The twists of Stalinist policy

Scan page 10

The following is an abridged transcription of a series of lectures by Tom Kerry in 1966. In these lectures, which are published here for the first time, Kerry follows the history of Stalinism's pernicious impact on the workers' movement from the late 1920s till the end of World War II.

Kerry was a leader of the labor and socialist movements for more than 40 years until his death in 1983. He was a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938.

As an SWP leader, he served as the party's national organizational secretary and as editor of The Militant newspaper and the International Socialist Review.

A few years before his death, Kerry became an outspoken oppositionist inside the SWP to the leadership's abandonment of the party's historic program. The tendency to which he belonged was bureaucratically expelled from the SWP after his death, coming together with other expelled opposition currents to form Socialist Action in October 1983.

10 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 1986 We attach great importance to studying the lessons of the past, both the victories and defeats of the working-class movement on a world scale. In this we differ from the spokesmen of the New Left [radical current in the 1960s], whose tendency is to deny that we have any lessons to learn from the past and who reject past experience as irrelevant.

You find an impatience on the part of the New Left, especially toward the Trotskyists, who insist upon studying history and Marxism, not just for an abstract study, but who try to derive from such a study lessons that are applicable today.

The revolutionary party, our party, and our International—the Fourth International—is, in this sense, the memory of the working class. And the parties of reformism, you can say, and of Stalinist revisionism, are notoriously the parties of poor memory.

Not only would the Social Democrats and Stalinists like to forget, they would like everybody else to forget their history, their development, and the source of their current policies, which are rooted in the past. They are policies that have led to a whole series of defeats.

At the time of the October Revolution in Russia in

Scan page 11

Lenin (speaking) and Trotsky (right, lower step) saw the Russian Revolution as (continued from page 10: “Gorbachev's foreign policy: The new face of "peaceful coexistence'”)

they were in opposing factions for a great part of their adult political lives. It was only at the time of the revolution in 1917 that Trotsky acknowleged Lenin's priority on this question and accepted his leadership. He became, as he called it, one of Lenin's pupils.

The defeats in Europe in 1919-1920, due to the lack of a Bolshevik party, inevitably led to a spread of ultra -leftism among the young left-wing formations drawn to the Russian Revolution. Those of you who have read Lenin's Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Diserder, will remember how he polemicized against these attempts to substitute the party for the working class.

The Third International The First Congress of the Third International met in 1919 to begin the task of organizing Bolshevik-type parties that could lead a struggle for power. These were the pioneers who set out at that time to overthrow world capitalism. That was their object and that was their aim in establishing the Third International.

The original proclamation calling for the First Congress of the Third International was signed by Lenin and Trotsky, who were the most authoritative and best-known leaders of the Bolshevik Party.

This First Congress, however, was attended by very few authentic representatives of organizations in Europe since it was difficult to get into Russia. Remember, in 1919, Russia was then under blockade. The armies of imperialism had troops on Russian soil. Civil war raged on 21 fronts.

But the Bolsheviks felt it was absolutely essential that they proceed with not only the proclamation, but the actual organization of the Third International.

For one thing, the representatives of the Second International had moved to reconstitute their International after the war, calling for unity in the Social-Democratic movement. The Third International sought to indicate that unity of the type practiced by the right-wing Social Democrats meant unity with the capitalist class.

The Second World Congress, which met in 1920, had as its goal the drawing of a clear demarcation line in the world socialist movement. It was at this congress that the 21 conditions for affiliation were proposed. The Congress of Third International in Moscow. Lenin and Bolsheviks welcome delegates.

leaders of the Third International set such conditions as to make it impossible for the opportunists who remained in the parties of the Second International to affiliate to the Third International.

There was the big Italian Socialist Party, for example, with its extreme right wing led by Turati, which coexisted with the left wing in one party. Lenin had to point out that this was an error. You could never build a homogenous, combat party designed for the specific purpose of leading a struggle for the conquest of power with that kind of a heterogeneous and antagonistic composition.

United-front tactic

After 1920 the revolutionary wave began to recede. Lenin and Trotsky realistically appraised the situation in Europe-the Communist parties were in most cases a minority among the working-class parties-and concluded that the main task was to win over the masses before engaging in the direct struggle for workers' power.

In line with this perspective, the Third World Congress elaborated the tactic of the united front. The tactic was designed specifically to cope with the problem of a working class divided between the Social Democrats, on the one hand, the Communist parties, on the other, and the centrists in between.

Lenin and Trotsky pointed out that it wasn't enough to publish articles in magazines, newspapers, and books. The workers don't learn primarily from reading. They LE advanced outpost in the struggle for world socialism.

learn primarily through action, through their own experience in struggle. It was this particular problem that the tactic of the united front was devised to solve.

After the Third World Congress Lenin was taken ill, and from that time we can date the beginning of the development of the bureaucratic caste in the Soviet The defeats in Europe and the tiredness of the Soviet masses, who had gone through several years of civil war, along with the destruction of the economy, fostered a loss of faith or hope in the immediacy of an extension of the revolution to the advanced countries. This was the basis upon which a struggle developed over the division of the products of Soviet industry and agriculture.

After 1923 the process of bureaucratization became accelerated. Out of this development arose for the first time the theory of building socialism in a single country, which was promulgated by Joseph Stalin. In response to this, Trotsky organized the Left Opposition. Thus began a struggle over the whole question of strategy, tactics, and program for the world revolution and for the Soviet Union.

"Socialism in one country"

In the ideological sphere, the attack against Trotsky by the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, who were in the leadership of the Russian Communist Party, took the form of an attack upon his theory of permanent revolution.

There was a worldwide campaign against Trotskyism and the theory of the permanent revolution, without the Left Opposition being permitted to have its views circulated in the sections of the Communist International.

There was one qualification that Stalin attached to his theory of building socialism in a single country. Socialism could be built in one country if there was no foreign intervention, and if there was no war. Thus, the policy of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union was directed at preventing the outbreak of war and of subordinating actual revolutionary developments in other countries that threatened the status quo.

Stalin and Bukharin argued that as long as there was a monopoly of foreign trade and the nationalization of industry and of land, then the question of time was of no importance whatsoever. They believed that they could proceed very gradually, at a snail's pace, to complete the building of socialism in the USSR.

This fantasy, this utopia, was rudely exploded when the rich and middle peasants, who had been encouraged to "enrich themselves," began a grain strike against the cities. The lack of industrial products that could be exchanged for grain had created a great disparity in the prices for industrial products, to the disadvantage of the peasants.

The kulaks, the rich and middle peasants, began to exert pressure to trade with the world market, where they could get more for their grain. This immediately threatened the overthrow of the state, because the only thing that prevented the restoration of capitalism, especially at that time, was the monopoly of foreign trade. It prevented cheaper capitalist commodities from being brought into the Soviet Union in exchange for agricultural products.

The Trotskyist opposition was the first to raise the necessity for a planned industrialization. They were stigmatized then as ultraleftists for even proposing this perspective, which was the only way to prevent the

THEORY/HISTORY •

HER :t11:119 Hiritti the increasing disparity between the cost of industrial and agricultural products.

The conflict in the Soviet countryside became acute just prior to the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International, which convened in 1928. After the Sixth World Congress, Stalin broke with Bukharin and opened up a war against the kulaks, imposing forced collectivization. The country was brought to the verge of famine, as rich and middle peasants slaughtered their cattle and destroyed crops.

Trotsky criticizes program

It was at the Sixth World Congress that Trotksy introduced his criticism of Stalin's draft political program. This program, which codified the concept of socialism in a single country, was an extremely eclectic one, covering over the recent defeat suffered by the working class in China.

In the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, the Communist Party was sent into Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, which was leading a war to unify China, and subordinated to its discipline. According to Stalin, the Kuomintang and its program embodied, misusing Lenin's old formula, the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry."

When Chiang Kai-shek returned from his expedition to the north, he opened up an attack on the Communist Party, slaughtered the workers of Shanghai and the other cities, and established the rule of the Chinese capitalists and landlords, which prevailed until 1949.

At the Sixth World Congress, James P. Cannon, a leader of the American Communist Party, and Maurice Spector, a leader of the Canadian Communist Party, got hold of Trotsky's criticism of the draft program. This marked the origin of the organized Trotskyist movement on a world scale.

A fierce factional struggle broke out in the International not long after the Sixth Congress. Not only the Russian Party but the whole International was purged by Stalin. Trotsky was sent into internal exile at Alma Ata. Bukharin was labeled a "bourgeois restorationist." Hundreds of thousands were sent to concentration camps in Siberia.

This extreme "left" swing by Stalin coincided with the beginning of a worldwide economic depression, and what came to be known as the "Third Period."

Third Period Stalinism

What were the policy, tactics, and strategy of Third Period Stalinism?

The Third Period was supposed to be the last period, the period of the final conflict, in which capitalism would be overthrown on a world scale. The Stalinists said that the main enemy was not the impending rise of fascism, but the "social-fascist" Social Democrats.

Lenin had characterized the Social Democrats as "social imperialists" or "social chauvinists," but then these terms had had some meaning. He meant that they were socialists in word and supporters of their own imperialist governments in deed. But "social fascism" was absolutely meaningless and nonsensical because the Social Democracy was as much threatened by fascism as was the Communist Party. Fascism aimed to destroy the independence of all working-class organizations.

The Stalinists jettisoned the united-front concept as it had been worked out by the Third World Congress. In its place was adopted what they called the "united front from below," which was supposed to exclude the top Social(continued on page 12)

SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 1986 11

Scan page 12

...Stalinist twists and turns -THEORY/HISTORY (continued from page 11)

Democratic leaders but include the ranks of Social-Democratic workers. In fact, this was no united front at all.

The Stalinists were : against working within the existing trade-union organizations. Instead, they established their own "revolutionary trade unions," which in most instances were 100-percent revolutionary and 100-percent impotent.

In Germany the strategy of the Third Period allowed Hitler to march to power without a struggle. It was the most disastrous kind of defeat. Remember, in 1933 the German Communist Party was the biggest Communist party outside of the Soviet Union. The German Social-Democratic Party was the biggest party in the Second International. Just prior to the time Hitler came to power, these two parties received some 13 million votes in the elections.

Trotsky gave as a cause for the seizure of power by Hitler the fact that the Communist Party of Germany had not formed a united front with the Social-Democratic Party on a platform for the defense of parliamentary government and the mass trade unions.

Hilter's victory was a terrible catastrophe, not only for the German working class, but for the world working class, because as Trotsky warned, the victory of Hitler in Germany meant war. Regardless of how the war began, at one stage or another of its development it would be aimed at the Soviet Union.

Third International dead

With the debacle in Germany, Trotsky concluded that the Third International was no longer a viable instrument for revolutionary change, and called for the formation of the Fourth International.

The defeat in Germany led to a reversal of Third Period ultraleftism by the Stalinists, signaled by the inauguration in 1935 of the Popular Front policy at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International. The central slogan became the defense of imperialist "democracy" against fascism, to unite all "progressives" against the fascist menace.

What that meant, of course, was that the struggle for socialism was taken off the agenda, lest it obstruct programmatic unity with capitalist forces opposed to fascism. In Spain, those who tried to go beyond the limits imposed by the policy of the popular or people's front were subjected to the most ferocious and savage persecution by a Spanish version of the GPU, the Stalinist political police. This policy in fact paved the way for the fascist onslaught.

You can well imagine what a shock it was for people weaned on popular frontism for four or five years when it was suddenly announced that Hitler and Stalin had concluded a non-aggression pact in 1939. A non-aggression pact which meant the beginning of World War II. The Popular Front policy was quickly jettisoned. Hitler, who had been the devil incarnate, was transformed into a peace-loving vegetarian. The main aggressors became France and Great Britain.

In the United States, this shift in policy was manifested by certain organizational changes. During the Popular Front period the American Communist Party's main vehicle for conducting the antiwar struggle was an organization called the League Against War and Fascism. With the Hitler-Stalin pact, however, the name was quickly changed from the League Against War and Fascism to the League for Peace and Democracy.

One of the American Communist Party's major slogans in this period became, "the Yanks are not coming," which was meant to indicate its opposition to U.S. imperialism becoming involved in the war on the side of British and French imperialism.

Price of Stalin's policy The Socialist Workers Party pointed to Trotsky's earlier warning, after Hitler's victory in 1933, that however the war started, ultimately it must in the course of its development be directed against the Soviet Union. Trotsky said that the differences that existed between capitalism in its fascist form and capitalism in its bourgeois-democratic form were not decisive.

Trotsky explained that the fundamental division in the world was between the nationalized property and the monopoly of foreign trade established by the October Revolution, and the capitalist world system of private property. Using this fundamental Marxist analysis as the point of departure, he concluded that the war would eventually be directed against the Soviet Union.

This pact between Hitler and Stalin ended, of course, with Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Despite warnings by British and French intelligence services, despite the obvious fact that Hitler was mobilizing his hordes on the border of the Soviet Union, Stalin refused to believe, even after the invasion had occurred, that Hitler's army had marched across the borders of the Soviet Union with the object of destroying 12 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY the Soviet regime. The result was that the Nazi army advanced very rapidily.

It is now estimated that over 20 million Russians were killed in the war. That was the price of Stalin's policy in Europe, which led to the defeat of both the German and Spanish revolutions, and set the stage for World War II.

In the Soviet Union, Stalin proclaimed the war to be the Great Patriotic War. The main slogans were pure nationalist, patriotic propaganda-"Kill Germans," "Destroy Germany" — directed against the entire German population.

No attempt was made to undermine Hitler's control over the German masses and over the German working class by revolutionary propaganda calling for the overthrow of Hitler. Not at all. Inevitably, that led the German working class to conclude that it had no alternative but to support Hitler to the very bitter end.

In the United States, the Stalinists dropped their "Yanks are not coming" slogan, and began clamoring for the United States to get in the war now, and to open up a second front to take the piessure off the Soviet Union.

With the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the entry of the United States into the war, the Communist Party pulled out all the stops for the war effort. It became the most Spanish Republicans: Betrayed by Stalin in the interests of preserving capitalism. ardent defender of the policy of class collaboration and national unity.

The Stalinists backed the no-strike pledge, which was established in industry on the fraudulent basis that there would be price controls to prevent a decline in the standard of living, that unions would be recognized, and that there would be a maintenance-of-membership clause in the union contract.

One of the Communist Party's main trade-union spokesmen, Harry Bridges, who was a founder and president of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union on the West Coast, proclaimed at that time that unions must become the instruments of speed-up in industry. For the Communist Party this became the main function of the unions during the war period-not to engage in struggles for better wages, hours, and working conditions—but to increase labor productivity.

Workers who went on strike were called finks. Those who broke strikes were called good patriots and good trade-union men and women. Bridges himself attempted to break a strike of the warehousemen at Montgomery Ward in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where his union had organized a section. He rejected the workers' request for support and called them strikebreakers. Everything was turned upside down.

Roosevelt proposes slave labor In the course of the war, President Roosevelt proposed the enactment of what he called the National Service Act. This was intended to empower the government to draft workers for assignment to work in any industry in any part of the country, under conditions imposed by the government, and to subject them to virtual martial law in the case of any disobedience. It was a proposal to extend military control over the American labor force.

Now this was so raw that even the most conservative leaders of the AFL and the CIO fought against it. They said this was slave labor. We were supposed to be fighting a war for freedom. This was contrary to the aims of the war, they said, and was a blow directed at the very existence of the trade-union movement. They succeeded in defeating the National Service Act.

The only tendency that supported Roosevelt's National Service Act was the Communist Party. They were the only ones that came out openly, advocating support to Roosevelt's slave-labor law.

The Trotskyists, by contrast, opposed the war, defended the independence of the unions, organized to overthrow the no-strike pledge, and fought for the continuation of the class struggle. The employers were enriching themselves, we argued, at the expense of the workers, who were asked to make all the sacrifices, as is usual in any war conducted by the capitalist state.

Against the Trotskyists, of course, there were no lengths to which the government wouldn't go. Eighteen of our comrades, some of whom were leaders of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, were convicted under the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate socialism.

We found that our greatest opposition within the tradeunion movement to fighting the Smith Act came from the Communist Party. It carried on a campaign in its press stigmatizing the Trotskyists as treasonous, subversive, and getting what they deserved.

We warned the Communist Party at the time that it was going to pay for its support for the Smith Act. We said that this love fest they were having with the capitalist imperialists was not going to last forever. And sure enough, it did pay in 1948-49, when leaders of the Communist Party were charged with violating the Smith Act and sentenced to prison.

CP advises FBI

Here is just one indication of how far the Stalinists went in their attacks upon the Trotskyists in the SWP. We were running a mayoralty candidate in Los Angeles in 1945 and the People's World, (March 1, 1945) which was the West-Coast organ of the Communist Party, published an editorial that explained why it opposed our candidate in favor of the capitalist candidate against whom we were running.

The editorial was headed, "Trotskyites spread seditious program," and it reads: "The true character of the Trotskyites as a subversive and disloyal movement is revealed in the so-called election platform....The platform contains not a single sentence or word in support of national unity or the war effort."

Isn't that a hideous crime? Of course it didn't. The Socialist Workers Party was opposed to the concept of "national unity" and did not support the so-called war effort. We supported the concept of the class struggle against the war.

Let's continue the quote: "Instead it tries to incite class strikes, disgust of government, and opposition to the war effort. It is a document that could well have been written by Nazi or Japanese spies. For instance, it charges that President Roosevelt is trying to Hitlerize America by asking for a National Service Act... We maintain that this stuff, under the guise of electioneering, is propaganda made in Berlin."

And then comes the bloody shirt. "With our soldiers and sailors at death grips with the German and Japanese enemy, the Trotskyites are attempting to foment treason on the home front. This should not be tolerated. The FBI and the U.S. District Attorney should act at once to clamp down on the Trotskyite saboteurs of our war effort."

This is just an indication, but not the worst by any means, of the kind of propaganda the Communist Party conducted during this period.

Stalin buries International

As a token of his good will toward his wartime allies, Stalin announced in 1943 the dissolution of the Communist International. There was no congress, no discussion. Not a single objection or criticism from any section of the International was raised.

Trotsky had already declared the Communist International dead in 1933, after the victory of Hitler. Stalin's decision was thus an attempt to give the International an official, if indecent, court burial.

Prior to the end of the war, the grand alliance of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, along with Chiang Kai-shek, met to draw up a number of pacts designed to parcel out "spheres of influence" for the imperialist powers following the war.

There was the Yalta Pact, the Teheran Pact, a whole series of pacts that were supposed to establish by treaty a common, permanent peace upon this earth. Tragically, in deference to these agreements, the Stalinists deliberately sabotaged the revolutionary prospects of the workers in France and Italy following the war.

In France, the Vichy regime had been in an alliance with Hitler. General De Gaulle was in exile and didn't have too much influence inside France. The resistance movement in its majority was controlled by the Communist Party, which was the only armed force, outside of the armies of the imperialist powers which had invaded France.

There was a power vacuum in the country. Nothing could have stopped the Communist Party from taking power and establishing a workers' state in France.

In Italy, Mussolini had been in power since 1921. There were no opposition parties, and the bourgeoisie in its overwhelming majority was part of the Mussolini outfit. So when Mussolini was finally strung up by the Italian workers there also existed a complete power vacuum. The Communist Party grew by leaps and bounds. Almost overnight it had millions and millions of members.

But the Communist parties of France and Italy, in conjunction with Stalin's agreement with Roosevelt and Churchill, set up coalition capitalist governments.

(continued on page 13,

Scan page 13

THEORY/HISTORY

----- pull-quotes -----

CURAOSOBREENTUSTE TRIES AATESAOAIR VERONS