and
North America.
Later in Cuba, Grenada, and
Nicaragua, authentic socialist popular revolutions took place
that are clearly distinguished from the Yugoslav, Chinese, and
Vietnamese revolutions because they were led by revolutionary
parties coming not out of Stalinism but from differentiation’s
and development of anti-imperialist and socialist currents from
their own countries. Consequently the processes of
bureaucratisation of power have been much less in these
countries compared to the others. Also limited and still
insufficient steps have been taken towards an
institutionalisation of workers’ and people’s power, more
locally than nationally. As a result of these real differences,
the Cuban revolution and the Cuban workers’ state have
continued to make revolutionary progress a long time after the
seizure of power, a progress which has had a real influence on a
part of the anti-imperialist and workers’ movement in Latin
America.
But here again the
non-assimilation of the essential tenets of revolutionary
Marxism has had serious political consequences. The absence of
authentic socialist democracy in Cuba becomes increasingly a
brake on further economic progress. The paternalist conception
of the party involves serious risks of political and social
conflicts. [20] The
subsequent identification of the party with the state limits
greatly the internal influence of the Cuban leadership for
promoting the revolution in Latin America. Inevitable diplomatic
manoeuvres of the Cuban state tend to influence if not dictate
the tactical, even strategic, advice given to revolutionary
forces in the rest of the continent. The lack of revolutionary
victories up to now in Latin America weakens in turn the
position of the Cuban state against imperialism, increases its
material dependence on the Soviet bureaucracy and deepens the
dynamic of crises in Cuba itself. The question of supporting the
revolutionary Marxist programme as a whole is not therefore an
insignificant or secondary detail even in the case of Cuba and
Nicaragua.
Given the qualitatively
different character of the Cuban and Nicaraguan leaderships one
question is raised: could these cases be repeated and thereby
pose the question of the emergence of a new revolutionary
leadership of the proletariat on a world scale in quite new
terms?
It is not serious to assert
that in no country of the world can a revolution ever triumph
without a revolutionary Marxist leadership. Revolutionary forces
can emerge here or there within an essentially national or
“regional” framework of differentiation as occurred in Cuba,
Grenada, and Nicaragua. In order to assess this possibility you
have to drop any dogmatic predispositions – either
“positive” or “negative” – and concretely study in
practice the choices, activities, and dynamic of such and such a
revolutionary organisation (for example in El Salvador,
Guatemala, or the Philippines). There is no ready-made answer in
advance. It depends on the concrete practice of such
organisations over a long period. But we are convinced we
are talking here of only a few exceptions. To grasp this
exceptional character we need to recall the particular
conditions of the victories in Cuba and Nicaragua:
- The genuinely independent
character of the revolutionary leaderships, above all, from
the bourgeoisie and the Soviet bureaucracy.
- The weakness, demoralisation
and extreme decomposition of the ruling classes.
- The weak tradition of
proletarian self-organisation.
- The relative paralysis of
imperialism given the unforeseen turn in the revolutionary
process and the failure of its political manoeuvres.
- The superior political
quality of the revolutionary leadership, acquired through
long activity and growing authority among the masses, a
precondition for successfully countering imperialism’s
political manoeuvres.
If we examine the situation in
all the imperialist countries, in the dependent
semi-industrialised ones, and in most semi-colonial countries,
we can see that nowhere are all the above-enumerated factors to
be round nor even a majority of them, which explains how the
Cuban and Nicaraguan victories came under a non-revolutionary
Marxist leadership.
Footnotes
18.
As for Albania and North Korea we still do not have enough
information to judge to what extent the CPs seizure of power
resulted from an authentic popular revolution or from a foreign
military intervention as in Eastern Europe.
19.
Defining Stalinism as parties founded on the theory of soclalism
in a single country is essentially idealist. It is also a source
of obvious confusion. A great number of social democratic
parties were supporters of “socialism in one country”
without for all that being Stalinist.
20.
Significantly, Fidel Castro assigns the responsibility for the
disaster in Grenada on the “division” of the revolutionary
forces. In reality differentiations within any victorious
revolutionary movement faced with new problems and new choices
are inevitable. Avoiding such differences ending up in the
phenomena of degeneration like that of the Coard faction hardly
could be the result of stifling differences inside the apparatus
and the leadership. The remedy lies in respect for the widest
internal democracy, with tendency rights. It also lies in the
working masses, organised in their democratically elected
councils being able to exert sovereign power.
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