http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\11\13\story_13-11-2012_pg3_2 Tuesday, November 13, 2012 COMMENT : Revolution betrayed or revolution derailed/aborted — I — Dr Saulat Nagi
Stalin is an enigma, a conundrum, in both Marxist and capitalist circles, albeit an interesting figure to ponder. Was Stalin a product of the system or was the system Stalin’s creation The history of humankind was rewritten in glittering narrative on November 7, 1917 (October 26 by the old-style calendar used by the Tsarist regime) when the famous October Revolution led by the Bolsheviks pulverised the capitalist forces and the working class proved its might by interring a system once seemed invulnerable and impregnable. The emancipated proletariat not only redeemed itself from the fetters of capital, it also empowered itself by expropriating the expropriators. It was the first ever moment in history when the working class through its heroic struggle made a real difference. On that fateful day, a miracle was performed by altering the relations of production, although what it turned out to be in the longer run was what Plekhanov intimated, a “Chinese empire in red.” Russia was an extremely backward and predominantly agrarian society that was in a dismal state due to war and exploitation. In isolation from the advanced western countries and their civilization, Russia was left to survive on its extremely meagre resources. According to Kautsky, its bourgeoisie had “never been the driving force of revolution due to its counter-revolutionary character” and the scant proletariat — emaciated through absolutist rule, imperial confrontation and years of repression — provided a less than ideal platform for a socialist revolution. The reflection of this bleak situation is emphatically described by Deutscher: “Old communists [in a humourous way] used to sigh: ‘Couldn’t God help us to start the upheaval in a more suitable country than this Russia of the muzhiks?’” Not only the development of productive forces but also of the social character of the productive process are considered to be the historic pre-conditions of socialism. Success in imposing social control in a productive process that is not inherently social is as unlikely and incongruous as attempting to maintain private control over a productive process that is largely social. Russia of 1917 hardly fulfilled these conditions. It was a mélange of proletariat and peasants where the latter outnumbered the former by a ratio of 1 to 10. It was the reactionary character of the peasants that forced the Bolsheviks to allow them to retain private property during the early phase of the revolution. Russia was the victim of a strange paradox where the midwife of revolution intervened “long before the embryo had had the time to mature” (Deutscher). Lenin was not unfamiliar with this. In 1918, he argued that, “Socialism is already a material reality in our days, but its two halves are torn asunder; one half, the political condition for it — the rule of the proletariat exercised through the Soviets — has been created in Russia, while the other half — the industrial and cultural prerequisites — exists in Germany.” In order to achieve socialism, it was vitally important to bring the two halves together. Lenin never claimed to have achieved socialism in Russia. Instead, he confessed to developing state capitalism. Given the lack of material conditions, one wonders whether it was sagacious on the part of the revolutionaries to commit themselves to such a gargantuan task. The answer is probably in the affirmative. According to Hobsbawm: “The case against the so-called ‘Legal Marxists’ of the 1890s, who took the Attali view that the main job of the Marxists was to develop a flourishing industrial capitalism in Russia, was also empirical. A liberal capitalist Russia wouldn’t come about either under tsarism.” Lenin and his comrades were under no illusion of sustaining socialism in one country. They knew that if the concept of a nation state is incapable of providing a framework to modern capitalism, for socialism it is unthinkable. Capital rules the world and to be its opponent, socialism has to wage a war transcending all the limits of international boundaries. According to Deutscher, “All Bolsheviks including Stalin expected at first that Russia would join a European socialist community in which Germany, France and/or Britain would take the lead and would help Russia to move towards socialism in a rational and civilised manner, without anything like the sacrifices, the violence, and the social inequality that were to accompany the industrialisation of an isolated Soviet Union.” In Europe, the midwife of revolution could not respond in time, whereas in Russia its intervention ended up stifling and strangulating the ‘revolution’ itself, which was just in the early phase of embryonic development. Russia could not be resuscitated after the introduction of the New Economic Policy. To some critics, permitting privatisation and the profit incentive was an economic capitulation to Russia’s vast petty bourgeoisie (peasants, artisans) and to entrepreneurs. This eventually resulted in class factions led by Stalin and Bukharin on the right, and Trotsky and Preobrazhensky on the left. Stalin succeeded in overthrowing the rest, and engaged himself in a massacre of his comrades through the infamous processes of purgation. Stalin is an enigma, a conundrum, in both Marxist and capitalist circles, albeit an interesting figure to ponder. Was Stalin a product of the system or was the system Stalin’s creation? Stalin, like any individual, was no more than an ensemble of social relations. He was a manifestation of the specific relations of immediate political, organisational and military forces that he did not create himself. He could not have ruled against the will of a class which, at that moment, held the economic power, and nor was he in any position to act against the conglomeration of forces that existed around him and were beyond his control. In fact, he was a fitting manifestation of those forces. He is described as a tyrant just as Kerensky was portrayed as a clown. As Gramsci states, “People have taken seriously his [Kerensky’s] moral and intellectual portrait drawn by his enemies as a tool to use against him, to isolate and to liquidate him; out of his portrait they created a straw man who exists outside of time and space, a kind of ‘helot’ to parade before the Spartans in order to educate them.” The case against Stalin is crudely framed. Finding an easy scapegoat in him is one thing, but looking for ‘material causes’ behind the ‘Stalinist betrayal’ is quite another. He is labelled as a tyrant; however, a tyrant is nothing but the political representative of the interests of a class, or class faction thereof, which is the dominant economic power. He may have been a schizophrenic, a mad man, but there was a method in his madness. His ruthlessness did not lie in his mind, but in those material conditions that brought him to power even against the wishes of his leader (Lenin). It was a Caesarist solution to a situation where the proletariat had already lost its grip on power. Hence, the ideological conflicts within the party were not debated and resolved on principles, but by a continuous tussle between the producers (who were simultaneously the consumers) and the managers on the one hand, and the international market on the other. Hobsbawm rightly pointed out: “The case against the Soviet experiment was not that socialism could only be constructed after the whole world had first gone capitalist, which is not what Marx said, or can be firmly claimed to have believed. It was empirical. It was that Russia was too backward to produce anything other than a caricature of a socialist society.” (To be continued) The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at [email protected] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
