Ken Tarbuck | ETOL Main Page
Ethiopia & Socialist Theory
Richard Sheppard has written two articles in Red Banner on the question of Marxism and the USSR, both of which dealt with the topic of Bonapartism. Touching upon some fundamental aspects of class relationships, class struggles and Marxist theory, this question is of considerable relevance. It is a cliché of popular Marxism that ‘the state is the executive organ of the ruling class’, and comrade Sheppard initially seems to be content with this rendering. The question for me is: ‘Is this sufficient?’ It may be that in the promised articles that were to follow on from those already published there would have been an elaboration, a refinement of this basic proposition. Indeed, even in the two published articles there are elements which hint at such a refinement, and therefore I hope that in what follows I do no injustice to comrade Sheppard’s intentions. However, for me, what has been published does not seem adequate in terms of the problems presented by the reality of the ex-USSR nor by Trotsky’s position, which comrade Sheppard seems to endorse. I would go further and suggest that the problems raised by comrade Sheppard are not only germane to the ex-USSR, but to all state forms, ancient or modern. This being the case, I would want to question some of the assumptions, implicit as well as explicit, in comrade Sheppard’s contributions.
But, before going on to examine the articles in detail, I would like to make a few comments on the following: ‘... revolutionaries today are split on this question mainly between those who support Trotsky’s analysis and the “state capitalists”. For Marxists to benefit from this debate it is important that both sides understand the other’s position.’ [1] The question under review was ‘the class nature of what was the first workers’ state’. [2]
Comrade Sheppard has touched upon an extremely important issue here. And I do not mean the nature of the ex-USSR. The issue is that it is important for all sides in a discussion to understand the other points of view. Understanding another point of view does not mean, of course, an acceptance of that view. The sad fact is that I have rarely heard such discussions in the Trotskyist movement. What I have usually witnessed or read have been polemics carried out with the purpose of suppressing the opposite point of view.
Such encounters have usually been engineered by one side or the other to strengthen their particular point of view, not to learn by an exchange of ideas, and I do not suggest thereby that this is always a conscious process. I will not dwell upon this topic, since it would require a full-length essay to trace the roots of this tradition, sufficient to say that it goes back to the Bolshevik tradition, possibly even earlier. Whatever its origins, and that in itself may be a question for discussion, it is necessary to overcome it and root it out wherever it shows itself. If we do not overcome this pernicious tradition we shall fail to learn.
Comrade Sheppard has recognised the necessity for this need by the remarks he made. For me, what may appear to be almost an aside becomes significant, because it means that there is the possibility of an exchange of views. One final comment on this topic, none of us should be afraid to make comments, suggestions, contributions because we are not 100 per cent sure of some aspects of what we say. Let us admit that we are not sure about some things, that we are tentative, that we are floating ideas for discussion, and let us not be afraid to admit that we may have been wrong on some points.
Before we can adequately discuss Bonapartism we should clarify a Marxist theory of the state.
As I mentioned above, there is a vulgar view of the state that subsumes all aspects of the state under the heading of ‘the state is the executive of the ruling class’, and as a corollary reduces this to undue emphasis on ‘armed bodies of men’. I believe that this view arises from an over-reliance upon Lenin’s small pamphlet The State and Revolution. Lenin wrote this during his struggle to turn the Bolshevik Party towards the seizure of power in 1917, and because of this he focused upon certain aspects of the state to sharpen up his immediate political aims. This was perhaps legitimate within the context of what he was attempting to do, but the pamphlet cannot serve as a rounded Marxist theory of the state. Unfortunately, like so much of what Lenin wrote, this pamphlet was turned into canonical dogma as being the last and final word on the problem of the state.
It is necessary therefore to re-state, as simply as possible, some quite fundamental propositions on the nature of the state.
Historically the state arose from a number of crucial developments within the evolution of human beings as social beings. With the development of the social division of labour there arose the need for a coordination and administration of activities that affected the whole community. Initially this administration was carried out by the whole community, but gradually there arose a further division of labour in which such tasks of administration devolved upon certain individuals but still under the overall control of the community.
What are the specific problems facing such communities? Firstly, there is the need for a decision-making process, what food is to be grown, who should do what, etc. Secondly, there arises the need for protection from other communities, both to conserve any surplus and to protect crops, land, etc. Thirdly, there is needed a means of regulating conflicts within the community in such a manner as the community is maintained.
The crystallisation of a separate layer of people who carried out this administration was the first step towards the creation of a state. But the creation of such a layer does not in itself mean that a state is in being, what we have is what Hal Draper called a ‘proto-state’, that is, a transitional form. The state proper emerges with the arrival of social differentiation within the community and the concentration of the means of coercion within the hands of one section of the community.
Each of these steps was gradual and took long historical epochs to become fully developed. However, the salient point here is that even when the state has become fully developed and does indeed protect the interests of an exploiting class, it can only do so on the basis of continuing to administer the most basic and enduring needs of the whole community. In other words, whilst the state is the executive organ of the economically dominant and exploitative class, it is also always more than that. The ability to maintain even the most repressive state is based upon its ability to maintain the community and administer the basic needs of that community. It is true that the state, precisely because of its nature, always does this work in such a manner as to protect the interests of the exploiters. And, we should note, that even when the state is abolished, or withers away, these community-wide functions will still remain to administered. However, if these most basic functions are not maintained then the state and the community that supports it will disintegrate. It is this failure to maintain the most basic equilibrium of the community which results in a descent into chaos or revolution.
When we look at the state in this light we can see that the problems presented by this social formation are much more complex than the simplistic versions of Marxism which reduce it to solely a class phenomenon and force. Richard Sheppard seems to be aware of this when he pointed out certain problems related to Lenin’s The State and Revolution, but he only does so by way of pointing to intra-class conflicts within the ‘ruling class’. It seems to me that one cannot adequately discuss Bonapartism unless one starts from a wider perspective, since Bonapartism is inherent in every modern state. Let me now turn to that question.
Richard Sheppard says: ‘The state machine led by Louis Napoleon had political control yet nowhere do Marx and Engels define the enormous state machine as a separate class.’ This is true, but is it sufficient? If we accept that the state is the product of the historical development of classes, to argue that – as Richard Sheppard does – ‘in writing about the rise of Louis Napoleon Marx and Engels were showing that the class analysis of history was still valid’ is superfluous. To discuss the state – any state – is by definition to be discussing class society. What Richard Sheppard is seeming to suggest is that we have two separate phenomena, that is, on the one side we have the ruling class and on the other side we have the state bureaucracy which is always subordinate to this ruling class even when it achieves some relative independence. Could it not be that the state and ruling class are, in some societies, coterminous?
Marx and Engels discussed Bonapartism in relation to clear historical examples of the state’s achieving relative independence from the economically dominant class, but we should not thereby extrapolate this specific discussion into the whole of history. If one looks at Marx and Engels’ discussion of Asiatic society it becomes clear that they did consider it possible for the economically dominant class to be located within the state machine. In such a situation the whole concept of Bonapartism falls to the ground, but does not therefore make the concept wrong. What we have to do is always to establish the concrete historical circumstances of the phenomena that we are discussing, and not use certain categories as holdalls into which we stuff inconvenient facts or ideas.
The point here is that we should be very careful about transposing the concept of Bonapartism, which Marx and Engels developed for certain historical circumstances, onto another situation which may not be the same. And that situation was Russia after 1917.
Richard Sheppard obviously thinks this to be the case:
Trotsky analysed the Stalinist regime in the USSR as Proletarian Bonapartism, in other words the Soviet bureaucracy had a certain independence from the economic base of society; the Stalinist bureaucracy held political power but the power was based on controlling a state which rested on an economy where the predominant relations of production were socialist: commonly owned by the working class. [3]
It is here that we come up against one of the biggest sources of dispute. Richard Sheppard assumes that the relations of production within the Soviet Union were socialist, but nothing is produced to support this contention. Comrade Sheppard makes the same mistake in this respect as did Trotsky and the whole of his tradition, that is, confusing state ownership of property with socialist relations of production. I do not deny that when the capitalist class is expropriated this will most likely take the form of taking their property into social ownership, but this must take on a much deeper content than the mere transfer of ownership to the state. Above all the hierarchical structure of relationships must be transformed if the workers are not rapidly to be once more subordinated and alienated. But in Russia within months of the October seizure of power by the Bolsheviks the old forms of hierarchical relations were restored throughout society, especially in industry.
He immediately follows on from the above passage with: ‘The bureaucracy balanced between the interests of the different classes, fundamentally the international capitalist class, the peasantry and the working class.’ [4]
This again makes a number of assumptions. Firstly, there is no international capitalist class of the kind implied here, there is no homogenous international capitalist class, only a number of different national capitalist classes who do have interests in common against other classes, but this is often vitiated by the antagonism between these capitalist classes, Moreover, there is no evidence to suggest that the Soviet bureaucracy ever carried out policies or actions merely to placate or please any capitalist class except where it judged them to be in its own interests. Secondly, there was no Soviet working class after 1918–19. The proletariat and the capitalist class form a contradictory unity of the capitalist system, they are necessary and essential components of a dialectical relationship. Once the capitalist class is removed then the working class itself begins to lose part of its defining and essential character. This will be so even in the most advanced capitalist societies after the demise of the bourgeoisie as a class. But in Russia this aspect was aggravated, firstly by the small numbers of the proletariat and secondly by the dispersal, death and de-classing of the industrial workers between 1917 and 1921. By 1921 the working class that had participated in the overthrow of Tsarism and the provisional government had been removed from the social equations. Only the peasants remained recognisably a class, this being so because of the primitive nature of that class formation. But even this class no longer acted as a class (if it ever did), rather it exerted its influence and pressure by way of its non-activity as producer of food and raw materials. Hence the need for the NEP in 1921. This class too was atomised and dispersed in the cauldron of the forced collectivisation that the Stalinist state bureaucracy carried out in the period 1929–33.
A Bonapartist regime balances between classes, whilst maintaining the fundamental interests of the economically dominant and exploiting class, by virtue of the need to moderate the clashes between the contending forces. That is to say it must be possible for the contending classes to be able to exert pressures as classes. But in the Soviet Union of the 1920s which class was able to act in such a manner? None. The working class was not only not the economically dominant class, it did not exist even as a class in itself. To argue that the ‘working class’ was the economically dominant class because industry was nationalised is to reduce the idea of the self-activity of the working class to a nullity.
The capitalist class of Russia had either been killed or fled, it was not a factor within the equation. Even the ‘international capitalist class’ did not exert pressure in a consistent and unified manner. It must be remembered that the USSR and Germany had concluded a pact which enabled the German army to train on Soviet territory, this in exchange for German weapons technology. Hardly a case of pressure! Even at the height of intervention during 1918–19 there was no overall coordination by the capitalist powers, each one jockeyed for its own particular state interests.
Only the peasantry remained as a class, but as pointed out above this did not act as a class, since it too hardly existed as a class in itself.
Richard Sheppard quotes several passages from Trotsky’s book The Revolution Betrayed, the whole thrust of which is that the Stalinist bureaucracy arose because of the backwardness of Russian society, the weariness and dispersal of the working class, plus the international isolation. All of which was and is plausible, but cannot be accepted as the whole answer. Richard concludes that ‘Trotsky, in essence, represented the weakened faction of Bolshevik workers, Stalin represented an increasingly independent bureaucracy’. Independent of whom? The implication is of the working class. But the Soviet state had achieved this long before Stalin became master of the situation. By late 1918 the Soviets had become mere shells, packed with Bolshevik supporters. Lenin recognised this in March 1919 when he said:
... the Soviets, which by virtue of their programme are organs of government by the working people, are in fact organs of government for the working people by the advanced section of the proletariat, but not by the whole working people as a whole. [5]
During the Civil War the new Red Army had absorbed much of the old state machine, and the policy known as War Communism effectively installed a commandist bureaucratic regime. Moreover, it was the old Tsarist state with a lick of Red paint that was effectively re-established. Again witness what Lenin said in 1922:
Obviously, what is lacking is culture among the stratum of the Communists who perform administrative functions. If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth, they are not directing, they are being directed. Something analogous happened here to what we were told in our history lessons ... sometimes one nation conquers another, the nation that conquers is the conqueror and the nation that is vanquished is the conquered nation. This is simple and intelligible to all. But what happens to the culture of these nations? Here things are not so simple. If the conquering nation is more cultured than the vanquished nation, the former imposes its culture upon the latter; but if the opposite is the case, the vanquished nation imposes its culture upon the conqueror. Has not something like this happened in the capital of the RSFSR? [6]
By 1921 all opposition had been outlawed, both inside and outside the Bolshevik Party. Strikes by workers were repressed by the Cheka/GPU in 1922–23, yet Trotsky did not protest. In essence then Trotsky represented a wing of the bureaucracy, not the workers. The fact that Trotsky believed that his faction represented the workers does not alter the truth of the matter.
In some respects Lenin had a better understanding of what had happened after the revolution than Trotsky had, hence his preparations for a struggle against the bureaucracy whilst he was still politically active during 1922–23. However, it is doubtful that even Lenin could have faced up to the whole truth of the matter. What is a little more surprising is that Trotsky did not come to terms with post-1917 Russia, since he had dissected in a very thorough manner the role of the Russian state in the history of that country many years before in his book 1905. In that work he had pointed to the dominating role of the state in the development of Russia for nearly 400 years, a role which it had not relinquished in 1917.
I conclude therefore that the theoretical conception of Bonapartism did not apply to the Soviet Union. To refer continually to this conception as a model in these circumstances positively prevents clear thinking. We have once more seriously to analyse the question of the state.
Comrade Sheppard says regarding the Left Opposition’s proposals for industrialisation: ‘All this was sneered at by Stalin. His allies at this time Bukharin, Rykov, Molotov and Tomsky argued for “socialism at a snail’s pace” and mocked the proposals for large-scale industrial schemes.’ [7]
The snail’s pace that is always trailed before us on these occasions in fact referred to the socialisation of agriculture, from early 1927 Bukharin was urging an increased tempo of industrialisation. And it was in 1927 that the First Five-Year Plan was launched, that is, when Russian industry and agriculture had reached prewar levels of output. If one compares Trotsky’s writings in the period 1929–33 one finds a coincidence of views between Bukharin’s views and his own. (I have dealt with this question in my book Bukharin’s Theory of Equilibrium. [8])
Again Comrade Sheppard says:
... by 1928, the working class in the cities faced approaching famine. The Kulaks (the rich peasants) carrying with them the middle peasants were storing grain mainly because they were exerting their new-found muscle and felt that the economic return was not enough. The Kulaks held the revolution by the throat by a process of withdrawing food supplies from the cities. [9]
This is the standard Trotskyist explanation (and Stalinist come to that), but it is exceedingly simplistic. The tenor of the report is that the Kulaks deliberately began starving the cities. When it is said that the Kulaks were the rich peasants, what is actually meant here? The fact is that these ‘rich peasants’ were so-called by the simple fact of owning a few horses and cattle; compared to farmers say in Germany or the USA they were practically poverty-stricken! Only in a society so bereft of material possessions could these people be judged to be ‘rich’. The productivity of Russian agriculture was appallingly low by international standards. The problem for the Russian state was that its industry was even less productive, both per person employed and in total. It was this gross imbalance that led to the lack of grain on the market in 1928. The peasants as a whole could see no reason to sell their grain for low prices when there were insufficient manufactured goods for them to buy even with this poor price. There was a perfectly possible solution to this problem, that is, what was known as goods intervention, that is the purchase of manufactured goods abroad to make up some of the deficit of Soviet production. This was never attempted, hence the contrived crisis of 1928.
Comrade Sheppard argues:
Five-Year Plans were instituted. Mass industrialisation was now to be rushed through, often with forced labour. The Gulag began. Politically, the right wing were now chopped and given the same treatment as the Left Opposition. Only those who jumped quickly enough behind Stalin were saved; only ‘yes-men’ survived.
Not wholly true. The ‘right wing’ were not imprisoned until much later. Moreover, the Gulag did not begin with the Five-Year Plans, it began in 1918. What happened during the Plans was that the Gulag developed enormous economic significance. But the basic structure of the Gulag was well established under the regime of Lenin and Trotsky. The slave labour of the Gulag was an essential ingredient in the building of huge infrastructural projects that were necessary for industrialisation, without this slave labour the Stalinist scale of industrialisation would not have been possible. Trotsky hardly mentioned this fact, he regarded the successes of industrialisation as being due to planning. He saw what he wanted to see and ignored the most unpalatable aspects of the process. I do not say this was done deliberately, but Trotsky was only human.
Regarding ‘yes-men’ saving their skins, only for a short time. In the purges of the mid-1930s all factions of the old Bolshevik Party were murdered, along with millions of non-party citizens. Nearly the whole of the Stalin faction within the party were disposed of during this period.
I want now to examine some further remarks of Richard Sheppard, since they demonstrate what I believe to be the central failures of the Trotskyist theory of Soviet Bonapartism. Firstly:
Stalin carried through a caricature of the programme of the Left Opposition. Like Marx’s examples of bourgeois Bonapartism, where the capitalists do not have political power yet capitalism developed, the Stalinist regime was able (in fact forced by the needs of its own survival) to strengthen the basis of the nationalised economy up to a point. The dialectical contradiction is that Stalin did this without workers’ democracy and, in fact, at enormous expense of workers’ lives and by polluting the whole Bolshevik tradition. Moral detestation at the crimes of Stalin should not blind us to the fact that the basic forms of production are crudely those of a workers’ state, but without the crucial ingredient of workers’ democracy. [10]
When arguing that Stalin carried through a caricature of Trotsky’s programme this is usually done to point up the differences between the two. Could it not also imply that there was considerable similarity? Even with the Spitting Images’ rubber caricatures there has to be sufficient similarity for them to be recognisable as the people they represent. But in the case of Russia we are not dealing with rubber puppets, we are dealing with vast social events. To suggest that Stalin’s programme was a caricature is to recognise that the similarities were greater than the differences, if not we should not be able to make such a comparison. Merely contrasting the differences between the two, and there were differences, detracts us from asking: was Trotsky’s programme correct? Was it suitable? Was it a socialist programme? Did it avoid exploitation of workers and peasants or only to a lesser degree than Stalin? It is these and similar questions that are avoided by a constant repetition of the genuine differences between the two programmes.
Comrade Sheppard tells us that Stalin carried through his programme without workers’ democracy, but where in Trotsky’s programme of 1927 was there a commitment to workers’ democracy? Certainly Trotsky called for the restoration of Party democracy, but that was not the same as workers’ democracy. Moreover, Comrade Sheppard tells us that this workers’ democracy was a ‘vital ingredient’. But if you try to bake a cake without a vital ingredient you don’t end up with a cake, degenerated or deformed, but with a mess! This is a central problem for any analysis of Russia after 1917. If socialism was to be the creation of the self-activating working class, what was actually created? You do not teach people democracy by banning all political parties, by banning all independent political activity, by sending dissidents to the Gulag; on the contrary you end up with a totalitarian regime.
To attempt to separate out politics and economics in a system where the state owns the means of production is futile. Preobrazhensky made this elementary error in his book The New Economics and thus was one of the first leading Trotskyists to capitulate to Stalin. Trotsky’s theory was little better in this respect, but his instincts were sounder and he spent the last decade of his life bringing his theory back into line with his basic instincts.
I have to ask why should ‘moral detestation’ for Stalin’s crimes blind one? This is said in such a manner as to imply that moral outrage somehow has no place in our political lexicon. Our moral outrage should inform our critique of Stalinism, but without such moral outrage our ideas will become desiccated and inhuman. Without such moral outrage it is possible to end as apologists for many types of dastardly crimes committed in the name of socialism.
Finally, on the above passage, I come back to the question of relations of production. Comrade Sheppard tells us that the basic forms of production were ‘crudely those of a workers’ state’. Here again we find a confusion between forms of production and relations of production. What were the forms? They were state-owned property, which was not peculiar to Russia. The judicial form of nationalisation is merely an empty shell until it is filled out with some definite content. Where in Russia did we find any socialist content? Nowhere. To use a popular adage Comrade Sheppard is asking us to ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’!! A capitalist Bonapartist regime often does come down very heavy on individual capitalists, even to the point of sending them to jail, but the bulk of the economically-dominant class are never in doubt about their position in society. In Russia the whole of the ‘ruling class’ was put in jail! I suggest there is a substantive difference here.
Let me now come to this passage:
The Stalinist bureaucracy never rested on capitalist forms of production. The Soviet regime was a transitional state economically on the first stages to socialism but ruled like a Bonapartist regime. It is for this reason that Trotsky termed it a Proletarian Bonapartist regime. [11]
It is true that the Stalinist bureaucracy did not rest upon capitalist relations of production, but they certainly attempted to introduce the forms of that system, mostly without success. The technology and production methods introduced during the Five-Year Plans were the last word in capitalist methods, but it was never able to emulate the levels of productivity of capitalism. As for the Soviet Union being a transitional state on the first stages to socialism, I would have to ask: show us the evidence. It seems to me that after 70 years or more of this transition it was only an historical detour on the road to capitalism, and ‘third world’ capitalism at that!
The formula of a ‘Proletarian Bonapartist regime’ is not merely inadequate to explain what happened in Russia, it positively prevents analysis. Comrade Sheppard ends his second article with a quotation from Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed and it actually exposes most of the weaknesses of the position. Trotsky says the ‘bureaucracy has converted itself into an uncontrolled caste alien to socialism’. What is a caste in this context? It is not a class yet, but takes on the characteristics of a class, it is in the process of becoming. Certainly it was uncontrolled by the working population in Russia of town or countryside, but this had occurred well before Stalin took command. Yet it was eventually controlled by Stalin. And if you doubt this, examine the fate of huge layers of this caste during the purges. Only after the death of Stalin did this caste reassert its own control. It certainly was alien to socialism, so why should it push, drag or even coax Soviet society along the road to socialism? It is nonsensical to suggest that this totalitarian regime, which turned the whole Soviet Union into a prison house, was somehow forced against its will to march along the road to socialism. Socialism? What sort of socialism was envisaged? Nothing like Marx or Engels ever proposed. Further on Trotsky says, ‘the social revolution, betrayed by the ruling party, still exists in property relations and in the consciousness of the toiling masses’. Here again we have this confusion of property forms and social relations, as though one property form only admits to one social relationship. But history demonstrates that property forms are only one part of the defining characteristics for any social formation. How about the consciousness of the masses? If this is true it is taking some peculiar paths in the ex-Soviet Union today! Not once have we seen a mass movement of toilers demanding the extension of socialism in Russia, on the contrary we have seen support for the restoration of capitalism!
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 was merely the final gasp of a peculiar formation which had no coherent relations of production, being historically limited and without any future. Let me return to what I said earlier about the state. It is clear that a part of the explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union was that it was failing to meet the most elementary needs of society, and therefore we have a descent into chaos. However, within this chaos it is also clear that the Russian state is still very much alive and doing well for itself. The uncontrolled caste that Trotsky quite rightly pointed to has shed one aspect of itself, that is, the old Soviet ‘Communist’ Party, but still effectively controls the state. Large segments of this caste are now trying to formalise their control of parts of the economy by transforming themselves into capitalists in the judicial sense. Other parts of the caste are clinging onto control of the state and state property, herein lies the struggle at this time, with the masses by and large standing to one side rather bemused by the catastrophe that has hit them.
Up to now the Russian state has not represented any class in society, it had its own interests which it protected. When we understand this and stop playing ‘hunt the class which the state represents’ we shall be in a better position to analyse the actual historical events and the current one as it unfolds. The historical peculiarity does not lie in Russian developments, on the contrary capitalism has been the historical peculiarity with its separation of economic and political power. Russia was never a capitalist society before 1917, and most certainly was not after that date. However, we may well be witnessing the birth of a capitalist society within Russia, but it will be a peculiar kind still moulded by the historic Russian state. If this is the case, then perhaps it will be much more justifiable to speak of a Bonapartist regime coming into being in the future than it was in the past. Even so, it will be a peculiarly Russian form of Bonapartism.
Let us stop applying abstract formulæ to concrete historical events and formations. One of these abstract formulæ is that the state is the ‘executive of the ruling class’; it is true as a general summation of capitalist society, but does not apply to all historical formations. On the contrary, we often find that the state is the ruling class. And on the other hand, it is quite possible for the state to achieve complete independence from the economically dominant class, so that there is a sharp division. Each of this variety of situations needs to be concretely analysed and not judged by formula. If I have convinced comrades to look at some situations with a fresh eye, I shall be content.
7 November 1992
1. Red Banner, no. 2, p. 4.
2. Red Banner, no. 2, p. 4.
3. Red Banner, no. 2, p. 7, my emphasis.
4. Red Banner, no 2, p. 7.
5. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 183.
6. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 288.
7. Red Banner, no. 3, p. 9.
8. K.J. Tarbuck, Bukharin’s Theory of Equilibrium: A Defence of Historical Materialism (Pluto Press, London 1989).
9. Red Banner, no. 3, p. 9.
10. Red Banner, no. 3, pp. 9–10.
11. Red Banner, no. 3, p. 10.
Last updated: 3 July 2014