Chilean Marxist traces Lenin's 'Trotskyism'

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6 SOCIALIST ACTION SUPPLEMENT La Revolucion Social: Lenin y America Latina by Marta Harnecker. Siglo XXI, Mexico City, 1986, and Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, Managua, 1986.

The development of the imperialist phase of capitalism, resulting in World War I, led Lenin to conclude that the coming revolution had to combine in a single process both the democratic (anti-feudal) and the socialist revolutions.

Thus in 1917, Lenin broke with the conception of a "two-stage revolution" inherited from the founders of Russian Marxism. This schema held that the bourgeois-democratic tasks would have to be concluded before embarking on a socialist revolution.

Lenin explained that the Russian capitalists could not carry out a democratic revolution. Instead, he pointed out that only a workers' state supported by the peasantry could fulfill those tasks—as well as go forward toward socialism. Lenin's BOOK REVIEW views on the matter thus came to coincide with those espoused by Leon Trotsky in his theory of "Permanent Revolution."

After Lenin's death, however, Josef Stalin revived the old "two-stage" theory. Opposing points of view were vilified as "Trotskyism."

The Stalinist dogma effectively required maintaining political blocs with "progressive" sections of the ruling class. The policy resulted in such disasters as the military coups in Indonesia (1967) and Chile (1973).

It is in this context that the publication of Martha Harnecker's "La Revolucion Social: Lenin y America Latina" takes on significance.

The evolution of Lenin's views Harnecker, a Chilean theorist who lives in Cuba, (and whose writings have taken on a semi-official character) undertook a study of the development of Lenin's strategic conceptions in order to apply them to Latin American.

She elaborates Lenin's views on the class character of the revolution, describing their evolution between 1905 and 1917. Harnecker's conclusions on this point confirm the traditional Trotskyist interpretation of the subject.

Relying heavily on her reading of "Two Tactics" and "The Agrarian Program of Social Democracy," Harnecker summarizes Lenin's pre-war conception, rooted in the economic determinism of the Second International, as accepting that "the revolution of 1905 is a bourgeois revolution in its economic-social content. If it triumphed, it would not destroy capitalism but rather develop it further.' " (emphasis in original)

In this analysis, the attempts by Stalinists to portray Lenin's single 1905 reference to the "uninterrupted" character of the Russian revolution as a healthy rebuttal to Trotsky's "ultraleftism" are shown to be historically false.

Harnecker explains what Lenin really meant by this formulation. She writes: "Once the bourgeois-democratic revolution has triumphed, clearing the ground for the development of capitalism, the proletariat will consciously begin immediately a struggle for another revolution, the socialist revolution.

"The uninterrupted character of the revolution consists in not contenting itself with the triumph of a democratic regime which gives free reign to capitalism, but rather in continuing to struggle for socialism in the conditions created by the democratic revolution."

The need for socialism On the eve of the October 1917 Revolution, Lenin transcended these views. Reviewing Lenin's "Letters From Afar," "Letters On Tactics," and the "April Theses," Harnecker notes the break and attributes it fundamentally to the analysis of imperialism developed by Lenin during World War I.

She points out that the Russian Revo-¡fi lution took place in one of the most backward countries of Europe and, at the same time, one that had suffered the accelerated impulse of war.

"The crisis produced by the war," she writes, "demanded the adoption of radical measures which, although still not affecting private capitalist property, submitted capitalist control to workers' control, which already imply the first steps towards socialism."

This required the establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat," which Harnecker describes:

"[T)he dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean the exclusive government of one class nor the elimination of an alliance with other classes... [it] signifies the political leadership of the proletariat. The proletariat as the leading and dominant class, must know how to direct its policies in such a way that it first resolves the most urgent problems."

In this sense then, "The soviet government was a workers' and peasants' government because it represented the two principal classes of the revolution, whose struggle or agreement determined the luck [of the] revolution."

Lenin's "Trotskyism"

Lenin later explained his new conception in more depth in "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky" and in the articles "The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" and "The Fourth Anniversary of the Russian Revolution."

In the last article, Lenin stated, "Bourgeois-democratic reforms are a byproduct of the proletarian revolution, that is, socialist.... The first transforms itself into the second. The second resolves in passing the problems of the first, the second consolidates the work of the first. The struggle, and the struggle alone, determines how far the second will go."

As Harnecker points out, "It seems important to insist that the transformation of the first into the second, which the Bolshevik leader here sets out, has nothing to do with his 1905 conception of the uninterrupted passage of the bourgeois- democratic revolution into the socialist.

"In that epoch, [according to Lenin's thinking at the time] the only tasks which the revolution set forth were the bourgeois-democratic tasks which drove the country, not towards socialism, but rather, towards the development of capitalism."

Harnecker concludes, "It is impossible for socialism to definitively triumph in a single country, especially if it is a backward country such as Russia, without the triumph of the socialist revolution in some of the advanced countries."

What Harnecker misses Harnecker's book is not without defects. In one sentence, she dismisses Lenin's belief that a socialist government had to be based on soviets (workers' councils). She fails to come to grips with the degeneration of the Russian Revolution led by Stalin and its impact on the non-Russian Communist parties.

Thus, the policies of the pro-Moscow Cuban Popular Socialist Party before 1959 and the Chilean Communist Party in the Allende era are occasionally and uncritically mentioned. This is a serious error in a work which purports to explain the importance of Leninism in Latin America.

Harnecker's ambivalence flows not only from a misperception of these parties as revolutionary but also from a rigid division of the revolutionary party's program into "minimum" and "maximum" demands. She states:

"It is important to differentiate the political discourse directed to the vanguard from the discourse directed to the great masses. These, especially if they are backward, must be informed only of the immediate tasks which the revolution plans to put in practice: It is not necessary to talk of other tasks, nor insist on the socialist character of the revolution, much less of the dictatorship of the proletariat."

This passage has a grain of truth. "Talking socialism" and abstract posturing are apt to alienate workers who do not see the connection between their everyday struggles and socialist solutions.

But the failure to raise "transitional" demands—which link the daily or economic struggles for "minimum" demands to the "maximum" demand of socialism—poses the danger of allowing reformist leaders to keep the fight within "minimum" boundaries.

Transitional demands

The relationship of forces in any struggle often leads to compromises. In such cases, transitional demands are needed to educate the workers and carry the struggle forward during the next upsurge. Without such education, the movement can dissipate without future prospects, particularly where reformists are involved.

This is where Harnecker's separation of minimum and maximum goals becomes dangerous. She warns against an organization becoming bogged down in opportunist minimalișm, or carried away by sectarian ultimatism. But she fails to pose any solution short of trusting the revolutionary vanguard to know what to do next.

When it is understood that Harnecker still includes the official Communist parties in the "revolutionary vanguard," even though they support Stalin's two-stage theory, one has a right to pause.

Harnecker intends to follow the present book with one which will elaborate her views on this and other questions in more detail.

Her present work, though marred by the problems noted, is nevertheless a serious study of Lenin's conception of a revolutionary situation and of the evolution of his thought on the key question of the class character of the revolution in the imperialist era. It also confirms some of the views traditionally defended by the Trotskyist movement:

"For Latin America to escape from underdevelopment, there is .... no other road than the revolutionary transformation of society through anti-imperialist and democratic solutions, which, in our countries, are at the same time necessarily anticapitalist solutions."

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... Growing worker unrest (continued from suppl. 1)

also named chairman of the party commission on ideology. Medvedev gives a good picture of where perestroika is going.

The economic reforms he describes are extremely far-reaching. They challenge fundamental aspects of a planned economy and seriously jeopardize a broad range of social gains made in the 1917 Russian Revolution.

"The market is an indispensable means of gearing production to fast-changing demand, and a major instrument of public control over quality and cost," Medveder says. "Cooperative businesses and individual enterprises are effective not only in small-scale production, ... they may also be useful in organizing ... large-scale industry. Our previous concepts of public property ... have proved untenable."

Nikolay Shmelyov, a leading Soviet government economist, was even more descriptive. Writing last year in the leading Soviet political and literary journal, Novy Mir, he said:

"We need to permit companies and organizations to sell freely, to buy freely, to buy and borrow from their reserves ... to invest their enormous but idle resources. .. In place of fruitless efforts at central planning ... we should introduce contracts between supplier and consumer."

Shmelyov continued: "Only profit can measure the quantity and quality of economic activity and permit us to relate production costs. ... One way of reducing the current shortage of capital funds [is] for the appropriate enterprises to sell bonds to enterprises ... and private parties as well."

None of these capitalist-like "market reforms" come cheap. They all have a price, and it's the working class and poor farmers who will pay.

The cost of reforms There are numerous examples indicating that the reforms mean more austerity for the majority.

For example, Gorbachev has strongly hinted that he no longer plans to wait two years before raising prices on consumer goods like meat and milk. He only backed away from price increases last year because of strong popular resistance.

On another occasion, Gorbachev's chiet economic adviser, Abel Aganbegyan, complained about the 1986 government working class. There are other very damaging consequences for the economy as a whole if the profit motive becomes the major stimulus for production.

Gorbachev was confronted with these problems during his recent visit to Siberia. He criticized many enterprises which were making a huge profit by emphasizing production of luxury items. Following the logic of the profit motive, some factory managers apparently have been shifting production away from inexpensive mass consumer items.

"There are some who have simply embarked upon the anti-social road and cut down the output of cheap goods in popular demand," Gorbachev complained. "Imagine what will happen," he said, "if everyone takes this road."

That's exactly the problem.

But Gorbachev should be pointing the finger at himself. His plan for broad application of the profit motive will necessarily mean more wasteful diversions of labor and capital.

A far better recourse-one which Gorbachev is not proposing—would be to fully democratize the planned economy, replacing the bureaucratic administration solution. "The substance of the current agrarian policy," he says, "is to change the relations of production on the farms." This includes promoting "contractual and lease agreements for up to 50 years."

In a dramatic speech on Oct. 13, Gorbachev called for farmers throughout the Soviet Union to be freed from the current state-run system of collective agriculture. Specifically, Gorbachev proposed that the limited experiments in leasing state lands to individual farmers should be promoted across the country. "Our idea," he said, "is that all agriculture, the entire agrarian sector, should follow this path."

Gorbachev has already encountered some problems in the countryside, just as he has in the city. Even with the colorful imagery of making "the farmer sovereign master" over the land, many farmers suspect Gorbachev's motives. The New York Times reports "a public jealous and resentful of the growing private entrepreneurial class."

Addressing himself to those agricultural workers who are reluctant to give up the social and economic security of the collective farms, Gorbachev remarked: "No fool is going to go to work on a lease I socia to utilize the raise their own prog ram...

. In a race to keep ahead of Planting may very well shift away from inexpensive foods toward highly priced specialty crops: And if private peasants are allowed to grow crops specifically for more profitable foreign markets, a serious food shortage could develop inside the Soviet Union. A food shortage is not idle speculation. It is, in fact, exactly what occurred in Soviet agriculture in the 1920s under similar conditions.

Long waiting lines and scarcity of mass consumer items will also grow dramatically if top Gorbachev adviser Abel Aganbegyan is correct in his prediction that "the monopoly of the ministry of foreign trade will be ended" with the new reform program. Last year there were already over 1300 enterprises with independent relations with the foreign market.

Economics and politics

Since Stalin's triumph over the original Bolshevik revolutionary program of Lenin and Trotsky—a triumph born from the assassination of virtually the entire leadership of the early Bolshevik Party— Soviet bureaucrats have subordinated the needs of oppressed people all over the world to their privileged, reactionary interests. They term this approach "Building Socialism in One Country." It is the polar opposite of the internationalist appeal of "Workers of the World, Unite!"

Perestroika economic overtures to capitalist banks and foreign markets will substantially increase pressures to accommodate to imperialism. Time magazine welcomed the reforms because, "Gorbachev may represent the West's last chance, at least in this century, of better integrating the Soviet Union into the world economy. There it could come under pressure to behave like a Western country, competing for capital and markets, lowering the barriers to foreign investment, and even making its currency convertible." (July 27, 1987)

Vadim Medvedev didn't waste any time in letting the imperialists know he was ready to deal. On the day he was elected to the politburo as chief ideologist, he put a new twist on the time-worn Stalinist "peaceful coexistence" policy of screwing the working class.

Medvedev actually termed the class struggle "outdated." Instead, he said, "socialism and capitalism will inevitably interact within the framework of the same human civilization." Not to be outdone by Medvedev, former Foreign Secretary Eduard Shevardnadze declared that "the struggle between the two systems is no longer the decisive factor."

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