Max Shachtman
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From The New International, Vol. XXIII No. 3, Summer 1957, pp. 156–160.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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The following article was written by Comrade Shachtman shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953, as an introduction to a second edition of his debate with Earl Browder in 1950 published in pamphlet form. Although written four years ago, it is nonetheless excellent as a concise analysis of bureaucratic collectivism and interesting for its accurate predictions of concessions – and their limitations – that would be made by the post-Stalin Kremlin bureaucracy. – J.F. |
The publishers, in their notification that a second edition of this booklet is being prepared, have invited me to write a foreword.
The theme of our debate can be even more clearly considered in the light of the many important events that have occurred since it took place. Outstanding among them is unquestionably the death of Stalin. It marks the point of separation between two eras in the evolution of Stalinism.
Both eras have, and will have, so much in common that a quick glance can easily overlook the difference between them. Yet the difference between the two is most important. One was broadly the era of the rise to power and the consolidation of the Stalinist regime; the other will be the era of crises, decomposition and death.
The difference lies least of all in the fact that the unique personal qualities of Stalin are no longer in operation; it lies in the nature of the regime and above all of the conditions in which it rises and falls.
The distinctive birthmark of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia is this: it made its first appearance when the revolutionary working class of that country was making its last appearance. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Stalinism could begin its rise to power only because there no longer existed a proletariat in the classic sense of the term. In the absence, further, of the relieving revolution in the advanced countries, the resistance offered by the Trotskyist and other oppositions, however heroic, justified and necessary it was, was doomed to succumb to the relentless drive of the new bureaucracy.
This bureaucracy was not, however, a neutral reflector of the stagnation and distortion of the class or the remnants of the class that had led the great Russian revolution. It became an active and effective agency for maintaining the working classes, including the new one it was compelled to bring into existence, in a state of confusion, demoralization and paralysis. Under no other condition could it have consolidated its position as the new ruling class in Russia and completed the work of expropriating the workers of all political power. In a society where the state owns all the means of production and distribution, those who are in absolute control of the political power are thereby and therewith likewise in absolute control of all economic and social, that is, all class power. This should be perfectly clear to all minds save those insulated by a dense coating of fuzz.
We are inclined to forget that the new Stalinist bureaucracy had a long and arduous time in reaching power even though the socialist resistance to it came only from a small but silent and passive working class and a much tinier minority of intransigent revolutionists. It took years of unremitting struggle, of crude advances and frightened retreats, before it could look down upon a population subjected at last to totalitarian disfranchisement, and during those years its own fate quivered more than once on the edge of the knife.
We are inclined to ignore that in order to subject this population and keep it subjected, the bureaucracy had to transform itself and its own form of rule. The mass even when under despotic political leash, is a permanent nightmare to the bureaucracy. The same mass, politically unleashed, would end the bureaucracy’s nightmare only by ending the bureaucracy itself. To deprive the working mass of all the means by which it can assert itself politically by word and deed, is therefore an absolute precondition for the total rule of the bureaucracy.
But it is only one of the essential preconditions for this rule. The other requires that the bureaucracy deprive itself of all the means by which any one part of it can, in the course of an internal disagreement, appeal to the mass to intervene for it against any other part of it, the bureaucracy. To submit such a disagreement to the arbitrament of the enchained mass would be even more dangerous than to submit a theological disputation in the College of Cardinals to the decision of scientists.
A democratic vote in the ranks of the ruling bureaucracy cannot be expected to settle a given dispute, either. The rule of the bureaucracy became possible only because it usurped the democratic rights of the vast majority; indeed, its existence is the organized and successful rebellion of the oppressing minority against the oppressed majority. Why then should any minority within the bureaucracy automatically resign itself to the voting victory of a majority?
Under such conditions, a powerful tendency makes its way and is eventually realized, namely to elevate out of the ranks of the bureaucracy itself a supreme arbiter who is granted unlimited political power.
If it is borne in mind that complete political power in the Russian state is equal to complete power in all fields of life, it is plain that the unlimited power of the supreme arbiter becomes greater than that enjoyed by any ruler of any land at any time in history. Corresponding to such unprecedented power, and in order to give it justification, the supreme arbiter is surrounded with the massively cultivated myth of his unparalleled intellectual and spiritual capacities, in most of which he soon rivals the better known of the world’s deities and in all of which he easily surpasses all mortals. It is in the course of the unfoldment of this inexorable process that Stalin, renegade from socialism but by far the ablest incarnator of the bureaucratic counter-revolution, was transformed first into the Greatest Genius of Our Time and then into the Greatest Genius of All Time.
But above all things, he was the omnipotent ruler of the rulers as well as of the ruled.
That too took more than a day and more than a year. It took more than a generation – a good three decades of bitter struggle, including struggle in the bureaucracy itself. Large sections of the bureaucracy resisted the working out of the process and in the course of this resistance it more than once imperiled the very existence of its own regime. But it found that it could not reverse the process; it could not escape it; paradoxically enough, it owed its very position of power to the unhampered unfolding of the process. For it turned out that the only way it could assure its rule over the masses was to abandon rule over itself. It had to accord supreme power to the supreme arbiter.
The apparent unshakability of the political structure thus created for a long time paralyzed the will not only of a legion of the opponents of Stalinism but of no smaller a legion of its supporters. The result was such a large-scale flight from the struggle for socialism as had not been known in the worst depressions of the modern proletarian movement. The first group looked upon Stalinism as the insurmountable obstacle on the road to socialism; the other regarded it as the only practical, even if unattractive vehicle that could ever traverse the road.
In actuality, the structure was exceedingly fragile. Stalin’s death is laying bare this truth about the Stalinist regime. The bureaucracy has, as if at one stroke, been hurled back into a position of the gravest peril: it faces the danger of self-rule.
Again, as in the first beginnings of its rise, it has the problem of depriving itself of the normal means of self-rule as the only way of assuring itself that it can rule over the masses to any degree at all, in any way at all. Only, this time the process of creating and elevating out of its ranks a supreme arbiter begins under conditions that makes its unfoldment a hundred times more difficult than it was thirty years ago.
First of all and most of all, the bureaucracy stands before a different working class in Russia. It created this class as a by-product in order to expand, consolidate and protect its own power. The new Russian working class is the most formidable the country has ever known. It is not only far more numerous than ever before but it represents a far more important social force than any of its forebears.
The hatred of the bureaucracy which this working class feels is unlimited; it cannot be overrated. Nobody knows this better than the bureaucracy itself. It remembers only too vividly the hatred of the Stalinist despotism which was displayed by the people in general and by those of the super-subjected nations (like the Ukraine) during the Second World War. The hatred was of such extraordinary violence that no other country could match it. It went to such lengths that the enemy, the German Nazis, could benefit from it in the outright military support on a scale that no other people gave it and which only the incredible outrages and brute stupidity of the Nazis themselves could transform again into reluctant cooperation with the bureaucracy.
In the second place, the bureaucracy faces a new situation in the vast new empire which it conquered in the course of the war and afterward.
In the countries dominated by the Kremlin, the Russian regime faces a three-fold threat. One is from the workers who hate the regime as only the working class can hate a class that exploits it with such inhuman cruelty. The other is from these same workers and all other toilers in their capacity as sons and daughters of the nation that feels the yoke of a foreign oppressor who has stolen their national independence. The third is from the native Stalinist bureaucracies of the satellites who dream of nothing so much as their freedom to tyrannize over their own nation without having the main fruits of their rule taken from them by their patrons of the Kremlin.
The Hitlerites discovered during the Second World War that the combination of class exploitation and national oppression generates a popular resistance of irrepressible explosive power. The Stalinists are discovering the same thing in the foreign lands they rule today. The very expansion of Stalinism has brought it face to face with the greatest menace not only to its growth but to its very existence.
It is astonishing, after all, how little each new exploiting class learns from the disasters of its forerunners. The Stalinist overlords cannot get it into their heads that this is the epoch of the destruction of all the old empires; that the old imperialist rule faces the most active and conscious resistance of hundreds of millions who have risen from a historic slumber; and that the idea of replacing the old empires with the new, even if in the guise of a “liberation of the peoples” by Stalinism, is an anachronistic absurdity.
BOTH THE MASSES AND THE bureaucracy understand, each in its own way, the new situation created by the death of Stalin. The mass senses the role that Stalin played in maintaining an ironclad front of the bureaucracy which the people could not think of breaching. It senses that the now automatically divided, mutually suspicious and antagonistic sectors of the bureaucracy need time, a good deal of time, before they can again face the population like a (more or less) self-confident and a (more or less) single-headed and single-armed force.
The problem of the bureaucracy is to determine which sector will impose its specific interests on the ruling machine as a whole, and which of the many equally ambitious and equally intolerant candidates for the supreme arbitership will succeed in suppressing and eliminating all the other candidates. Both sides in the revived class struggle in Russia – the rulers as well as the ruled – know that right now the most precious factor of all is at stake: time.
All the concessions made so precipitously and desperately by the new regime have one objective: to gain time, to throw dust in the opening eyes of the people, to sow illusion and confound confusion in order to gain more and more time. The silent but unrelenting and ubiquitous pressure of the Russian masses has already extracted from the bureaucracy all sorts of concessions, all of them of far less substance than appears on the surface, yet all of them revealing far more about the reactionary, oppressive and precarious nature of the regime than ever before in its history. (The release of the condemned Moscow doctors, and the acknowledgment that their “voluntary confessions” were fantastic falsehoods concocted and imposed by the police, tells us everything we ever needed to know about the “purges” and “confessions” of the past, that is about the frame-ups and mass murders perpetrated by the regime against its opponents. What a self-revelation by this “socialist” regime!)
Outside of Russia, however, the pressure is no longer silent. The veritable unarmed uprising of the East Berlin proletariat against the rule of Stalinism is a landmark of history, heralding the beginning of the end of the great iniquity. Its spread to cities outside of Berlin, and countries outside of Germany, only underlines the fact that the uprising was neither an isolated nor accidental phenomenon. It is a product and a producer of the crisis of the regime. The regime needs time and more time and still more time; the masses, with increasing consciousness, are determined that it should get less time and still less time in which to reorganize and reconstitute itself over their backs.
Who will prevail? For our part, we who never had any doubt of the final outcome, have, if anything, less reason than ever to feel doubt today. The days – or for the more literal-minded, the years – of Stalinism are numbered. Even though capitalist imperialism and capitalist reaction, organized and led by Washington, would seem to be doing everything in their power to prolong the rule of Stalinism, its doom is sealed – and with it is doomed world capitalism as well.
We do not for a moment entertain the preposterous notion, now so sedulously disseminated by ignoramuses and all sorts of volunteer as well as professional apologists for Stalinism, that somehow, sometime, the bureaucracy will organically and peaceable transmogrify itself into the democratic servant of an all-powerful people. Not for a moment! It will have to be overturned, crushed and extirpated by the revolutionary democratic upheaval which genuinely establishes the political and economic supremacy of the masses.
Before that happens, the bureaucracy, in Russia as well as in the satellite states, will give and will have to give more than one concession to appease the growing fury of the people, concessions that are real and valuable as well as the trivial kind of concessions it has granted up to now. But one concession it will never grant: the power to determine by itself whether or not to grant concessions, whether to grant one and not another, the power – in a word – to rule, exploit and oppress the people.
We shall yet see with our own eyes the frenzied savagery and bloodthirstiness with which the bureaucracy will fight to keep this power from being wrested by the people. And yet, the very concessions it is obliged to grant will only increase the appetite of the people, will only fortify their determination to wrest all power from the totalitarian despots and enhance their confidence that it can be done.
And when it is done, the masses will truly come into their own. Progress can triumph over the Stalinist reaction not in the name of capitalism, but only in the name of socialist freedom, and with its real substance. The idea that Stalinist states are “socialist communities” or are socialist in any sense at all, is grotesque. But the idea that the Stalinist tyrannies will be transformed into socialist regimes by the revolutionary assaults of the newly rising proletariat – that will materialize, it is already materializing, into the outstanding political phenomenon of the whole era we are now entering.
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Last updated on 13 January 2020