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The Critique of Stalinism

Another criticism that stems from the claim that the outbreak of the Russian Revolution contradicted Marxism by occurring in a backward country is the assertion that, in transforming Russian society, ideology and leadership took the dominant role. Marx said that ideology and political leadership were part of a society’s superstructure and were dependent upon its base—that is, upon the mode of production. Bourgeois critics argue that under Stalin the roles were reversed: instead of the base affecting the superstructure it was the superstructure that transformed the base. Consciousness had preceded material reality and had thereby disproved dialectical materialism.

Once more, this criticism can be met at two levels. Firstly, what did Marx and Engels say? And secondly, how would a Marxist apply their analysis? Marx and Engels undoubtedly stressed the economic or material base as the major determining force in human history, but this does not mean that there was a one-way relationship between matter and consciousness. Marx indicates this when he says that consciousness at any given time is a reflection of the mode of production plus those ideas inherited from the past. Consciousness at any given moment is more than a passive reflection of the current mode of production. Furthermore, ideas (from wherever derived) interact with the material base.1

Marx and Engels explicitly warned against using the materialist conception in any crude way that was to suggest that the dialectic was only one-sided—with matter affecting consciousness and not the other way around. After Marx died, Engels had cause to caution other people who called themselves Marxists against applying the dialectic mechanically. In a letter to Joseph Bloch written in 1890, Engels wrote,

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic development is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure: political forms of the class struggle and its results … also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. We make history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one.2

A few years later, Engels wrote a letter to Heinz Starkenburg (1894) in which he makes this same point.3 Therefore, individuals who fail to take these specific clarifications into effect are either incapable of understanding, or deliberately trying to portray Marxism as a crude form of economic determinism. Yet, a large number of commentators simply assert that the use of political initiative to transform society is un-Marxist.4

Let us turn to the second question: How would a Marxist apply theory to practice? China presented a situation very similar to that of Russia. Indeed, China was even more backward, so that there, too, revolution depended on a conscious party leading in transforming the economic base. Mao Zedong explained the course of action by pointing once more to the two-sidedness of dialectics. There are two opposites involved and each influences the other; sometimes one predominates and sometimes the other. The one that predominates Mao Zedong calls the “principal aspect of the contradiction.” He explains in terms similar to Engels that

while we recognise that in the general development of history the material determines the mental and social being determined social consciousness, we also—and indeed must—recognise the reaction of mental on material things, of social consciousness on social being and of the superstructure on the economic base. This does not go against materialism; on the contrary, it avoids mechanical materialism and firmly upholds dialectical materialism.5

To the above, two other observations can be added. Firstly, bourgeois writers fail to raise the question “from whence did the consciousness of the party derive?” The answer is that it derived from the mode of production inside and outside of Russia. The fact that imperialism made the world into a single system definitely facilitated this. It is not possible for consciousness to rise in a vacuum. Marx himself has made it clear that his own ideology was a historical product—it arose at a given point in history when the mode of production permitted it. In other words, Marx could not write about a capitalist society until such a society had appeared. Nor could Lenin say that “Communism is Soviet power plus … electrification”6 until after the technique for harnessing electricity for power had been mastered. The Soviets were not creating an economic base out of ideology. They were using the consciousness derived from reality to transfer from capitalism techniques that were already in existence. Soviet revolution may have come before industrialization within the imperialist world. Such an understanding exposes the fallacy of arguments advanced by writers like John Plamenatz.7

Secondly, in all bourgeois writers, there is a tendency to overlook the role of the masses as though they were the passive victims or the passive beneficiaries of transformation. In fact, the achievements of the revolution were possible only because of the tremendous effort of the people. Soviet historians rightly stress this, although sometimes they, too, fall into lapses where they appear to attribute crucial developments to the work of Lenin or the work of the party or Stalin rather than to the people. Popular participation in the revolution was itself impelled by consciousness arising out of an awareness of being backward and exploited. Those notions were deemed possible because external capitalism had impinged upon the less advanced forms of social organization in tsarist Russia, which is again a reflection on the relevance of placing the discussion in an imperialist context.

In the historical writings on the period of transformation in the USSR, several other points are raised by way of challenging the right of the Soviets to call their achievements “Marxist.” Sometimes such charges come from non-Marxists, and other times from Marxists. Of course, the non-Marxists or bourgeoisie often resort to the arguments of other Marxists to obscure the issue and dismiss both Marxism and the Russian Revolution. Invariably, they turn to the Trotskyists for confirmation. As I discussed in chapter 4, Trotsky was forced into exile by Stalin in 1928, and from his perch outside of the country he wrote a number of historical and polemical works concerning the Soviet Union. He also attracted a considerable intellectual following, many members of which wrote pamphlets and books. Most outstanding of all from a historical viewpoint are the works of Trotsky himself—notably, The Revolution Betrayed—and the works of Isaac Deutscher, which include biographies of both Stalin and Trotsky.8

Out of the writings of Trotsky and Deutscher, four different but closely related points emerge: (1) Stalin encouraged “socialism in one country” instead of international socialism; (2) the state did not wither away but became more oppressive and bureaucratic; (3) social and economic inequalities were fostered; and (4) there was an inadmissible element of force in building socialism. I will take up each of these assertions in order.

Socialism in One Country

Marx and Engels envisioned that ultimately the nation-state would disappear, since it functioned as a vehicle for expressing the interest of a particular class. This was their idea behind the world-famous statement in the Communist Manifesto: “Proletariat of the world unite.”9 It was this sense of internationalism that motivated Lenin to oppose workers’ participation in the First World War; and all the Bolshevik leaders in 1917 felt that revolution was imminent in the more developed countries of the West. That would have allowed them to make socialism a worldwide, or at least European-wide, phenomenon.

Trotsky accused Stalin of having had a national chauvinist mentality that induced him to think of building “socialism in one country”—namely, in the Soviet Union, abandoning workers elsewhere. In The Revolution Betrayed there is an appendix entitled “Socialism in One Country.” There and elsewhere, Trotsky attacked Stalin for promoting this erroneous notion as opposed to genuine Marxist internationalism. Trotsky alleges that it was a distortion of Marxism to put forward the theory that backward Russia on its own was capable of building socialism. It was more than just a theoretical debate, however. Trotsky analyzes the policy of the Comintern (which was the foreign policy branch of the Soviet Union), and he suggests that through the Comintern Stalin betrayed the Chinese Communists by giving support to Chiang Kai-shek.10

Trotsky and Deutscher see most of the distortions of Stalin’s period as stemming from his attempt to build socialism in backward Russia alone, instead of the building of socialism in Russia proceeding simultaneously with the building of socialism in more advanced countries, so that the latter could help Russia out. As a matter of fact, it can hardly be denied that the attempt to build socialism in Russia alone has had certain unfortunate consequences, which Trotsky and Deutscher point out. But as criticism of Stalin and the party under Stalin, the attack on “socialism in one country” is very hollow. To be effective, the argument must show that Stalin betrayed certain revolutions, but that is a very ineffectual line of approach because genuine social revolutions have their roots in the locality in which they take place. The failure of revolutions to take place in Western Europe was a function of imperialism, which strengthened their bourgeoisie and disarmed the workers. Stalin and the Russian Communist Party and the Comintern had no control over that.11

If one agrees that Stalin was not to blame for the absence of revolutions elsewhere, then it is entirely logical that he should have proceeded on his own. That is, unless the inference is that Russia should have abandoned its social transformation until the workers revolted in Britain! Even Trotsky himself had no intention of doing so, and his comments as a historian conflict with this policy when in power, for in 1925 he was one of the leaders of the “super-industrialization faction” in the Soviet Union. At that time, Trotsky was urging that Russia should rapidly industrialize.12 Since he criticizes Stalin for what he himself advised, one can only conclude that Trotsky’s stand is conditioned by bitterness through having been defeated in the struggle for power. To put it bluntly, personal considerations clouded Trotsky’s judgment and it becomes difficult to draw any distinction between Trotsky the political antagonist and Trotsky the historian.

Bureaucracy

Marx makes a very significant prediction that under communism the state, as we know it, will begin to wither away and ultimately disappear. The state as defined by Marx is an instrument of coercion in the hands of a given class, so it follows that if and when a classless society is produced, the state will disappear. Marx never discussed the timing of this disappearance in any detail, and it has therefore been a matter of debate as to exactly at what point this is envisaged.

Trotsky argues that “the dying away of the state begins … on the very day after the expropriation of the expropriators”—that is, after bourgeois property has been seized.13 In Soviet Russia, the bourgeoisie were expropriated and eliminated as a class, but a new bureaucratic state began to appear and rose to great strength under Stalin. Here again, the problem is to determine whether the growth of the bureaucracy was Stalin’s responsibility. If so, then one could agree with Trotsky that by fostering bureaucracy Stalin betrayed the revolution. However, on close scrutiny, one finds that Trotsky and Deutscher themselves explain why the bureaucratic state was an inevitable consequence of Russia’s historical situation. The growth of the bureaucracy, they concede, started under Lenin. He was aware that bureaucratic control threatened genuine worker democracy, and he fought to keep the bureaucracy under control, but it grew nevertheless—both in numbers and influence. Trotsky explains that the demobilization of the Red Army of 5 million played a major role in the formation of the bureaucracy. The victorious commanders assumed leading posts in the local soviets, in the economy, and in the administration, excluding the masses from actual participation in leadership. This was in 1922, when both Trotsky and Lenin were key figures in the political leadership.14 The origins of Soviet bureaucracy can hardly be attributed to Stalin.

There were three areas in which the bureaucracy was needed: the administration, the economy (which of course was all public), and inside the Communist Party itself. Trotsky lays greatest emphasis on the latter: bureaucrats replaced and swamped genuine political activists and revolutionaries, causing the party to degenerate. One of the major aspects of Deutscher’s Stalin: A Political Biography is its account of how Stalin accumulated power through developing and controlling the bureaucratic machinery of the party. Stalin held certain key posts in the political administration, such as commissar for nationalities and the commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (a kind of ombudsman machinery). By the time he became general secretary, Stalin had filled numerous offices with his own henchmen and “yes men.” Deutscher explains that in the absence of a strong working class and of a high general level of culture, the bureaucracy was able to take over as a stratum exercising power on behalf of the workers and peasants. But since there was no workers’ control over them, they established a bureaucratic dictatorship.15

Here we might recall Marx’s important distinction between mental and manual labor. Those with education belong to the first category, and they would inevitably dominate the latter. Only general education could abolish this division. Soviet Russia started out with a minority of the population in the category of mental laborers. That minority constituted the bureaucracy (for the most part), and they dominated the majority. In effect, therefore, the rise of the bureaucratic state was itself a consequence of Russian backwardness rather than the fault of Stalin or the party under Stalin. At most, the bureaucracy might have been limited by a lack of conscious leadership such as that which Lenin was capable of giving, but even that was not certain. Trotsky quotes Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, saying of the Left Opposition in 1926: “If Ilych [Lenin] were alive, he would probably already be in prison.”16 The bureaucrats were so powerful and so interested in running the show themselves that, as Trotsky implies, they chose Stalin rather than the other way around. Although this conflicts with Deutscher’s views, it is more logically consistent. In any case, Deutscher himself believed that the phenomenon of Stalinist bureaucratic rule was a direct product of Russia’s backwardness.

Trotskyite criticisms sound extremely hollow because they were criticizing things that they admit could not have been avoided. It therefore turns out to be criticism for criticism’s sake. The same characteristic is to be found in their statements on the rise of inequalities.

The Dictatorial Element in Soviet Transformation

As indicated above, another major feature of the negative portrayal of Soviet history is the charge of dictatorship. Because the Bolshevik party outlawed all other parties, it was deemed dictatorial; and because Stalin eliminated his own rivals in the Communist Party, he was able to establish a personal dictatorship. Many of the attacks against Stalin are well-grounded in facts and thereby provide an unchallengeable basis on which to use emotive language to deride socialism as a whole. Critics, above all, refer to the great political purges of 1936–8, during which Stalin imprisoned, exiled, or executed a large number of Central Committee members and extended his elimination campaigns to administrators, managers and technicians in industry. The officer class of the Soviet army was particularly hard hit.

Leonard Schapiro talks of the purges as “the national blood-bath into which Russia was to be plunged.”17 He says that critics were called counterrevolutionaries. People who failed to achieve the impossible were called saboteurs. The concentration camps were filled with innocent people. And the secret police (Cheka) came to dominate the whole state under Stalin’s supervision. All of the charges Stalin brought to deport people to Siberia or to execute them were false, even when the people “confessed.”18 A comparison with Hitler is always lurking somewhere in the background of bourgeois writings on Stalin.19 During the Second World War, the Soviet people fought a major part of the struggle against Hitler, and the capitalists in Britain, France and the United States were only too willing to have the Soviets as an ally against Hitler. But, once the war was over, it was possible to return to the interpretation that the rise of fascism in the 1930s was a phenomenon comparable to communism. The particular way in which Schapiro evokes the comparison with Hitler in his book on Soviet government is quite subtle. He says that, to the Russian people, “Hitler seemed to surpass even Stalin in his inhumanity.”20 Thus, he gives Stalin the benefit of the doubt, but at the same time, he projects essentially the same image of two inhuman beings—one representative of German fascism, the other of Russian communism.

The bourgeois historical interpretation of Stalin was very effective within the large part of the world that was until recently politically subjugated to Western Europe, and that until now is culturally colonized by the bourgeoisie of North America and Europe. One did not need to read a history book to know that Stalin was a terrible monster. This “fact” was assumed in every publication from an encyclopedia to a comic strip. In colonial territories, it was part of the warning used against independence movements, which were invariably described as “communist” or “communist-inspired,” and many a sermon has been preached in our part of the world against the dangers and evils of Godless Communism—as exemplified under Stalin’s rule in the 1930s in particular.

Soviet historians made, at one time, a blank denial of the charges raised by the West against Stalin, or they defended Stalin’s reputation without admitting that anything was fundamentally wrong. As discussed in chapter 7, it was not until after Stalin’s death that Soviet officials began to offer new explanations for his policies, or for the regime more generally. To be precise, it was after the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 that it became the official policy to criticize Stalin. Some writers refer to the years after 1956, when many of Stalin’s policies were rejected or modified, as a period of “de-Stalinization.” Volume 2 of A Short History of the USSR includes a section devoted to “the historic impact of the twentieth Party Congress” in which it reports having “examined the question of the Stalin cult and its consequences” and exposed its errors:

The cult of an individual is foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism. It is the people who are the true makers of history. Marxism-Leninism does not deny the important role played by the leaders of the working class, but condemns any magnification of personalities, because such magnification inevitably relegates the people and the Party to the background and belittles their role in history.21

These are the terms in which Soviet historians usually assess the discreditable events of the purges and other things carried out by Stalin.

There is in fact another important section, entitled the “Stalin Personality Cult.” According to Soviet historians, things were going well under Stalin up to the early 1930s. By 1934, however, Stalin began assuming credit for all that was done in transforming Soviet Russia to that date. He usurped the functions of the party congress and he abolished the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, which was established as a control on the leadership. Stalin then went on to violate the principles of collective leadership laid down by the party, and the worst elements of his own character came to the fore. “Stalin had come to believe that he was infallible and began departing more and more from the Leninist standards and principles of party life, violating the principle of collective leadership and abusing his position. The negative features of his personality—incivility, disloyalty to leading party workers, intolerance of criticism, administration by injunction—came to the fore.”22 Soviet historians admit that Stalin flagrantly infringed upon socialist legality and engaged in personal victimization against honest people in the party and outside with the help of henchmen like Lavrentiy Beria, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, and Georgi Malenkov. This was possible because ordinary people had come to trust and believe Stalin, unaware of his numerous abuses until after his death. Soviet writers conclude, however, that the cult of the personality could neither change the nature of Soviet society nor stop its onward development.

By facing up to some of the atrocities of the Stalin era, Soviet historiography has come a considerable way toward making itself more credible. It is easier to counter the distorted implications of bourgeois writings if one recognizes where major errors were committed in the process of Soviet transformation. But the Soviet denunciation of Stalin is not entirely convincing. It is impossible to blame Stalin and a few other individuals, while concluding that the Communist Party was all the while correctly leading the Soviet people. This contradiction is blatantly brought out in the pages of A Short History of the USSR. On page 178, the authors explain that socialism had triumphed in Russia by 1938, “ensured by the correct leadership given by the Communist Party, which organized and inspired all the victories of socialism.” They advance the view that the Constitution of 1936 recorded “the triumph of socialism and provided the foundations for broad socialist democracy.” Two pages later, they denounce Stalin for having “flagrantly infringed upon socialist legality” by removing party authority over the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and “placing it under his own control.” (The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or the NKVD, became Stalin’s secret police force.) He continued to do so in spite of the Constitution of 1936.23 If Stalin could so easily and undemocratically undermine the party’s authority, how could the party have been offering correct leadership from 1934 to 1938?

To reiterate, both the achievements and the failures of the Stalin epoch have to be attributed to the Soviet people as a whole and to the Communist Party, in particular. Whatever tragic consequences befell the party under Stalin’s leadership must be counted as a serious distortion in the whole society. Because bourgeois scholarship has simply been interested in manufacturing hostile propaganda and Soviet writers have either turned a blind eye or offered apologies, the phenomena of social and political violence under Stalin has not been subject to a profound sociohistorical analysis.24 Bourgeois historians find it convenient to say that the weaknesses under Stalin were an inherent part of the Marxist position or at least of Marxism under Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Therefore, there is no need to give any serious historical explanation for why profound distortions appeared in Soviet society in the 1930s. To them, Stalin was merely manifesting more fully the dictatorial and tyrannical tendencies of Lenin himself, and the whole process can be traced back to when the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917. That was the beginning of the dictatorship.

Even in the absence of a serious socioeconomic study, one can discern some evidence of a real decline after Lenin’s death. Ideological standards dropped, accelerated by the elimination of the Bolshevik old guard of the pre-1917 era. By 1936, Stalin was the only one left in Russia from that original group. Committed and mature Marxists were replaced by a generation of opportunists and sycophants who often made up for their lack of socialist insights by their zeal in persecuting people whom they defined as enemies of the people. Lenin had warned against such types and had kept them under control.25 But under Stalin they were appointed to the very highest positions. One such ideological illiterate was Beria, who became the powerful chief of police.26

It is not accurate to say that the Stalin cult did not change the nature of Soviet society. To a great extent, the political problem in the Soviet Union after 1956 was how to remodel Soviet society and break from the mold into which it had been cast under Stalin’s rule. Quite clearly, there had been a considerable distortion of socialism in the previous epoch. Soviet historians have tried to mitigate the unfortunate trends of the Stalin period, mainly by taking into account the intensity of internal and external counterrevolutionary activity. While it is true that certain critics were suppressed without regard to their rights, it is equally true that many critics were hostile to the regime and were engaged in undermining the state. The Soviet experience demonstrated the various ways in which counterrevolution could manifest itself in modern socialist society. It was not just the person who aimed at killing a party official who was dangerous, but also the economic saboteur, who tried to undermine economic administration by black market practices or by deliberately slowing down production. To root out such individuals required an extension of the secret police machinery. It was certainly abused, but it was a necessity in a period when the internal enemy had not yet been crushed and was receiving aid from the capitalist powers and external organizations. Numerous “White Russians,” Mensheviks and SRs had organizations in capitalist countries that the Western governments encouraged in their attempts to undermine the Soviet state.27

Every time that a socialist state comes into existence, it is likely to find that its survival comes into conflict with some of the principles of justice it would ideally like to espouse. Who can guarantee that every citizen’s rights will be fully protected when the security forces take justifiable action in the interests of the state and citizens as a whole? It is well to recognize that the Soviet state was operating in a real world and had first to guarantee its existence. In the final analysis, however, while Soviet transformation departed from the socialist norms in many ways, it remains a superior alternative to capitalism and bourgeois democracy from the viewpoint of workers and peasants. Moreover, it was at no point equivalent to fascism.

Fascism is a product of capitalism in crisis. It was an attempt to rescue the essence of the capitalist exploitative system while pretending to be representative of all interests, such as those of the working class, the bourgeoisie, and the church. The biggest capitalists in Germany initially went along with Hitler’s party because he promised to improve their positions relative to the capitalists of the United States, Britain and France. At the same time, Germans of the lower middle class and the working class were encouraged to believe that their lot would be better by subjugating peoples of all other races and religions—Latin peoples, Slavs, Jews and Africans. After being fed with the supremacist racist doctrines, a large number of Germans voluntarily relinquished their own power into the hands of the small clique who were to carry out the enslavement of non-German people. In the process, a dictatorship arose—that is, a government that ruled by no sanction other than the principle of force—such as was never remotely true of the Soviet regime.28

An excellent contemporary example of a fascist system is South Africa. Whites of all classes have been convinced that the only way their own well-being can be protected is through the permanent suppression and exploitation of Africans. They have accepted the doctrine of white racial superiority just as the Germans accepted the doctrine of Aryan racial superiority. The majority of the whites have voluntarily relinquished their own rights to a police state for the purpose of dominating Africans within and without South Africa. At the same time, South Africa remains a capitalist state. Its fascist policies are a result of fear of change, so they are prepared to preserve capitalism so long as it preserves white supremacy.29

Fascism is compatible with capitalism in Portugal, Greece and South Africa, because fascism is only a more reactionary version of capitalism. Undoubtedly, the liberal middle class dislike fascism because it threatens privileges and rights for which they fought since the eighteenth century, but the real capital-owning class prefer it to socialism because it does not threaten capitalist property. And they liken communism to fascism because they would like some of the bitterness against fascism to be transferred to the Soviet state, China and any others who seek to construct socialism.

Socialism is based upon equality, not domination. Socialists can obviously fail to live up to expectations, as in the Soviet Union under Stalin, but this does not bring them anywhere near the war-mongering fascists. The comparison between Hitler and Stalin is a crude propaganda device. The comparison also displays the extreme of subjectivism, which concentrates on the individual ruler and not on the structure of society as a whole. In this respect, we already drew attention to the work of Francis Randall. Having decided that everything that was done in the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1953 was an expression of Stalin’s will, Randall becomes preoccupied with Stalin as a person and proceeds to psychoanalyze him to understand why he was one of the worst men in history. He concentrates on such facts as Stalin having been wrapped in swaddling clothes, his short stature, his drunken peasant father, and the likelihood that Stalin witnessed the sexual relations of his parents.30

A ruler in the final analysis is as good or as bad as the society he represents. Two contemporary examples will illustrate this. When South African prime minister Hendrik F. Verwoerd was assassinated, John Voerster took his place.31 It is a complete waste of time to try and determine how Verwoerd’s personal life varied from that of Voerster’s. The two are carrying on essentially the same policy because the structure of society and the state did not change with Verwoerd’s assassination. They both must be assessed, not by Freudian theory, but by an analysis of the vicious society in which they lived and ruled. In the United States, John F. Kennedy is regarded as one of the best presidents in modern times. Yet it was he who escalated the war in Vietnam and launched the invasion of Cuba while blatantly lying to the American people. He was no less a spokesman for US imperialism than Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard Nixon. They are all the chief representatives of a social system that is the most exploitative the world has ever known. It is quite irrelevant to discuss whether they were ever wrapped in swaddling clothes, whether they have inferiority complexes, or whether their fathers abused their mothers.

From a socialist perspective, much can be said by way of adverse criticism of the political process of building socialism in the Soviet Union. But in the end, the balance is in favor of the positive elements. There was an enlargement of freedom in the Soviet Union after 1917 because real freedom is a function of cultural and economic equality. Because of economic and cultural inequality, capitalist society is full of fictitious freedoms. A poor man is as free to buy a helicopter as a capitalist playboy. A worker may have freedom of expression, but the means of expression are owned by the capitalist. An illiterate peasant is free to enjoy written literature, and so forth. Soviet society went a long way toward economic equality guaranteed by education. In this way, it proved itself superior to capitalism and fascism, which are premised on inequality.

And yet, we ought to be skeptical of the Soviet claims of having fully achieved Socialism in 1937–8 and that they are now building Communism. That they can pin down a precise date is immediately suspicious because in history one epoch gradually merges into another. Communism, after all, is the highest stage of socialism; one in which goods and services are produced in such superabundance that they can be given to all citizens according to need. It is also the epoch in which the state withers away in the sense that a state machine of class oppression ceases to exist. Neither of these conditions obtain in the Soviet Union nor are they likely to obtain in the immediate future.

Thus, while the Soviet Union has solved the problem of poverty and is moving to raise the general level of consumption, it is far from super-abundance. If this were so, why are the Soviets carrying on trade with underdeveloped countries and demanding their pound of flesh? Why would they ****** Ford and Fiat to build cars and trucks in the USSR if their own level of production was approximating the stage of communist abundance? It is entirely understandable that the Soviet state is not withering away, because socialism has not yet become an international phenomenon. Caught up in contradictions with capitalist powers, the Soviet Union has to strengthen its state apparatus. And in doing so, it is behaving so much like a capitalist state that it is demanding from China land areas once held by the former tsarist state and it is invading other countries, as in Czechoslovakia.

Much of the humbug in Soviet historiography is not really necessary. It is enough to say that they have constructed Socialism. Trotskyite critics like Deutscher and even the capitalists are willing to concede this point. Having accepted this major achievement, however, socialists have to be concerned with the factors limiting further development and with eliminating weaknesses in the system. Making unjustifiable claims to greatness will not address these problems and advance the struggle toward Communism.

We have examined bourgeois interpretations of the Russian Revolution and found no fundamental disagreements among them. Our study of various Marxist interpretations revealed no real unity. Indeed, their positions range widely, from Kautsky and the Mensheviks who echo bourgeois scholarship, the Soviets, the Trotskyites, to those Marxists who forgot to be radical (Social Democrats) and those who forgot to be humanists (Stalinists).

But where do we stand? We cannot say that we are in between, neutral, or any more objective. We have our own historical stand and must define our position relative to our own history. By “we” I mean the colonized and formerly colonized, black Africans, workers and peasants or intellectuals with roots in said classes. Because we were colonial inside capitalism, we were taught that the varieties of bourgeois thought encompassed the truth (just like people in the developed capitalist countries). The materialist worldview is excluded or mentioned as one among many alternative views. The result is a Marxist view through a distorted bourgeois lens. Ours clearly could not be that of the bourgeoisie. Is it that of Soviets? They have their national and international interests, and their historiography reflects this. While we share much with the Soviets because of the similarity of our present and past with their past in the period under study, current political and economic developments mentioned above complicate our position vis-à-vis the Soviets.

Essentially, what we need to do is define our own stand first and see where it coincides. Assuming a view springing from some Socialist variant not necessarily Marxist but anti-capitalist, assuming a view that is at least radical humanist—then the Soviet Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent construction of Socialism emerges as a very positive historical experience from which we ourselves can derive a great deal as we move to confront similar problems.

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