The Soviet Union in Historical Perspective

On 31^st. December 1991 the Soviet Union was officially dissolved, and the news was greeted in the west with hysterical delight - communism, it was said, had collapsed. If ever there was a case of the wish being father to the thought this was it, because it was the Soviet Union that had collapsed, not communism; the two terms are by no means identical, and the difference is of profound historical importance.

Let us clarify this term, “communism”, which like everything that exists contains a contradiction and can be understood in two different senses. In the first sense it is a social scientific term which identifies the kind of society in which the means of production are publicly owned, and the production, distribution and exchange of what is produced is subject to the democratically expressed will of the people who all relate to the means of production in the same way, that is, it is a classless society, which must of necessity be based on a higher level of productivity and general culture than has so far been achieved. Clearly, no such society exists or ever has, and no properly informed communist would hold that it has, since it will take generations for classless society to evolve once the working class achieves state power through political revolution. Had communism been achieved within the territorial limits of the Soviet Union, (in any case an impossibility because it cannot be done in one country alone), then it would be fair to say that communism had collapsed there, but clearly this was not the case. How can something which does not exist be said to collapse?

In another sense communism is understood to mean the personal belief in the necessity of transforming the present, class divided society, from its present state into a communist one, and the collective theory and practice of those who engage in political struggle to bring this transformation about. The regime that issued from the revolution of 1917 was communist in this sense only, that communist society was its ultimate objective, and it had made important steps in this direction, but after the death of Lenin, in 1924, this process of transition ground to a halt when the brutal bureaucratic dictatorship rose to power under the leadership of Stalin and the anti-communist reaction against the revolution began

However, since there are millions of people in the world who understand that the transition to communist society is a historic necessity, and who organise themselves into political parties for the purpose of fighting for it, then in any case, regardless of what happened in the Soviet Union, communism cannot be said to have collapsed in this sense, the only sense in which it has ever really existed. In this sense it must be granted that communism is alive, healthy and kicking as an international revolutionary tendency, and now that we are armed with this better understanding we are in a position to penetrate to the real truth of what happened to the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a contradictory process which, for clarification, demands the dialectical approach. It was simultaneously a serious defeat and at the same time a huge leap forward for world social revolution, (that is, the transition to communist society), a defeat because the socialised property relations resulting from the Revolution of 1917, undoubtedly an important step towards communism, were overturned and the state enterprise system was privatised, and a huge leap forward because it removed the greatest obstacle in the path of revolution, the Stalinist bureaucracy. In order to fully understand this it is necessary to familiarise ourselves with the complete history of the Soviet Union in the context of world history as a whole, and firstly to understand the cause of its coming into being in 1917.

The climax of the Russian Revolution came at the height of the First World War, during the period 25^th to 26^th October, according to the old calendar then in use, with the storming of the Winter Palace, which was the seat of the bourgeois Provisional Government that had issued from the revolutionary upsurge and the overthrow of the Czarist regime the previous February. During these same hours the Congress of the Soviets, which, with the Provisional Government now overthrown, was to form the system of government henceforth, was sitting. Trotsky, undoubtedly expressing the unanimously accepted view of the Bolsheviks, addressed the Congress with the following words:-

“We rest all our hope on the possibility that our revolution will unleash the European revolution. If the revolting peoples of Europe do not crush imperialism, then we will be crushed – that is indubitable. Either the Russian revolution will raise the whirlwind of struggle in the west, or the capitalists of all countries will crush our revolution.” (History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 3, page 315, L. Trotsky, Sphere Books Ltd.)

The period of history we must now study is the story of how the second of these alternative predictions came true in 1991.

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II. War and Revolution

War and revolution are inseparably connected. Capitalist nation states will only resort to the desperate measure of actual warfare when their economic system is in mortal crisis and the competition between them can only be resolved by the escalation of trade war to armed conflict. It follows from this that wars between such states take place at those historical moments when they are at their weakest and most reactionary and ripe for overthrow. The working class, on the other hand, are suffering the privations of war and are strongly motivated to resist their oppressors, and what is more they are, or at least during the twentieth century were, herded into vast armies and able to organise on a grand scale. The Russian Revolution occurred in connection with the First World War.

On August 4th. 1914 there began not one war but two, one contained within the other. By this time the world was already completely divided up between the main imperialist powers, and this was a predatory war for the re-division of the world between them, Britain, Russia, France, Belgium, and later America on the one side, and Germany and Austro-Hungary on the other, a war from which the working class had nothing to gain. Contained and more or less hidden within this war was the war of the classes, the war of the government on the workers, the war of the officers on the men. The struggle between the classes is of course never ending, since by their very nature they conflict, but when an imperialist power goes to war it must of necessity declare open war on its own national working class, in order to force the workers to do the fighting, and to regiment the industrial workforce to support the war effort.

The real cause of the war between the imperialist nation states is explained easily and simply, and the matter is dealt with definitively by Lenin in his book, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which he quotes figures which show that between 1889 and 1908 German exports rose by 89 %, and while prior to the turn of the century she had no significant foreign investment, by 1902 she had exported capital to the value of 12.5 billion francs, and that this had increased to 44 billion francs by 1914. Germany had become a powerful imperialist country with astonishing speed, and in order to enforce her right to foreign investment and exploitation of colonial territory she began a massive shipbuilding programme in 1900, which resulted in a fleet of 16 main battleships, 41 cruisers, 88 destroyers and many submarines by 1914. Her land army was far bigger than Britain's. Since 1815 Britain had operated a policy of maintaining a navy twice the size of the combined strength of her two nearest rivals, and the sudden appearance of a massive modern fleet on the opposite shore of the North Sea upset this balance, so a massive rebuilding programme was begun in 1904 under the direction of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord Fisher. It was about this time that the British ruling class made its commitment to the war, since it was obvious that if Germany continued its arms build-up she would shortly become too powerful to defeat and Britain would lose her position of world dominance. Indeed, Fisher twice advocated a pre-emptive strike, in 1904 and again in 1908, and by 1914 had built a fleet of 24 main battleships, 91 cruisers, and 155 destroyers. Larger than Germany's, but not decisively so, and since both France and Russia had also re-armed, and carried out joint naval exercises aimed at controlling the Mediterranean Sea, the balance of power was seriously altered, leaving Britain just one among several competing imperialist powers. The end of the British Empire was in sight, and imperialism as such had become the most reactionary, destructive force on Earth. Russia’s place in the conflict was contradictory. Predominantly a backward feudal country it nonetheless had imperial pretensions, but it occupied at the same time the position of a colony itself, since her rapidly developing industrial base rested on massive foreign investment mainly from France and Britain. Deeply in debt, it was obliged to ally itself to these countries in the war, hoping to share in the spoils by conquering new territory.

The war within the war, the war between the classes, also took on violent form, particularly in the armed forces on all sides of the front. The death penalty was freely applied for cowardice and desertion and often carried out the night before an attack, so that the following dawn the soldiers would be obliged to decide between probable death from a bullet fired by a comrade on the other side, or certain death at the hands of their own officers, their class enemies. Flogging was still practised in the Czarist army. Compulsory conscription began in March 1916, industrial conscription became a reality in practice and all trade union rights were suspended. As we shall see below the Labour Party gave full support to this war on the working class.

Trotsky’s reference to the European revolution was by no means rhetorical; during these years the whole of Europe was engulfed in revolutionary upheaval. The people were sick of the slaughter of war and the lies and patriotic jingoism of the ruling class had by now been exposed and the real cause of war no longer a secret, at least not to the more conscious layers of the working class. Prior to the war no-one could have had a clear idea of the scale and wretchedness of the coming conflict, but the workers, alarmed by the war preparations, began to make preparations of their own, not for the imperialist war, but for the class war. The Congress of the Second International at Stuttgart in 1907 unanimously resolved to fight war by all ways and means. In 1908 a large delegation of British workers took a petition to a rally in Berlin bearing 5,000 signatures including those of the leaders of the Independent Labour Party and Social Democratic Federation, which declared that while the workers suffer the consequences of war, only the propertied classes stand to gain, and the rally agreed that workers in all countries should unite to oppose the war.

The struggle against the imperialist war produced many rallies and demonstrations. The Congress of the Second International at Basle in 1912, at which every socialist party in the world was represented, passed a resolution saying that the war “cannot be justified on the slightest pretext of its being in the interests of the people”, and that it was “for the sake of the capitalists’ profits” and that it would be a “crime for workers to shoot each other down”. It went on to explain that the war would bring on a political and economic crisis which must be utilised to “hasten the downfall of capitalist rule”. There is absolutely no doubt that the mass of the workers in all countries were ready to act in international solidarity and use every means at their disposal to stop the war, and that if they refused to serve in the army, and refused to accept the militarisation of industry, a political crisis would follow which would have made the overthrow of capitalism entirely possible. As we have said, war and revolution are inseparably connected.

In fact, what happened was exactly the opposite: In every country, with the exception of a few supremely courageous individuals and the Bolsheviks led by Lenin and Trotsky, the working class leaders joined their own national ruling class by supporting the war, becoming, as Lenin described them, social chauvinists, socialists in words only and bourgeois nationalists in deeds, and they broke with international working class solidarity and assisted the ruling class to tie the workers in their own countries to the war effort. In Britain the Labour Party leaders ratted on the Basle Congress decision within days of the war declaration, in Russia the Mensheviks supported the war, and so did the Bolsheviks when they were legalised immediately after the revolution of February 1917, while Stalin held a controlling position for a short period. It was only when Lenin returned from exile in April, and a little later Trotsky also, that a fierce fight began to re-orientate the Party to the correct position of revolutionary defeatism, to take the opportunity presented by the conflict between the imperialist powers to unite the workers of all countries in a revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism.

In spite of this betrayal by the leaders of the Second International there were political leaders in all the belligerent countries who courageously upheld the decisions of the Second International and adopted the correct position of revolutionary defeatism. In Germany, Karl Leibecht and Rosa Luxemburg won a minority of the Social Democratic Party to revolutionary defeatism but were arrested and jailed. The French socialist Juares opposed the war but was murdered by a right wing patriot. In May 1916 the British Socialist Party, (no to be confused with the Labour Party), split, with the majority opposing the war and the minority supporting it. In Scotland a mighty resistance was centred on the Clyde led by John Maclean, then a member of the British Socialist Party. There were anti-war strikes and huge demonstrations. These were the struggles Trotsky had referred to when speaking of the revolting peoples of Europe.

As the months went by the full horror of the imperialist war began the be understood, the disruption to the economy caused massive house rent and price increases, (food prices increased by 33% by July 1915), and the disruption to family life resulting from the massive conscription of female labour, and the exhausting work regime, was met with resistance. Strikes led by shop stewards continued in spite of the labour bureaucracy's support for the government war measures which prohibited strikes and militarised the workforce. In 1915 200,000 South Wales miners successfully struck for higher wages. In 1916 nearly 2.5 million working days were lost in 532 disputes, and by July of that year over 10,000 workers had been jailed or fined for breaches of the Munitions Act which militarised the workforce. There were serious and widespread mutinies in the armed forces of virtually every country involved in the war which had to be violently put down often with loss of life.

But above all it was the shattering news of the Russian Revolution sweeping across Europe that transformed the situation, bringing the imperialist war to an end and thrusting the inner war, the class war, to the forefront of events. In Hungary soviets came into being and the workers formed a government for a short period. In Germany, Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg were released from jail and in December 1918 led the foundation of the German Communist Party in the midst of a general strike and a revolutionary upsurge against the reformist Social Democratic government led by Friedrich Ebert. The Kaiser was force to abdicate, but Leibnecht and Luxemburg were arrested and brutally murdered while being taken to prison in police custody, and their bodies were flung into a canal. The French army was seriously undermined by a wave of revolt. The effect of the Russian Revolution was felt in Britain as early as June 1917, when British workers followed the example of their Russian comrades by holding a national conference in Leeds to set up Workers and Soldiers Councils, or Soviets.

With the end of the imperialist war the class struggle, far from abating, took on new and highly significant meaning. Not unnaturally, the millions of war weary soldiers, sailors and airmen expected to be demobilised immediately, but in spite of their insistent demands demobilisation was limited to a token few. At this time British forces had been deployed not just on the western front but were also in Russia, in Murmansk in the north, Vladivostok in the east and in the Caucuses, and British ships were in the Black Sea. These forces, supposedly deployed as part of the war against Germany, were now to be used to crush the Bolshevik Revolution. This intention was clearly spelt out in the terms of the armistice signed on 11th. November 1918, which stipulated that Germany must withdraw all troops to within her own borders with the exception of those on Russian territory which were to return “as soon as the allies shall think the moment suitable, having regard to the internal situation in those territories.” It was also agreed that Britain would have access to the territory vacated by the Germans through Danzig and the Vistula, and the Black Sea ports, through which the Germans were already supplying the counter-revolutionary Russian “White” army, their bitter enemy only a few days previously but now their ally against the workers, at the beginning of the civil war in Russia. As if by magic, overnight, these bitter enemies, Britain and France against Germany, had become allies in the war against their common enemy, the working class. “We might have built up the German Army, as it was important to get Germany on her legs again for fear of the spread of Bolshevism”, said Churchill on 10th. November 1918. (Winston S. Churchill, Vol. 4, p.226, C. E. Calwell). This was the reason why the soldiers were not demobilised, but the plan failed for two reasons, first because of the monumental effort of the revolutionary workers of Soviet Russia, who under Trotsky's leadership built the Red Army to defend the Revolution in the teeth of the civil war, and because the workers in the Allied countries refused to fight their comrades in Russia. In 1919 a new International was founded, the Third or Communist International or “Comintern”, to replace the Second International which had betrayed the working class at the beginning of the war.

Many thousands of soldiers were occupying rest camps along the south coast, and on 3rd. January 1919 those near Folkestone received orders to embark for France, but since the war was over they understood that their ultimate destination could only be Bolshevik Russia, and they refused and placed pickets at railway stations and at Folkstone harbour to prevent troop movements. They demanded to be demobilised and threatened armed resistance. On 10th. January 1919 the Daily Herald reported “everywhere the feeling is the same – ‘the war is over, we won't fight in Russia, we mean to go home’”.

These events at Folkestone are but an example of a revolt that swept Britain involving a total of at least 62,000 soldiers, with similar revolts in the navy and air force. Intermittent riots continued for weeks and lorry loads of mutineers descended on Whitehall demanding to see government ministers, to no avail. At Kimnel Park rebelling troops raised the Red Flag and were fired upon, five being killed and twenty-one wounded, and Epsom Police Station was stormed and the station sergeant killed. Troops in France also demanded demobilisation, as did sailors en route to Russia, and allied troops under British command in Archangel and Murmansk became mutinous when copies of an English language Bolshevik newspaper were mysteriously circulated. The minutes of the War Cabinet meeting on 8th. January 1919 provide sufficient proof that the British workers had given decisive help to the Bolsheviks in the first dangerous days of the civil war. It was proposed at this meeting that two battalions should be withdrawn from Omsk, but Churchill opposed it, saying, “The fabric we have been trying to construct would fall to pieces. The Czechs would go, Kolchak's army would disappear and the French would withdraw.” So much, then, depended on the British army, but the British soldiers would not fight the Bolsheviks. Indeed, the Cabinet military advisors had said that “there is considerable unrest in the Army on the subject of Russia, and the dispatch of further troops might have serious results.” Years later Prime Minister Lloyd George was to write of this period, “If demobilisation had been stopped in order to divert troops from France to Odessa or Archangel there would have been a mutiny. The attempt to raise a force of volunteers for the purpose of waging war against the Bolsheviks was a miserable failure.” (The Truth About the Peace Treaties, vol. 1, p.319, D.L. George) Finally, Lenin summed up the situation in his Letter to the Workers of England and America, published in Pravda on 24th. January 1919 – “Attempts to conquer Russia, which require a long term occupation army of a million men, are the most certain road to the most rapid extension of the proletarian revolution to the Entente countries.”

Lenin was entirely justified in this view, for it wasn't just the soldiers who resisted, the workers at home also played their part. A national “Hands off Russia” campaign was launched by trade unionists and socialist parties and the strikes were more or less continuous. In August 1918 the London police struck for union recognition, and again the following year for a wage rise. In Glasgow, the Clyde Workers Committee, led by John Maclean, called for a general strike on 27th. January 1919. The strike was total, with massive demonstrations, and many consider this period which has gone down in history as the “Red Clyde”, to have brought the Clyde workers to the brink of revolution. In England rail workers struck in September 1919 to resist a wage cut. This was most significant, since the rail union formed part of the “Triple Alliance” formed on 9th. December 1915, together with the transport and dock unions and the miners. The government was thrown into a panic, since if the Triple Alliance acted in unison it would amount to a general strike. The Tory Bonar Law wrote to Lloyd George saying “The King is in a funk about the labour situation and is talking about the danger of revolution.” The King’s cousin and close friend was of course Czar Nicholas II who was at this point under house arrest with his whole family. Prime Minister Lloyd George invited the leaders of the Triple Alliance to a meeting at which he said :-

“Gentlemen, you have fashioned, in the Triple Alliance of the unions represented by you, a most powerful instrument. I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon. Trouble has already occurred in a number of camps. We have just emerged from a great war and the people are eager for the reward of their sacrifices, and we are in no position to satisfy them. In these circumstances, if you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us. But if you do so, have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the government of this country and by its very success it will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the state which is stronger that the state itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state itself, or withdraw and accept the authority of the state. Gentlemen, have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?” Robert Smillie, a miner and Triple Alliance leader who was present, is reported to have said later, “from that moment on we were beaten and we knew we were”. Within days the strike was brought to an end and a great revolutionary opportunity had been lost. The reformist labour leaders had no stomach for a fight of that kind.

Here then was the European revolution to which Trotsky referred. Speaking later of Lenin’s appraisal of these events he said:-

“The symptoms which he observed through the screen of the military censorship of all countries did actually portend the approach of a revolutionary storm. Within a year it shook the old building of the Central Empires to its very foundation. But also in the victor countries, England and France – to say nothing of Italy – it long deprived the ruling classes of their freedom of action. Against a strong, conservative, self-confident capitalistic Europe, the proletarian revolution in Russia, isolated and not yet fortified, could not have held out even for a few months. But that Europe no longer existed. The revolution in the west did not, to be sure, put the proletariat in power – the reformists succeeded in saving the bourgeois regime – but nevertheless it proved powerful enough to defend the Soviet Republic in the first and most dangerous period of its life.” (History of the Russian Revolution, Vol.3, page 124, L. Trotsky)

It is therefore clear that the Russian Revolution was not an isolated event, but something in the nature of the hart of the fire where it is hottest, the highest point of the world revolution in that moment. The working class failed to achieve its revolution in the west because it was betrayed by its leaders, but why did it succeed in Russia rather than in the west? Russia’s primitive feudal agricultural economy and generally low level of culture as opposed to the much more advanced capitalist manufacturing economies of the west would seem to have condemned it to be the last in line for social revolution rather than the first. This contradiction is easily explained when we understand the revolution not as something immanent to the country itself, but simply as the first stage of the world revolution, as the reflection in one country of developments in world history as a whole. That imperialism was in mortal crisis there can be no doubt, since the competition between the main powers had exploded into the most destructive war in history. As explained above, Russia was the economically weakest of the belligerent powers, riven with debt and with a fatally low rate of productivity. Further, the capitalist class there was in its infancy, and proved unequal in the power struggle between the classes. Russia was the weakest link in the chain of capitalist nations. For years the political life of the country had been conditioned by revolutionary struggle against Czarism, the struggle of the petit bourgeois peasantry for the land and for democratic reform, often taking the form of outright terrorism. The spark which ignited this explosive mixture was Bolshevism, a strongly united and disciplined party in possession of the scientific theory of revolution, Marxism as concretised by Lenin.

The Bolsheviks never intended that the revolution should be a purely Russian affair. As Trotsky had explained to the Congress of Soviets, the purpose was to take advantage of this weak point in the defences of world imperialism, and to lead the heavy reserves, the workers in the western countries, through the breach. It was already understood by all the leaders of the Second International that the Revolution would break out, as set out in the Basle Manifesto, “precisely in connection with the war”. But, due to the treachery of these leaders, the reserves never came, hence the Soviet Union found itself in the position of a beleaguered fortress surrounded by enemies and under constant attack. Worse, as we shall see, it had to deal with the enemy within.

The millions of Russian workers and peasants followed the Bolsheviks because they were the only party that was in a position to deliver the future they so desperately had to have, a future that was encapsulated in Lenin’s famous formula, peace, bread and land. The Russian army, outdated, badly equipped, and led by incompetent Czarist bigots, was starving, freezing and disintegrating in the face of the German onslaught. As an effective fighting force it no longer existed. On the first day after the revolution, 26 October 1917, the Congress of Soviets passed a resolution stating its intention to begin peace negotiations, and on 7 November sent an appeal to the Allied nations, addressed simultaneously to the governments and the peoples, to join in peace talks, but they made no reply. On 22 November a truce with the Germans was signed and talks began, led by Trotsky, at Brest-Litovsk. Without an army, the delegation led by Trotsky had to negotiate from a position of hopeless weakness, but the Germans too had their problems, because there were strikes, serious unrest and support for the Russian revolution in Germany. Trotsky’s tactic was to string out the talks as long as possible in order to allow time for the revolution to develop in Germany and the rest of Europe, and no agreement was reached and the Germans renewed hostilities on 18 February 1918. The following June a Menshevik government came to power in Georgia and immediately invited the Germans to occupy the country, which then became a base for the counter-revolutionary White armies.

So began the “wars of intervention” by the western powers and the civil war waged by Czarist counter-revolutionaries against the fledgling Soviet workers state. Finland had been part of the Czarist empire but was granted independence by the Soviets in November 1917 and was immediately used as a base by the German army. The Russian general Krasnov made an attempt to march on Petrograd immediately after October, was captured and released, then made his way south to form the counter-revolutionary Don army with the support first of the Germans and then the Allies. The Czarist admiral Kolchak declared himself supreme ruler of Russia and with support from Britain, France and America waged war on the Soviets in the Urals, Siberia and the Far East. The British invaded Georgia in the summer of 1918. General Wrangel led a counter-revolutionary army from the Crimea again with British support. It fell to Trotsky to lead the defence against these incursions, and with amazing speed and facility he built the Red Army out of volunteers and the remnants of the old Russian army. He constructed his famous “armoured train” as a flying headquarters, equipped with an electrical generator, a radio station, a printing press, fighting units and wagons containing motor vehicles. In this train he travelled from front to front giving leadership and urgently needed supplies, and forged the disparate fighting groups who were already defending their revolutionary Soviet power into a centrally commanded army. In 1920 the last counter-revolutionary army, led by the French in the Crimea, was defeated.

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III. The Soviet Union is Born

The Russian Revolution was the result of the will of the people driven by historic necessity; it is only necessary to make an honest historical appraisal of the event to convince ourselves of this. The political entity that emerged from the revolution and civil war became the Soviet Union. It was officially founded at a congress of Soviets representing Russia, Byelorussia, Transcaucasia and the Ukraine, all of which had already adopted the soviet system in their own right, on 30^th. December 1922. Other countries joined later.

It is fashionable today to regard the Russian Revolution and the Soviet socialist system which was its result as some sort of unfortunate accident of history, or even a ghastly mistake, but in fact it was absolutely necessary and it had to happen. In the first place this view fails to understand that the history of the human race is the history of the revolutionary struggle between classes. No doubt Marx had this in mind when he referred to revolution as “the locomotive of history”. From the very beginning of the revolutionary struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudal oppression the modern working class was also fighting for its emancipation if only spontaneously, often in the forms of riots and religious sectarianism. At the time of the Peasant War in Germany in the sixteenth century there were the Anabaptists, then the Levellers in the English Revolution, and Babeuf and his followers in the French Revolution, and later the British Chartist movement in 1838. The first truly proletarian uprising took place in Lyons in 1831 and this was followed by the Paris Commune of 1871, the first truly communist revolution which established proletarian state power although it lived for only seventy-one days. The next great revolutionary uprising was the uncompleted Russian revolution of 1905, and finally, like the highest peak in the mountain chain of events, the revolution of 1917. In a most important work entitled Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels explains with reference to the earlier struggles:-

“The new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the mode of production and exchange - in a word, the economic conditions of the time; that the economic structure of society always furnished the real basis, starting from which alone we can work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of the judicial and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period.”

In the same work Engels goes on to explain the changes in the particular means and mode of production and exchange which had taken place with the development of the capitalist system of factory production, and hence the essence of the struggle between the two main classes as we live it today, the bourgeoisie or capitalist ruling class, and the modern working class or proletariat:-

“The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialised. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolished the conditions upon which the latter rests … This contradiction, which gives the new mode of production its capitalist character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today.”

Here we see the general historical necessity for the revolution of 1917, the need to resolve this contradiction by making the mode of production compatible with the means of production by socialising the latter as well as the former in order to unlock the full productive potential of modern science and technology. The view that the Russian Revolution was somehow unnecessary fails to understand that it was a particular manifestation of this general law of the evolution of modern human society, and further, that since socialisation of the means of production implies the dispossession of the capitalist class and the reversal of the entire system of property rights and the system of legality based upon them, then it can only be achieved in a revolutionary way. At the same time it is important to understand that general laws of nature and human society do not manifest themselves in a straight forward, mechanical way. It is true that Russia was least of all European countries ready for socialism in 1917, but the concrete conditions were such that the workers had no choice but to take the path of revolution. The war and the economic collapse of Czarist Russia, and the inability of the capitalist class to impose a workable solution by democratic means meant that revolution was a matter of survival for the working class, since the choice before them was not between revolution and liberal democracy, but between revolution and continued starvation and war under Czarist dictatorship in an even more extreme form following the attempts at fascistic coup led by General Kornilov, which began in August 1917 and persisted right up to the Revolution of 25^th October, with the connivance of the Provisional government.

A revolution occurs when class divided society is in deep crisis and the old system can go no further, when the ruling class cannot continue to rule in the old way and the mass of the workers cannot live under existing conditions. The most striking feature of revolution is that the mass of the people, the oppressed class in a class divided society, spontaneously take a direct hand in the course of events in defiance of all existing authority, hence in the essence of the matter it cannot be an act of dictatorship over them. On the contrary, the very logic of the situation demands that they must answer the threat of dictatorship over them brought on by the revolutionary crisis with a revolutionary dictatorship of their own, so that having rested state power from the ruling class by transferring it to the Soviets, it was then necessary for the Russian workers to exercise a dictatorship over the possessing class to disarm and dispossess them and construct the socialist order. We call such a period the dictatorship of the proletariat. So there was a dictatorship in Russia after the revolution, but it was the first dictatorship in history which did not negate the principle of democracy because it was a dictatorship of the majority over the minority, and the whole purpose of any democracy is precisely to subordinate the minority to the majority so that society can act in a unified way. Nor was it a communist dictatorship because communism did not yet exist, nor could it have done because it will take generations of economic development to bring it into being once the working class has achieved state power through revolution. In any case communism is a classless society and in such a society dictatorship would be an absurd impossibility; how can there be a dictatorship when society is one homogenous whole and there is no one class to dictate to any other?

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a regime which is transitional from capitalism to communism, a period in which the class division in society steadily dissolves as the property relations are transformed from private to public ownership. When the communist classless society is achieved there will be no need for dictatorship, or for that matter even a state. How was it then, that the dictatorship of the people over their erstwhile oppressor, the possessing and exploiting ruling class, became transformed into the horrendous Stalinist dictatorship over them? To answer this question we must familiarise ourselves with the precise historical conditions which gave rise to this new and qualitatively different dictatorship.

Revolution is a law of motion of human society. When we speak of revolution we do not mean such events as a change of government by some illegal means while political power remains with the same class; we have in mind the major historical turning points which occur when state power passes from one class to another, when the ruling class is overthrown and the oppressed class becomes the new ruling class. In Britain, the last such event was the English Revolution of the 1640’s in which the feudal ruling class was overthrown and the bourgeoisie became the new ruling class, exercised its dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and proceeded to build the capitalist order in the ensuing years. But when such a revolution occurs the old ruling class does not disappear from the scene, it resists the change, hence every revolution is followed by a period of reaction, tending to roll the wave of revolution back. Such a process followed the English Revolution and culminated in the restoration of the monarchy followed by the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 which restored some monarchical rights, and also after the French Revolution when the revolutionary Jacobins were deposed and executed by a reactionary coup in 1794. In the Russian revolution, the feudal class was overthrown together with the capitalists and the proletariat, followed by the poor peasants, became the new ruling class, and this in turn was followed by a period of reaction when the feudal elements and their capitalist allies found political leaders for their cause. The chief among these leaders was Stalin, of whom little had been heard up to this time, and the dictatorship over the workers which took form under his leadership was anti-communist and counter-revolutionary in essence. The dictatorship preserved the socialised property relations established by the revolution, but at the same time it preserved the old bourgeois attitudes and habits of personal gain and privileges for the ruling strata. Of course in was necessary to deny the very existence of the privileged ruling bureaucracy which was the result, so all that it did in its own interest was done in the name of the Revolution and dressed up in the language and iconography of communism. No wonder the uninformed fell into the trap of equating Stalinism with communism.

The social transformation wrought by the revolution was two-fold. In the first place it overthrew the old feudal relations in agriculture by dispossessing the landlords and giving the land to the peasants. In effect the peasants became a new bourgeoisie and began to employ wage labour. But, due to the scattered nature of peasant agriculture and the resulting individualism of such classes of people, and due to prevailing world conditions, they could not have achieved this revolution otherwise than under the leadership of the modern industrial proletariat, who, in carrying through their revolution for the socialisation of the means of production in industry, had of necessity at the same time to lead the revolution in the land question because they could not have achieved their objective without the support of the poor peasants. This latter was achieved on 6^th. February 1918 by way of the Land Socialisation Act, which abolished private ownership of land and placed the land and all private stock and implements at the disposal of the peasants under the local Soviet authorities and the control of the Federal Soviet Government. The future course of the revolution now depended on the living relations between these classes, proletariat and peasantry, between town and country, between industry and agriculture.

By now the fledgling Soviet Union was in a parlous state. Famine had already begun during the World War due to the devastation of infrastructure and crops, and the civil war and the blockade imposed by the capitalist West that followed it caused dreadful suffering to the point of actual starvation. This situation was a much more serious problem for Russia than it might have been for a modern European country. It was predominantly a backward feudal country with a correspondingly low level of labour productivity, there were few roads or railways and hardly any electric power, so that economic recovery was bound to be difficult and slow.

The policy of “military communism” became necessary in 1918, a system of strict government control of all supplies and regimentation of production and distribution. This was followed in 1921 by the “New Economic Policy”, (NEP), which restored a degree of private trade in order to regulate relations between industry and agriculture and to stimulate the economy. As conditions improved under the NEP the class based contradiction between agriculture and industry began to unfold. The expropriation of the landlords had made the peasants much richer, but now that they had to supply themselves with industrial products through the market they were on balance much worse off. It became necessary to allow the increasingly bourgeois agricultural class to enrich itself to some extent, with the result that wage labour became more common and the gap between rich and poor widened alarmingly. As time went by the original programme of collectivisation of farming was shelved, the richer peasants gained control of the provincial soviets and began to influence government policy in their favour to the detriment of industrial development, causing progress towards socialism to grind to a halt.

This alarming situation had political consequences – those leaders who based themselves on the opportunism of the peasants grown relatively rich on the basis of the NEP coalesced round Stalin, and those who stood for collectivisation and progress to a modern industrialisation and socialist economy formed themselves into what became known as the “Left Opposition” led by Trotsky. The conflict between these two political blocs became increasingly serious, with the Left Opposition striving for socialist planning and to preserve the democratic processes in the Communist Party and the Soviets, and Stalin’s faction consolidating its political power through bureaucratic control of the machinery of state. The generally low level of productivity and continued isolation of the Soviet Union from the more advanced countries resulted in grinding poverty for the masses, a situation to which there appeared to be no end in site, and the scene was set for the rise of the bureaucratic dictatorship. As Trotsky explains, those who were in a position to make controlling decisions as to the distribution of wealth in a situation of generalised want began systematically to shape the system to their own advantage.

“The power of the democratic Soviets proved cramping, even unendurable, when the task of the day was to accommodate those privileged groups whose existence was necessary for defence, for industry, for technique and science. In this decidedly not “socialistic” operation, taking from ten and giving to one, there crystallized out and developed a powerful cast of specialists in distribution.” (Revolution Betrayed, New Park Publications, page 59)

By the 1920’s the rising bourgeois layers of the peasantry upon which the bureaucracy based itself politically became dangerously powerful, so powerful in fact that there was a real danger of the overthrow of the nationalised property relations and a return to capitalism. A point of crisis was reached in 1928 when the richest of the peasants, the Kulaks, organised a nation wide strike and refused to deliver grain to the cities at the price levels decreed by the government. However, a return to capitalism would have been disaster for the Stalinist bureaucracy since its privileged social position rested on the state system and socialised property relations, hence there followed a sudden shift in policy to a crash programme of industrial development to strengthen the proletarian base of Soviet society, and harsh measures to enforce collectivisation of farms. The dictatorship now developed along bonapartist lines, that is, the bureaucracy became a ruling cast based on a balancing act between two political forces, the developing social revolution, and the reaction tending to counter-revolution and the restoration capitalism. To ensure its own survival it had to defend the nationalised property relations, but it did so only in order to further its own privileged position. This is the secret of the horrendously violent nature of the dictatorship under which all the communist leaders of the revolution were murdered, exiled or framed up in show trials.

Perhaps the greatest contribution Trotsky made to the theory of world social revolution as a historical process was his scientific analysis of the Thermidorian reaction to the revolution of 1917. Characterising the Soviet Union as a “deformed workers’ state”, he explained:-

“As a conscious political force the bureaucracy had betrayed the revolution. But a victorious revolution is fortunately not only a programme and a banner, not only political institutions, but also a system of social relations. To betray it is not enough. You have to overthrow it. The October revolution has been betrayed by the ruling stratum, but not yet overthrown. It has a great power of resistance, coinciding with the established property relations, with the living force of the proletariat, the consciousness of its best elements, and the inevitability of world revolution.” (Revolution Betrayed, New Park Publications, page 251, L. Trotsky.)

What does Trotsky mean by describing the Soviet Union as a “deformed workers’ state”? All attempts at a settled definition of the term, Trotsky explains, are futile and can only lead to error, because the Soviet Union was not a finished system of social relations, but was a historical moment of transition from one system to another, from capitalism to socialism, and the outcome of the transition was not yet a decided question. The Soviet Union might progress towards socialism or regress towards capitalism, (which latter, we now know, is what did happen in 1991). Many on the left who unconsciously subscribe to the metaphysical, anti-dialectical outlook which demands that a thing must either exist or not exist, is fixed and immutable, and who are therefore unable to grasp such transitional processes as Trotsky describes, subscribe to the theory that the Soviet Union became a fixed system of “state capitalism”. In the first place, this is a crass misunderstanding of a term used previously by Marx to describe state control over enterprises within the overall capitalist system, such as occur when it becomes necessary to “nationalise” a failing railway system which is necessary to the capitalist economy as a whole. Secondly, capitalism is a system of private ownership of the means of production and exchange, and at this stage the property relations in the Soviet Union remained socialised under state control, and remained so right up to 1991. It is true that there had never been anything quite like the Stalinist bureaucracy before, it had a special privileged position in Soviet society, but it was forced to defend the socialised property relations in order to ensure is own survival.

In spite of these dreadful political conditions the advantages of publicly owned means of production and centrally planned economy became obvious. By 1925 state industry was responsible for 80% of industrial produce, the transport system was state owned, credit institutions were a state monopoly, and 95% of foreign trade was state controlled. Proper economic planning was now possible and the first 5-year plan began in 1926, and in spite of the corruption and miss-management of the bureaucracy great progress was made. From the time of the 1929 crash in the capitalist west to 1935 industrial production rose in Britain 3%, in Germany 4%, while in France it had declined by 30% and in the USA it was down by 25%. During this same period industrial production in the Soviet Union rose by 250%. Production in heavy industry rose by a factor of 10, and production of coal, steel, and electricity all increased dramatically.

Inside the Soviet Union the bureaucracy had found a base of support in the reactionary bourgeois layers who were finding their feet on the basis of the NEP, but just as we find the ultimate cause of the Russian Revolution in the European revolution as a whole, so we find the cause of its reversal, the wave of reaction, in world conditions. The defeats of the revolutionary struggles in Europe, particularly that in Germany, left the Soviet Union more and more isolated. Up to 1923 these defeats had resulted from the lack of experienced communist parties for political leadership. Later, particularly after the death of Lenin in 1924, and with the Left Opposition now deprived of its rights and politically isolated, the bureaucracy’s alliance with the bourgeoisie at home was reflected externally in its international relations. The class internationalist outlook upon which all scientific socialist theory is based was replaced by the nationalist idea that a single country could arrive at socialist society within its own national borders. In order to achieve this, however, peaceful relations with the capitalist countries were obviously necessary. With this two sided policy, based on the theory of “socialism in one country”, and “peaceful co-existence”, Stalinism found finished and determinate form, and it is important to adhere to this strictly scientific understanding of the term, as opposed to its later vulgar misuse by those who wish to falsely equate Stalinism with communism.

Workers in struggle everywhere looked to the Soviet Union and the Comintern for leadership and support, but just as the bureaucracy used the machinery of the Soviet State to serve its own ends domestically, the Comintern became a tool to serve its ends internationally. Trotsky explains:-

“The international situation was pushing with mighty forces in the same direction. The Soviet bureaucracy became more self-confident, the heavier the blows dealt to the world working class. Between these two facts there was not only a chronological, but a causal connection, and one which worked in two directions. The leaders of the bureaucracy, [through their control of the Comintern], promoted the proletarian defeats; the defeats promoted the rise of the bureaucracy. The crushing of the Bulgarian insurrection and the inglorious retreat of the German Workers Party in 1923, the collapse of the Estonian attempt at insurrection in 1924, the treacherous liquidation of the General Strike in England and the unworthy conduct of the Polish workers’ party at the installation of Pilsudski in 1926, the terrible massacre of the Chinese Revolution in 1927, and, finally, the still more ominous recent defeats in Germany and Austria – these are the historic catastrophes which killed the faith of the Soviet masses in world revolution, and permitted the bureaucracy to rise higher and higher as the sole light of salvation.” (Op. Cit., page 90)

The Left Opposition continued to advance the international perspective but was by now politically defeated. Stalin, by now the supreme dictator of the Soviet Union, now crushed all opposition by driving members of the Left Opposition out of leading positions in the Communist Party and the Soviets and finally by mass arrests, exile, judicial frame-up and assassination. Here it is important to note precisely who were the leaders of the Left Opposition. Firstly there was Trotsky himself, the leading Bolshevik theorist after Lenin and the practical leader of the Revolution and the civil war. The others were all Bolsheviks who had been in leading positions in the party and the Revolution, in direct association with Lenin. Clearly then, the suggestion that the Stalinist dictatorship was “communist” is false, since the dictatorship was directed precisely against the communists, who, to their credit, never gave up their resistance. In later years Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, remarked that “if Lenin were still alive he would be in prison.” Trotsky compares this process of reaction against the Russian revolution to that of the French revolution when, on 9th. Thermidor, (July 27, 1794), the counter-revolutionary coup took place and the revolutionary Jacobins led by Robespierre were executed.

Under Stalinist leadership the Comintern, originally constituted as the world party of social revolution, became nothing but a tool for the conduct Stalin’s foreign relations which in practice meant a means of compromise with the ruling class and betrayal of the international struggle for world revolution. When interviewed by an American press baron, who asked him whether the Soviet Union had any plans or intentions regarding the world revolution, Stalin replied, “We never had any such plans of intentions … This is the result of a misunderstanding”. (Revolution Betrayed, page 202). Disastrous and bloody defeats for the international working class followed as a result of this dreadful betrayal.

In China there were revolutionary struggles to overthrow the ancient feudal system, with the bourgeoisie organised by the Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-shek, and a large communist party with mass support. Stalin, taking a conservative, right-wing position, decreed that the Kuomintang must lead the revolution and the communist party must play a subordinate role – he even made Chiang Kai-shek, a capitalist, an honorary member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern ! In 1927 the Kuomintang, with communist support, won a decisive victory in the civil war and immediately carried out a bloody massacre of the communist party and thousands of its supporters.

The Bolsheviks had always been aware that it was vitally necessary for the revolution to triumph in advanced capitalist countries since socialism can only be built on the basis of advanced and highly productive economy and on a world scale, and Germany was considered a key country. There was every possibility of successful revolution in Germany, since the working class was highly educated and had lived through the experience of the 1919 revolution which had overthrown the Kaiser, established a republic and briefly brought soviets into being. By the 1920’s the German economy was in a parlous state due to the restrictions and heavy reparation payments enforced by the victor countries under the Versailles Treaty. Her economic stability depended on huge loans from America, and when these were withdrawn following the economic crash of 1929 Germany was plunged into crisis. The working class fought the massive unemployment, striking in support of the right to work, and giving substantial support the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party, but in spite of continued working class militancy, and increasing support for the Social Democrats and the Communist Party, the Nazis came to power. How did it happen?

The answer lies in the opportunist policy of the Comintern and the German Communist Party, the KPD. As revolutionary struggles began in Germany Stalin, reacting blindly to his disastrously right-wing policy in China, veered to an ultra-left position. In times of crisis, he correctly observed, the ruling class resorted to fascist methods, but he went on to conclude that since the social democratic parties, that is the parties of the Second International which had betrayed the Revolution in 1914, were the main support of the ruling class, then they were indistinguishable from actual fascists, and he coined the term “social-fascists” to describe them, a term without any basis in truth. Both the Social Democratic Party, (SPD), and the Communist Party had millions of supporters and elected representatives in the Reichstag, but under instruction from the Comintern the Communist Party was forbidden to enter into any united front activity with the so-called social fascists, leaving the German working class split and at loggerheads at every important turn, with the result that fascism triumphed and Hitler came to power in 1933. He immediately set about consolidating the Nazi dictatorship by arresting the Communist, Socialist, and trade union leaders, and beginning a massive arms drive which restored full employment, although the workers, bereft of trade unions and all democratic rights, suffered the conditions of slave labour. The heinous concentration camp system, which was much more widespread than is generally believed, and which carried capitalist exploitation of labour to its logical conclusion, also played its part in the German economic recovery and war effort. But even the Nazis could not place German capitalism on firm foundations without expanding her territory, that is, without acquiring an empire, or as the Nazis called it, “living room”. Czechoslovakia and Poland were obvious targets, but the main prize was Soviet Russia, with her vast grain growing areas, oil, and other raw materials.

Having precipitated this dreadful defeat at the hands of the Nazis Stalin lurched from his extreme left to an extreme right position. At its 7^th. Congress in August 1935 the Comintern adopted the policy of the “Popular Front”. It concretised the Stalinist process of betrayal of the revolutionary struggles of the working class by tying the communist parties of the world not just to the social democracy, the social chauvinist parties of the Second International, but to the political organisations of the capitalist class as well, and this in spite of the horrendous experience with the Kuomintang. Ostensibly the purpose of the Popular Front tactic was to unite any and all elements of society that might possibly be opposed to fascism, and it is vital that we grasp the essence of this new turn. Up to this point Trotsky and the International Left Opposition, (ILO), had seen the catastrophes such as in China and Germany as the result of mistakes by the Stalinist led Comintern, and he regarded the International Left Opposition as an expelled faction of the Comintern. The experience of the Popular front, however, convinced him that it was no longer a question of mistakes but deliberate and conscious betrayal of the revolutionary struggles of the international working class to ensure the continued survival of the bureaucracy as a parasitic cast on the backs of the workers, and that there was no possibility of reforming the Comintern and returning it to the correct road. Accordingly he resolved to split from the Third International, the Comintern, and found the Fourth International, which came into being in 1938. Since the first result of the Popular Front policy was to bring disastrous defeat and the fascist dictatorship under General Franco down on the heads of the Spanish working class in 1939 we can perhaps best approach the question in this context. The following quote is an excellent general statement of the nature of fascism as a historical phenomenon:-

“The bourgeoisie does not light-mindedly take to fascism. The Nazi movement of Germany had almost no bourgeois support in the putsch of 1923. [Hitler’s failed attempt to take power by conspiratorial means]. In the ensuing decade, it secured financial support only from a few individual capitalists until 1932. The bourgeoisie of Germany hesitated for a long time before it accepted the instrumentality of Hitler; for fifteen years it preferred to lean on the social democratic leaders. But at the height of the world economic crisis, technically advanced Germany, handicapped by the Versailles Treaty in its imperialist conflicts with England, France and America, could ‘solve’ its crisis temporarily, in capitalist terms, only by destroying the workers organisations which had existed for three-fourths of a century.

Fascism is that special form of capitalist domination which the bourgeoisie finally resorts to when the continued existence of capitalism is incompatible with the existence of organised workers. Fascism is resorted to when the concessions, which are the product of the activities of the trade unions and political parties of labour, become an intolerable burden on the capitalist rulers, hence intolerable to the further existence of capitalism. For the working class, at this point, the issue is inexorably posed for immediate solution: either fascism or socialism.” (Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain, page 2, Felix Morrow, New Park Publications.)

By the 1930’s this was the question posed for the Spanish workers. The Spanish economy had been in permanent crisis since the end of the First World War. Manufacturing industry had developed somewhat, particularly in Catalonia and the Basque regions of the north, but 70% of the population were poor peasants mostly working as paid labourers on huge estates, most of which were heavily mortgaged to the banks. In spite of appearances, therefore, Spain was essentially a capitalist country. Agriculture accounted for over half the national income and two-thirds of exports, but there was stiff competition on the world market and capitalism could only survive by cutting wage levels which necessitated crushing the trade unions and peasant organisations. In 1931 there were huge strikes and insurrectionary struggles, the result of which was to depose the monarchy and found a republic with a government consisting of a coalition of bourgeois liberal parties. The workers were led by various parties: Due to the large peasant agricultural population there was a large anarchist party, and there was the Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista, (POUM), a Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the main trade union which was the National Confederation of Labour, (CNT), and a small section of the International Left Opposition. The POUM was associated with neither the Comintern nor the ILO, but it had some degree of solidarity with the latter. After further intense class struggles a Popular Front Government was elected in February 1936 based on a coalition of two bourgeois liberal parties, socialists, representatives of the CNT, and the Communist Party.

The record of this government, of which the Stalinist Communist Party was a part, is one of brutal oppression of the workers. Demands for the re-distribution of the land were ignored, strikes were declared illegal, martial law was declared, and demonstrations and meetings violently broken up. When, on 17^th. July 1936, the fascists made their bid for power the government gave them every assistance. Having censored warnings of the event from socialist newspapers and refused to distribute arms to workers organisations, it gave assurances that everything was in order. During the hours when General Franco was bringing forces from Spanish Morocco it issued the following statement:-

“The Government acknowledges the offers of support which it has received [from the workers organisations] and, while being grateful for them, declares that the best aid that can be given to the Government is to guarantee the normality of daily life, in order to set a high example of serenity and of confidence in the means of the military strength of the state” (Claridad, 18^th July 1936)

But the military strength of the state was now at the disposal of the fascists and coming to slaughter them! What kind of a government anesthetises the working class in the face of such mortal danger, and, the most burning question of all, what was the Stalinist Communist Party doing is such a government? The answer is simple, it was there because the Comintern leaders wanted it there, because they had already decided that it was in their own best interests to make sure that the bourgeoisie retain power in Spain, and if that meant fascist dictatorship then so be it. The Role of the Communist Party and the socialists was to legitimise the government in the eyes of the workers and maintain their allegiance to it even though is was clearly not going to oppose the fascists. On 18^th. July the Communist Party and the Socialists issued the following joint statement:-

“The moment is a difficult one but by no means desperate. The Government is certain that it has sufficient resources to overcome the criminal attempt. In the eventuality that the resources of the Government be not sufficient, the republic has the solemn promise of the Popular Front, which gathers under its discipline the whole proletariat, resolved serenely and dispassionately to intervene in the struggle as quickly as its intervention is to be called for … The Government commands and the Popular Front obeys.”

A neat division of labour; The Communist Party keeps the workers subservient to the Republican Government, and the Government submits to the fascists, but it didn’t work because the workers took the initiative into their own hands. First, the workers in Barcelona stormed the barracks and armed themselves, and after dealing with the local garrison quickly gained control of the whole of Catalonia. The situation was the same in Madrid, and in Valencia the soldiers shot their officers and distributed arms to the workers. In the navy the sailors shot their officers and took command of the ships. At the same time as the workers militia army was coming into being to defeat the city garrisons and the forces coming from Morocco under Franco the revolutionary organisations formed all over the country. Peasants organised in revolutionary village committees took over the land and workers took over the factories, supplies were ensured and order maintained by a policing system. All this left the Republican Government completely isolated and impotent with no military forces of its own, so that by this time a situation of dual power had arisen and the question of state power was immediately posed. Would the Republican Government continue to rule through the old bourgeois state system, or would the workers overthrow the old state system and construct a new state based on their revolutionary committees, as the Russian workers had done with their system of Soviets?

Unfortunately there was one essential element missing from the equation to complete the revolutionary process, a strong and well trained party armed with a revolutionary theory capable of leading the masses to victory, a Marxist party of the Bolshevik type. As a result the workers could not break from the influence of the bourgeois forces centred round the Republican Government and achieve the necessary class based central organisation at the national level, and this tragic circumstance gave the Communist Party time to organise and prepare its betrayal. Compared to the POUM and the Anarchists the Communist Party was small and had little influence, but under the command of dubious “instructors”, in other words murderous GPU agents sent from Moscow, it began a crash programme of recruitment. As they had done in the Soviet Union, the Stalinists based themselves on bourgeois elements rather than the working class. With unlimited funds and resources dispensed by the “instructors” they recruited right wing trade union leaders and forces from small traders’ organisations and business men, and organised break-away unions of rich peasants who were opposed to collectivisation.. A trickle of arms and supplies began to arrive from Moscow, but far from being of any real use these turned out to be a Trojan horse. At the first sign of insubordination to the Party the tap would be turned off, hence the workers were blackmailed into subservience.

The key question, as in all revolutions, was the question of the state. If the workers had managed to consolidate their militias and committees into a working state machine, and, crucially, to nationalise the banking system so as to dispossess the ruling class and to ensure finance for their own state forces, the revolution might well have been complete. Many workers, including the ILO and members of the POUM, were calling for soviets to oust the Republican Government and take state power as the Russian workers had done, but the POUM and CNT leaders, maintaining that conditions were different in Spain, made the fatal error of trying to achieve power within the parliamentary type Republican Government system which could never be anything but an instrument of bourgeois rule. By failing to take the soviet road they left the Republican Government time to reconstruct a police force with the help of the Soviet Union who supplied it with arms and equipment including machine guns and armoured cars. A new Cabinet, which included two Communist Party members, was formed on 4^th. September 1936 and with armed bodies of men now at its disposal it dismantled the workers organisations step by strep. First it decreed that the Militia Committees were dissolved and condemned any resistance as fascism. Then it issued an order that all arms must be handed in within eight days, again accusing those who refused of fascism.

At this point the role of the Stalinist Communist Party in the civil war became explicit. It submitted completely to the counter-revolution Republican Government by placing its Party militias under its control and calling for a ban on all political discussion in the army. One of the most important mouthpieces of the Comintern, the French Communist Party paper L’Humanité, bluntly spelt out the Stalinist policy in August 1936:-

“The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Spain requests us to inform the public, in reply to the fantastic and tendentious reports published by certain newspapers, that the Spanish people are not striving for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but know only one aim: the defence of the republican order, while protecting property.”

It is clear that the “certain newspapers”, which in fact were those of the POUM and other workers parties, were quite correct, since the workers had spontaneously built their own forces of state rule in their committees and the militias, and taken over land, factories, transport etc. “Defence of the republican order” meant submitting to the rule of the bourgeoisie under the parliamentary system, and “protecting property” meant protecting the private property, factories land etc., of the capitalist system. Clearly the statement was aimed at deceiving the workers and reassuring the bourgeoisie, and at the same time making the intentions of the Communist Party clear. This was followed on 17^th. December by an even more explicit statement in Pravda:-

“As for Catalonia, the purging of the Trotskyists and the Anarcho-Syndicalists has begun; it will be conducted with the same energy with which it was conducted in the USSR.”

We have already discovered what form this “energy” took in the USSR – lies, false accusation and imprisonment, torture, and murder on a mass scale, and it had indeed already begun. While the Republican Government looked the other way the Communist Party, under the supervision of Stalin’s GPU “instructors”, formed terrorist bands which were equipped with private prisons and torture chambers. In March 1936 a gang of Stalinists, including the Mayors of Villanueva and Villamayor, were found guilty in a republican court of rape, extortion, and the murder of political enemies including 16 members of the CNT. Five of the gang were condemned to death and eight others imprisoned, and there were other similar cases and countless reports of such activities which the Republican authorities failed to investigate. In August 1937 the leader of the POUM, Andre Nin, was arrested by the police and handed over to the GPU who tortured and murdered him.

Why did the Republican Government, faced with fascist uprisings in the cities and the advance of Franco’s army, crush the only organisations that could defend legality and democracy, the workers organisations and militias? The answer is simple enough. The bourgeoisie had more to lose from a workers state and social revolution than they had from fascist dictatorship, which after all would be a system of rule based on their own class. In any case by concentrating their forces against the workers militias they weakened the front against Franco’s forces sufficiently to ensure his victory. As for the Stalinist leaders of the Comintern, it made no difference to them whether democracy or fascism triumphed, so long as the workers did not take power, and that is the essence of their Popular Front tactic. However, the Stalinist policy of protecting the international bourgeoisie from the revolutionary working class in order to maintain peaceful relations with them was about to be put to a severe test.

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IV. The Second World War.

It was not until the late 1930's that the mortal threat of a German invasion impinged on Stalin's mind, but the only force on earth that could have prevented it, the German working class, was already defeated, due to Stalin’s disastrously treacherous leadership. In 1939, having stood aside while the Nazis herded the communists, the social democrats and trade union leaders into the death camps, Stalin signed a pact of “non-aggression” with Hitler. The idea that a mere piece of paper could stop the Nazis waging war on the Soviet Union was surely the crassest of all Stalin's mistakes and when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 it came as a complete surprise to him. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the decisive advantages of socialised planned economy were demonstrated in breath-taking fashion during the war and ultimately enabled the Soviet Union to crush the Nazi war machine, but first we must understand the essence of the conflict.

On 3rd. September 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany for the second time, the world learned that the First World War had decided nothing. In 1938 Germany had once again been impelled to expand her territory in order to survive, by annexing Austria in March, the Sudetenland in October, and by invading Czechoslovakia in September. Finally, when Hitler's Germany invaded Poland on 1st. September 1939 it became necessary once again for the British ruling class to defend its imperial interests by means of war, because if Germany were to succeed in her war aims she would become the most powerful imperialist power in the world, threatening to dominate the ocean trading routes and eclipse the British Empire, now already in decline. The most important attribute of an imperialist power is that it is an exporter of capital, and until the crisis of the 1930's Britain had been a net exporter of capital, although at a much slower rate after the First World War, but by 1939 she had become a net importer of capital, with an annual deficit of £50 million in her current balance of payments. Moreover, Britain depended heavily on foreign trade just to survive, since industry depended on imports of raw material, and two thirds of the food supply had to be imported. Add to this the fact that an important part of Britain’s income was earned from shipping foreign trade, and it is clear that Britain had to oppose the explosive expansion of German imperialism by war if necessary. This time, however, there was much more at stake, because with the development of technology and the productive forces since 1914 the antagonism between the imperialist powers in the struggle for markets had become fiercer than ever, and more importantly, one sixth part of the world's surface was the possession of the working class, the workers state of Soviet Russia, and therefore unavailable for capitalist exploitation.

This latter consideration, the necessity from the imperialist point of view to overthrow the socialist system and restore private property relations and capitalist exploitation in the Soviet Union, was an objective held in common by all the contending imperialist powers. In 1931 Trotsky had characterised the military threat to the Soviet Union posed by imperialism:-

“None of the ‘normal’ bourgeois governments can at the present time risk a war against the USSR: for it would bring with it the threat of unforeseen internal complications. But once Hitler comes to power and proceeds to crush the vanguard of the German workers, pulverising and demoralising the whole proletariat for many years to come, the Fascist government alone will be the only government capable of waging war against the USSR. Naturally, it will act under such circumstances in a common front with Poland and Romania, with the other border states as well as with Japan in the far east. In this enterprise, the Hitler government would only be the executive organ of world capitalism as a whole. Clemenceau, Millerand, Lloyd George, and Wilson could not directly carry on a war against the Soviet government; but they were able, in the course of three years, to support the armies of Kolchak, Wrangel and Denekin. If victorious, Hitler will become the Super-Wrangel of the world bourgeoisie.” (Germany 1931 to 1932, p. 17, L. Trotsky, New Park. Our emphasis.)

This remarkably accurate prediction brilliantly explains the underlying politics of the period. In the coming war the imperialist powers would fight among themselves to re-divide the world, but the very existence of the Soviet Union was a deadly threat to the whole system of imperialism since it was a workers state and hence a revolutionary example to workers everywhere, and at the same time it was above all necessary for the imperialists to win back for capitalist exploitation the territory taken from it by the working class by way of the Russian Revolution. The “three years” were of course the years of the civil war during which the western powers tried to defeat the Revolution by invading the Soviet Union and supporting the reactionary White forces. In so far as the Second World War was aimed at crushing the Soviet Union, it was nothing but a continuation of the civil war and the wars of intervention, the class struggle itself on a global scale.

Britain was anxious to see Germany wage war on the Soviet Union and win back this territory for capitalist exploitation. However, this would mean that Germany would emerge from the conflict by far the most powerful country in Europe, second in the world only to America, with a powerful navy to dominate the sea routes, and the British Empire would be finished. This contradiction was reflected inside the Tory Party, splitting it down the middle. There were those who supported its leader, Neville Chamberlain, who pursued a policy of appeasing Hitler by giving in to his territorial demands in Eastern Europe, happy in the knowledge that his main target was Soviet Russia, and that he would indeed prove to be, as Trotsky explained, a Super-Wrangel who would give back Russia to capitalism. The opposition within the Tory Party was led by Winston Churchill, who, with a deeper grasp of the situation, realised that the threat Germany posed to the British Empire was so great that it must be stopped immediately, and that the problem of Soviet Russia would have to wait.

This explains why the British ruling class gave Hitler every assistance in expanding his territory to the east, and why Chamberlain flew to Germany repeatedly to meet Hitler to discuss his claims, in particular with respect to the Sudetenland, a region in Czechoslovakia adjacent to Germany where many of the inhabitants speak German, without even consulting the Czechs or the Soviet Union, while at the same time ignoring the repeated attempts of the Soviet Union to reach agreement on a strategy to contain Nazi aggression. Had he wished Chamberlain could have had Hitler overthrown and prevented the Second World War altogether, because on 5^th. September 1938 he received a visit from Theodor Kordt of the German embassy in London, who informed him that Hitler intended to invade Czechoslovakia by 1^st. October, but that the High Command of the German Army was ready to refuse to act and depose Hitler if he gave the order, if only Britain and France would support their coup. The British response to this electrifying news was leaked to the Times in which the following editorial appeared on 7^th. September:-

“It might be worthwhile for the Czechoslovak Government to consider whether they should exclude altogether the project, which has found favour in some quarters, to make Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous state by the secession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation with which they are united by race … The advantages to Czechoslovakia of becoming a homogeneous state might conceivably outweigh the obvious disadvantages of losing the Sudeten German district of the borderland.” (Quoted in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, page 383, William Shirer.)

Whatever this convoluted statement meant it was a clear indication that the British government was behind Hitler’s claim to the Sudetenland, and in the following paragraph Shirer provides the reason:-

“There was no mention in the editorial of the obvious fact that by ceding the Sudetenland to Germany the Czechs would lose both the natural mountain defences of Bohemia and their ‘Maginot Line’ of fortifications and be henceforth defenceless against NAZI Germany.” (Ibid.)

What Shirer does not seem to appreciate, however, is that the removal of the Czech defences rendered Poland as well as Czechoslovakia defenceless and opened the road to the Soviet Union, and surely this was the British intention since it could make no difference to them where the Sudeten Germans placed their allegiance. In any case the fact that the offer of the German Army Command was ignored speaks for itself. On 28th. September 1938 Hitler invited Chamberlain, Daladier of France, and the fascist Mussolini of Italy, to a conference in Munich at which it was agreed that Germany should occupy the Sudetenland without even consulting the Czechs or the Soviet Union. Hitler’s public stance was that this was his “last territorial claim”, but it was an obvious strategic advance in preparation for invasion of the Soviet Union and it is inconceivable that this was not understood by Chamberlain. Following this conference Hitler and Chamberlain signed a peace agreement which clearly demonstrates the attitude of the British ruling class to Hitlerite fascism at the time. The text is as follows:-

“We, the German Fuehrer and Chancellor, and the British Prime Minister, have had a further meeting to-day, and are agreed in recognising that the question of Anglo-German relations is of the first importance for the two countries and for Europe. We regard the agreement signed last night, and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one and other again. We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.”

Chamberlain returned to Britain and proclaimed to a curios little gaggle of cheering supporters gathered for a photo opportunity that there would be "peace for our time", but six months later German troops occupied the remains of Czechoslovakia. It was clearly not going to be “peace for our time”, and the NAZIS continued their war of manoeuvre in the east by provoking hostilities with Poland and occupying Lithuania, thus surrounding Poland on three sides. Clearly Poland was the real gateway to the Soviet Union but, after coming under pressure in Parliament from those who wished to prevent Germany becoming a more powerful imperialist power than Britain, by now a majority, Chamberlain was forced to conclude a pact with the Poles on 30^th. March 1939, guaranteeing to come to their defence in Germany invaded. France was also a signatory to the pact, but it is significant that the Soviet Union, the only power that could come to the aid of Poland if only for geographical reasons, was not even consulted.

When Hitler invaded Poland on 1st. September Chamberlain was forced to declare war on Germany. The Chamberlain Government staggered on till Hitler invaded Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium and France on 9th. May 1940, proving at last that Germany was as much a threat to England and its Empire as it was to the USSR. Chamberlain was forced to resign from the Tory leadership in favour of Churchill who formed a National Government which took office on 15^th. May. Bourgeois historians would have us believe that Britain fought Germany in order to restore democracy in Europe, but in truth the British ruling class had no objection to fascism as such, as the agreement shows. The real reason was, as with the previous war, that Germany was rapidly becoming the most powerful imperialist power in the world, threatening to dominate the ocean trading routes and eclipse the British Empire, now already in decline.

Once again the capitalist ruling class could not go to war between themselves without going to war on the working class. The class war in Britain during this period took a different form to that in Germany, where by this time the working class had already been defeated. The British ruling class had no need of a fascist party, it could rely on the Labour Party to dupe the workers into accepting all the privations of war, and to their eternal shame the Communist Party of Great Britain, (CPGB), did the same. Once again industry was militarised. The Labour leaders joined the Tories in the national government and on 22nd. May 1940 Attlee steered the Emergency Powers Bill through Parliament in one day, which stripped the workers of all their rights and gave the government the power to direct any worker to undertake any work in any location, and to requisition property and production facilities. Military conscription began, and all unmarried women between the ages of 20 and 30 were conscripted into industry. The man in charge of this onslaught against the workers was Labourite Ernest Bevin, a leader of the Transport and General Workers Union and the Minister of Labour. On 24th. May he whipped the unions into line at a meeting of 2000 union executives, representing 150 unions, at the Albert Hall, saying:

“I have to ask you to place yourselves at the disposal of the state. We are socialists and this is the test of our socialism ... if our movement and our class rise with all their energy now and save the people of this country from disaster, the country will always turn with confidence to the people who saved them.”

Such a travesty could only have been uttered by a leader of the Labour Party. The justification frequently advanced by Labourites for all this is that it was a war against fascism, but as we have shown it was a war between imperialist powers, and in any case the fight against fascism is by its nature a struggle between the classes, not countries.

How was it possible for Bevin to fight fascism by going to war on the working class and imposing upon them what are after all fascist measures ? The incorporation of the unions into the state which Bevin called for is one of the cornerstones of the fascist system, so, far from fighting fascism he was promoting it. If the Trade Union movement and the working class must “save the people of the country”, does this mean that the trade union movement and the working class on the one hand, and the people of the country on the other, are two different things? If the “country” will turn with confidence to the people who saved it, does this mean that the country and the trade unionists are two different things? In fact, it does, because the only way to make sense of this treacherous sophistry is to understand that it is an expression of the class nature of society, the “country and the people” are here used as ciphers for capitalism, and the “movement” stands for the working class which must now fight and die and work under slave conditions in the factories and mines to save it. The disaster which threatened was of course the war, and the ruling class as a whole was to blame for this, its division into those who spoke German and those who spoke English being of only relative importance.

The incorporation of the unions into the state, in other words the militarisation of the working class in Hitlerite fashion, was provided for by way of the “Conditions of Employment and National Arbitration Order 1305”, imposed in July 1940 under The Emergency Powers Act, and Bevin, as Minister of Labour, used his powers to the full. All trade disputes had to be referred to the National Arbitration Tribunal whose decisions were binding, which meant that all strikes were illegal. In spite of this workers continued to fight for their rights and unofficial strikes continued to occur, and as a result 6,300 workers were prosecuted with a conviction rate of 81%.

The role of the Communist Party of Great Britain during the war years is most instructive. By now the communist parties of the world had abandoned their role of revolutionary leadership and become submissive instruments of Soviet foreign policy under the Comintern; every move they made was directed from the Kremlin and tailor made to serve the interests of the bureaucracy. At first the policy dictated by the Kremlin with respect to the war between Britain and Germany which began in 1939 was the correct revolutionary defeatist policy; under instruction from their bosses in Moscow the CPGB advised the British workers to refuse to support the Churchill government and the war and to turn the war into a class war against the imperialist belligerents. This was of course entirely inconsistent with the previous “popular front” policy which had been so disastrous in Spain, but significantly it was consistent with the Kremlin policy of friendly relations with the Nazis which culminated with the pact of non-aggression agreed between Hitler and Stalin on 13^th August 1940, since it undermined Britain’s capacity to wage war on Germany. However, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in July 1941 there was a sudden panic-stricken reversal, and under orders from the Kremlin the CPGB pulled out all the stops to harness the British working class to the war effort. In a pamphlet entitled Britain’s Chance Has Come, published July 1941, their leader, Harry Pollitt, said:-

“There can only be one consideration, whether people mean to defeat Hitler or openly or covertly endeavour to sabotage the common victory of the British and Soviet people. This is why a fight for a united national front means support for Churchill’s government and all measures for a common victory.”

Stalin, having long ago abandoned the internationalist class perspective and adopted the narrow nationalistic outlook, gravitated to the western imperialists as allies on the simplistic basis that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The allies, particularly Churchill, took the same view although qualified by a deeper understanding. He and American President Roosevelt immediately resolved to support the Soviet Union by providing as much by way of supplies as possible, but there was a catch. In a radio broadcast to the nation in which Churchill announced the policy of support for “Russia” as he insisted on calling the Soviet Union, he said:-

“The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. It excels all forms of human wickedness in the efficiency of its cruelty and ferocious aggression. No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies, flashes away.” (The Second World War, Vol. III, Page 331, Winston Churchill.)

Such ignorant and vitriolic anti-communism can only be explained by naked class self-interest, since to equate communism with Nazism is to shut one’s eyes to the history of the twentieth century thus far which shows beyond doubt that communism and Nazism are mutually exclusive opposites. Communism, (or more correctly, progress towards communism), can only be based on state power for the working class, a “workers state”, which was true of the Soviet Union even under the Stalinist dictatorship, whil