Revulsion of Stalinism sparks revolt for workers' democracy

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16 SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 1989 "Communists have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole."

The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels, 1848 On March 26, Soviet citizens elected delegates to a new Congress of People's Deputies. Despite numerous measures that restricted candidate nominations and assured tremendous advantage to those running with the support of the Communist Party apparatus, the results were a humiliating defeat for official Communist Party candidates across the country.

In Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, who earlier had been deposed as city party chief after being attacked by Communist Party head Mikhail Gorbachev, won with a stunning 89 per cent of the vote over the candidate backed by the local party machine.

In Leningrad, the top five Communists in the Leningrad power structure went down to defeat. Two of the losers, including the Leningrad regional party chief and Politburo member Yuri F. Solovyev, were running unopposed. The complex and restricted nomination process assured that many of the top Communist Party officials ran unchallenged. However, so many Leningrad voters scratched their names off the ballots that they were unable to gain the 51 percent required to take their seats.

This was the pattern across the country where hundreds of senior party functionaries were defeated, including over 30 regional Communist Party chiefs, many of whom ran unopposed.

In the ethnic republics the rejection of the apparatus candidates was even more sweeping. The victors included most of the candidates who campaigned for greater autonomy in the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia-including some candidates who favored the secession of their republics from the Soviet Union.

The Lithuanian movement Sajudis all but swept the elections, claiming victory for 32 of the republic's 42 seats, with eight others forced into runoffs.

Repeat in Poland

During the first week of June, Poles voted in an election for a new bicameral parliament. After attempts to crush Solidarity for a decade through repression, banning, and martial law, General Wojciech Jaruzelski negotiated with Solidarity President Lech Walesa for a limited election designed to guarantee the Communist Party a large and automatic majority. In 1981, Jaruzelski had ordered tanks into the streets, killing over 200 Solidarity supporters.

Solidarity was only allowed to run candidates unrestricted in the 100-seat Senate. There, Solidarity won 92 seats outright; the remaining eight were undecided in the first round, but seven of those were won by Solidarity in the subsequent runoff election.

In the 460-seat lower house, Solidarity was restricted to running candidates for only 161 seats (35 percent), leaving the Communist Party free to run unopposed for the remaining 299 seats (65 percent). Solidarity won all but one of the 161 seats where it was allowed to run head to head against the Communist Party.

But even where Communist Party candidates ran unopposed, almost all failed to be elected. Only three Communist Party candidates running unopposed for the 299 seats apportioned them were able to obtain enough votes to be certified. Again the electorate overwhelmingly crossed their names off the ballots.

This constituted virtually a complete rejection of the Polish Communist Party by the Polish workers. It's hard to recall in modern history a more decisive rejection by the electorate of a ruling party.

Response in China

Like the Soviet Union and Poland, but even more aggressively, the Chinese Communist Party has been driving ahead with the new strategy of pro-capitalist economic "reforms." But in China the Communist Party makes no pretense of risking even limited elections, no matter how controlled and restricted as a safety valve for worker discontent.

The result this spring was the spontaneous emergence of the massive pro-democracy movement. Singing the "Internationale" and chanting "Workers of the World Unite," students and workers organized demonstrations ranging from 10,000 to 1 million in major cities throughout China.

The demands of the pro-democracy movement focused on freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, the right to strike, and financial audit of the notoriously high-living Communist Party elite.

The response of the Chinese Communist Party? The shooting down of thousands of unarmed workers and students in the streets and the imposition of a massive campaign of repression, arrests, and executions.

We have here three of the major Communist parties of the world, presiding for many years over supposedly socialist societies. Yet the events of this spring demonstrate conclusively, and not for the first time, that these regimes do not have the support of the workers of the Soviet Union, Poland, or China. In the final analysis all three parties retain government control only by brute force or the threat of force.

For workers throughout the world, this situation represents a central contradiction of our era. It can hardly be claimed that such Communist parties "have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole." On the contrary, their relationship with and attitude toward the proletariat is without exception one of fear and contempt. Anyone calling himself or herself a Marxist has to decisively address and explain this contradiction.

It is this contradiction that is the principal source of the deep and continuing crisis of leadership facing the world proletariat today.

Common Stalinist heritage

All three of these Communist parties have a common historical heritage and common political roots based on the defeat and crushing of the Bolshevik Party that made the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Their political origins can be traced to the parasitic bureaucracy that emerged in the late 1920s, with the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Stalin was its spokesperson This defeat of the party of Vladimir I Lenin and Leon Trotsky was a watershed defeat for the leadership of the world working class. The Stalinization of the early Communist parties remains the principal roadblock to the building of effective revolutionary leaderships throughout the world.

This historic defeat was only accomplished with the physical liquidation of the Bolshevik Party. Stalin arrested, executed, or had murdered almost every important living Bolshevik participant in the revolution.

Of 1966 delegates to the 17th party congress in 1934, 1108 were arrested. Of 139 members of the Central Committee, 98 were arrested. Almost all of these leaders were either executed or died while imprisoned. Along with three Soviet marshals, one third to one half of the 75,000 Red Army officers were arrested or shot.

The purges of the 1930s were so sweeping that no major party figure of the October Revolution, which gave power to the Bolsheviks, survived to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the event, except Stalin's faithful lieutenant, Vyacheslav Molotov, who was retired in disgrace in 1958.

Soviet democracy crushed

One of the first victims of the Stalinist bureaucratization was workers' democracy. Not only was democracy crushed in the party but throughout the entire structure successfully established by the 1917 revolution—in the Soviets, in the trade unions, and in the agricultural collectives.

Through the bureaucracy's control of the Third International, the international party formed by Lenin and Trotsky in 1919, this same character was imposed on Communist parties through out the world.

In the long run, a socialist economy cannot function without democracy-it is a necessity. The Left Opposition, founded by Trotsky to defend the program of the Bolshevik Party against Stalin, correctly predicted the results would be growing economic crises.

The wholesale success of the heavy industries in the workers' states is a gigantic conquest-a stunning accomplishment for economies forcibly isolated from the world market and a tribute to the intrinsic advantages of a planned economy. It was possible to accomplish the rough work of borrowing, imitating, transplanting, and grafting from capitalist technology on the basis initially laid down by the successful revolution itself.

However, the test of modern industry is the production of delicate mechanisms, electronics, computers, etc., which demand both technical and general culture. The further you go in this direction the more the economy runs into the problem of quality, "which slips out of the hands of a bureaucracy like a shadow."

As Leon Trotsky wrote in 1936: "The Soviet products are as though branded with the gray label of indifference. Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative-conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery....Soviet on

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'The struggle for the freedom of the trade unions and the factory committees, for the right of assembly, and for the freedom of the press, will unfold in the struggle for the "The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution' SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 1989 17 Sergei Gunevev struggle for democracy is not the demand of an abstract policy, still less an abstract moral. It has become a life-and-death need of the country."

The bureaucracy's needs in defending its material privileges and maintaining its special monopoly status as a governing elite, free from the constraints of workers' control, are what drove them to smash the Soviet democracy created by the 1917 revolution.

These same forces are what moved them to abandon Lenin's concept of internationalism and replace it with a policy of class collaboration under the euphemism of "Building Socialism in One Country."

Stalin's "peaceful coexistence"

Lenin and the Bolsheviks were convinced that the only defense of the Soviet Union in the long run lay in extending the revolution. This was the guiding principle of the Bolshevik foreign policy. reVoluti bureaucrams, bara to ideal ly world imperialism, or a segment of it, to maintain the status quo and secure their position within it. Revolutionary struggles and upsurges throughout the world are principally seen as opportunities and bargaining chips for brokering a deal with the imperialist powers.

Gorbachev, in his transparently crude offer to help settle "regional disputes" in return for more favorable treatment on the part of U.S. imperialism, is just the latest sorry chapter in this disastrous policy.

It is nothing less than an offer by the bureaucracy to use its influence to extinguish revolutionary struggles in South Africa, Angola, the Middle East, Nicaragua, and El Salvador for a will-of-the-wisp quid pro quo.

Similarly, the Chinese Stalinists' invasion of Vietnam in 1979—at the behest of U.S. imperialism in return for the lifting of the U.S. trade blockade-graphically demonstrated what the counterrevolutionary policy of building socialism country concretely means.

Restoring capitalism?

The entrenched bureaucracies in the workers' states characterize workers' opposition, the democratic movements, and the emergence through Solidarnosc of an independent trade-union movement, as steps by counterrevolutionary and alien class forces to reintroduce capitalist rule.

This claim is even given credence outside the workers' states by various currents on the left, sometimes openly, sometimes half-heartedly and surreptitiously.

Behind such an idea has to lie the ridiculous assumption that the struggle of workers, farmers, peasants, and students in the bureaucratized workers' states for democratic rights and control over their own government would, if successful, be used by them to return land to large landowners and factories back to capitalists.

As demonstrated in the recent events in China, it was the students-supported by millions of working people throughout the country—who were demanding a real socialist system, a system based on workers' democracy.

The Left Opposition 50 years ago correctly predicted that the fight against the Stalinized bureaucracy would begin precisely around such slogans and demands.

In 1938 Trotsky wrote in "The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution:" "A fresh upsurge of the revolution in the USSR will undoubtedly begin under the banner of the struggle against social inequality and political oppression.

"The struggle for the freedom of the trade unions and the factory committees, for the right of assembly, and for the freedom of the press, will unfold in the struggle for the regeneration and development of Soviet democracy.®"

In fact the growing opposition in the Soviet Union, Poland, and China is in Carl Finamore/Socialist Action response to pro-capitalist economic "reforms" introduced by the bureaucratized Communist parties which have produced inflation, unemployment, and a lowered standard of living for workers.

The bureaucracy is not a ruling class-they are a privileged, parasitic caste feeding off the historic gains of the revolution-but a caste which aspires to transform itself into a ruling class.

Danger stems from bureaucracy The economic crisis in the workers' states is deepening. The bureaucracy's rule is a prime factor in this process. Centralized planning without democracy is leading to ever greater bureaucratic inefficiencies and stagnation. Their counterrevolutionary policies of class collaboration and so-called "peaceful coexistence" is the principle brake on the successful extension of the world revolution.

As the economic crisis in the workers' states deepens, the bureaucracy's primary concern is to save itself and preserve its privileges. Ever more it sees as its only option a policy to allow the penetration of world capitalism directly into the workers' states and allow market relations to develop without the check of workers' democracy.

It is the bureaucracy itself that represents the growing danger for the restoration of capitalism. It is the bureaucracy that functions ever more openly as a transmission belt for the introduction of bourgeois ideology and practice into the workers' states.

If some currents on the left are confused about the fundamental nature of the democratic movements in the workers' states, the imperialists are not.

Some commentators have expressed puzzlement as to why the Bush administration has offered such lukewarm support to the demonstrations for democratic rights in China and has been so obviously reluctant to criticize the Deng regime for drowning them in blood.

Baldev/Sygma The Bush administration correctly calculates its best hope for restoring capitalism in China is the bureaucratized Communist Party. The imperialists also understand that workers' states under democratic workers' control would pose a qualitatively increased threat to continued imperialist rule everywhere in the world.

Workers' control

But how can democratic workers' control be re-established in the bureaucratized workers' states? Can the bureaucratic caste, in whose hands the power and wealth are now concentrated, be peacefully reformed out of existence? There is not a scintilla of evidence to indicate that is a realistic possibility.

On the contrary, as the economic crisis of the workers' states becomes more acute the bureaucracy gives every indication that it intends to defend its privileges above all— even if it means the introduction of capitalist methods and institutions.

These entrenched bureaucracies cannot be reformed-they will be removed only by a revolutionary force. Their removal will require a political revolution in the bureaucratized workers' states. And, as always, there will be fewer victims the more bold and decisive is the attack.

But boldness and decisiveness in and of itself is not sufficient; preparation and organization are required.

Victory can be assured only through the building of organizations based on the program of the Bolsheviks and the Left Opposition.

This was the bitter lesson the Chinese students and workers were forced to learn on the streets of Beijing this spring.

There are those on the left, even some who come from a long tradition of revolutionary anti-Stalinism, who nonetheless have evolved in an unfortunate political direction in recent years.

They have concluded that a new world reality has been established by a series of events which include the Cuban Revolution, the Nicaraguan Revolution, the defeat of American imperialism by the Vietnamese people, and the revolutionary upsurges in El Salvador and Grenada, among others.

In their view this new world reality supersedes the problems raised by the role of Stalinism. For them this new world reality precludes the ability of the Stalinized bureaucracies to play the kind of counterrevolutionary role they had in the past. Stalinism was relegated to a largely historical problem-the question of Stalinism was becoming irrelevant.

Of course, if Stalinism was no longer relevant, then the program of the Left Opposition was no longer relevant. The need for political revolution in the bureaucratized workers' states was no longer relevant. And the need to prepare organizations which could lead such revolutions was no longer relevant.

Even the need to build parties throughout the world committed to the kind of revolutionary program Lenin and Trotsky had forged to successfully lead the Russian Revolution was, perhaps, irrelevant.

Those who objected to this view were seen as sectarians who insisted on viewing all events in today's world through the now distorting lens of the outdated Stalin/Trotsky debate.

In truth, as recent events are constantly demonstrating, the political questions raised in the struggle of the Left Opposition against the Stalinist degeneration remain today, in ever greater force, the central political questions facing the world working class.

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the freedom of the i in development of

unions and Soviet democracy? -Leon Trotsky