Just Another Kautsky Fan: Understanding the Early Stalin

Interpreting Stalin’s fledgling revolutionary career through his later status as a brutal labor dictator obscures an early whole-hearted admiration for the works of Kautsky and Lenin. By Lawrence Parker.

Writing in 1946, Max Shachtman made an astute point about Joseph Stalin. In reviewing Leon Trotsky’s biography of Stalin, he said that “we do not recognize the young Stalin in the Stalin of today; there does not even seem to be a strong resemblance”.¹ By 1946, Stalin was the ‘generalissimus’ of the Soviet Union, heading up a brutal dictatorship over and against the working class. Little wonder it was so difficult for the left to then understand the mentality of the young Georgian revolutionary who joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) at the turn of the 20th century, particularly after Stalin’s back story had been ‘enlivened’ by a few decades of lying propaganda.

Shachtman’s own line of reasoning appears to be traceable to contradictions inherent in Trotsky’s (unfinished) biography of Stalin. We partly have the imposition of a schema, a kind of ‘original sin’ that suggests Stalin was always fundamentally bad:

Never a tribune, never the strategist or leader of a rebellion, [Stalin] has ever been only a bureaucrat of revolution. That was why, in order to find full play for his peculiar talents, he was condemned to bide his time in a semi-comatose condition until the revolution’s raging torrents had subsided.²

However, Trotsky offered other statements that make such overarching judgments problematic from the standpoint of method. He had this to say about Stalin at the beginnings of the anti-Trotsky triumvirate (which included Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev) in circa 1923:

Who could have thought during those hours that from the midst of the Bolshevik Party itself would emerge a totalitarian dictator who would repeat the calumny of Yarmelenko with reference to the entire staff of Bolshevism? If at that time anyone would have shown Stalin his own future role he would have turned away from himself in disgust.³

Now, calling someone “only a bureaucrat of revolution” is obviously a different designation to that of “totalitarian dictator”, but Trotsky does establish the important principle that historical circumstances changed Stalin profoundly, which could be taken to imply that history could have produced a number of different versions of Stalin, so to speak.

With this in mind, it might be better to view pre-1917 Stalin as a Social Democratic praktik, one of its intelligent workers involved in the running of its local and national organizations and intent on furnishing the proletariat with a deep-seated Marxist knowledge of its heroic mission to overthrow Tsarism (i.e. the active, hegemonic notion of a Marxist propagandist). As part of this role, Stalin, as a follower of Lenin, also sought to emulate the revolutionary achievements of German Social Democracy and its leaders and communicated his admiration. Subsequent Soviet notions from Stalin and others of Russian Bolshevism as sui generis, set apart from the international revolutionary movement, are invented narratives, absent from Stalin’s early work. This, I would argue, is one of the messages to be gleaned from Stalin’s pre-1917 writings.

When looking back at his own works from 1901-07, Stalin classed himself as one of the “Bolshevik practical workers”, characterized by “inadequate theoretical training” and a “neglect, characteristic of practical workers, of theoretical questions”.⁴ As Tucker has pointed out, this characterization allies itself with the mature image of Stalin as a “pragmatist”, intent on the practical effort in constructing ‘socialism’ inside the borders of the Soviet Union rather than on supposed airy-fairy ideals of ‘world revolution’.⁵ In fact, a prosaic reading of ‘practical’ (as opposed to praktik) obscures what Stalin was in these years. Tucker asserts that Stalin’s “original function as a Social Democratic ‘practical worker’ was propaganda” and that “knowledge of the fundamentals of Marxism and the ability to explain them to ordinary workers were [Stalin’s] chief stock-in trade as a professional revolutionary”.⁶ Little wonder, then, that this propagandist graduated to writing unspectacular but worthy articles for Georgian Social-Democratic newspapers such as Brdzola (The Struggle).

Stalin’s downplaying of his theoretical and literary credentials was not followed through consistently in Soviet literature. Although Stalin reduced his personal role in his edits to the 1938 Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)⁷, other works, for example by Soviet historian Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, offer a more realistic appreciation of Stalin popularizing the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in early theoretical writings and having the “closest affinity” with Lenin.⁸ Other assertions of Yaroslavsky, that in 1905 “Stalin worked hand in hand with Lenin in hammering out the Bolshevik line”⁹ are fraudulent. Stalin was simply a follower of Lenin in this period.

Stalin also offered a 1946 health warning on his early works (including ones up until 1917), stating that they were “the works of a young Marxist not yet molded into a finished Marxist-Leninist” and that they “bear traces of some of the propositions of the old Marxists which afterward became obsolete and were subsequently discarded by our party”.¹⁰ Stalin gave two examples: the agrarian question and the conditions for the victory of the socialist revolution. But such a warning was also pertinent to articles praising German Social-Democratic figures such as Karl Kautsky and August Bebel. The Stalin of 1946 would not have wanted communist readers thinking these were suitable figures to emulate, given the line that had emerged in his manifold corrections to the 1938 Short course, where it was argued that after Engels’ death in 1895, West European Social-Democratic parties had begun to degenerate from parties of social revolution into reformist parties.¹¹ However, at least in the terms in which he referenced German Social-Democracy, Stalin’s praise was not a facet of his own immaturity or ‘immature’ Bolshevism, given that as late as 1920 Lenin was looking back favorably on the influence of Kautsky in the early years of the 20th century: “There were no Bolsheviks then, but all future Bolsheviks, collaborating with him, valued him highly.”¹²

‘An Outstanding Theoretician of Social-Democracy’

A flavor of Stalin’s own praise can be gleaned from an article from 1906, in which he discussed German opportunists accusing Kautsky and Bebel of being Blanquists. Stalin said: “What is there surprising in the fact that the Russian opportunists… copy the European opportunists and call us Blanquists? It shows only that the Bolsheviks, like Kautsky and [French socialist Jules] Guesde, are revolutionary Marxists.”¹³

In February 1907, Stalin wrote a preface to Kautsky’s The Driving Force and Prospects of the Russian Revolution, which began unambiguously:

Karl Kautsky’s name is not new to us. He has long been known as an outstanding theoretician of Social-Democracy. But Kautsky is known not only from that aspect; he is notable also as a thorough and thoughtful investigator of tactical problems. In this respect he has won great authority not only among the European comrades, but also among us.¹⁴

In the face of such unambiguous praise, the Soviet editors of Stalin’s Works were forced to partly retract the general suggestion of the 1938 Short Course that Western Social Democracy had begun to disintegrate into reformism after the death of Engels in 1895. They argued that the likes of Kautsky had retained their revolutionary integrity a decade beyond this and that the revolutionary Russian party was, implicitly, not sui generis:

K Kautsky and J Guesde at that time [1906] had not yet gone over to the camp of the opportunists. The Russian revolution of 1905-07, which greatly influenced the international revolutionary movement and the working class of Germany in particular, caused K Kautsky to take the stand of revolutionary Social Democracy on several questions.¹⁵

But Stalin was still praising the revolutionary wing of German Social Democracy beyond 1907. In 1909 he was stating that “our movement now needs Russian Bebels, experienced and mature leaders from the ranks of the workers, more than ever before”.¹⁶ This after August Bebel, the leading German Social-Democratic parliamentarian (1840-1913). Stalin returned to the example of Bebel on the latter’s 70th birthday in 1910, discussing “why the German and international socialists revere Bebel so much”.¹⁷ He concludes:

Let us, then, comrades, send greetings to our beloved teacher — the turner August Bebel! Let him serve as an example to us Russian workers, who are particularly in need of Bebels in the labor movement. Long live Bebel! Long live international Social Democracy!¹⁸

Writing much later in 1920, Stalin was prepared to concede that figures such as Kautsky and the Russian Georgi Plekhanov had been worthy theoretical leaders of the movement. Stalin argued that these were examples of “peacetime leaders, who are strong in theory, but weak in matters of organization and practical work”, although their influence was limited to only “an upper layer of the proletariat, and then only up to a certain time”.¹⁹ Stalin added: “When the epoch of revolution sets in, when practical revolutionary slogans are demanded of the leaders, the theoreticians quit the stage and give way to new men. Such, for example, were Plekhanov in Russia and Kautsky in Germany.”²⁰ Stalin thus pictured Lenin as the successor both to theoretical leaders such as Kautsky and to “practical leaders, self-sacrificing and courageous, but… weak in theory” such as Ferdinand Lassalle and Louis Auguste Blanqui.²¹ This line of 1920 did represent a shift from Stalin’s argument in 1907, quoted above, that Kautsky had not been just a theoretical leader but also “a thorough and thoughtful investigator of tactical problems”. Nevertheless, in line with Lenin, Stalin was not yet prepared to give up his longstanding admiration for Kautsky.

Stalin Advocates the ‘Merger Theory’

Stalin gave an even more robust defense of Kautsky in May 1905 when he “recycled” the latter’s arguments in order to defend Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? against Menshevik interlocutors in Georgia.²² Stalin quoted a passage from Kautsky writing in the theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit (in 1901-02) that Lenin had used and that subsequently became infamous for apparently illustrating Lenin’s disdain for proletarian leadership abilities: “… the vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia (K Kautsky’s italics). It was in the minds of individual members of that stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians…”²³ The often tedious arguments that center on this passage essentially mix up an empirical debate about the origins of proletarian class consciousness with a dialectical one about its future development. Stalin correctly understood this point as working out the difference between initial “elaboration” and the future “assimilation” of socialist theory.²⁴ Neither Kautsky nor Lenin was guilty of disdain for the proletariat because such a dynamic was always presaged on the merger of socialism and the worker movement. In other words, the future of socialism was not beholden to its debatable origins.²⁵

But what of Stalin? Surely, we might expect that someone who had, in Trotsky’s words, only ever been a “bureaucrat of revolution” to have not been in favor of any such democratic merger with the proletariat. In fact, Stalin made his positive appreciation of the merger on the very first page of his defense of Lenin, presaging his article with an (unattributed) Kautsky quote: “Social-Democracy is a combination of the working-class movement with socialism.”²⁶ This is no isolated motif from the article and Stalin elaborated on this point at some length:

What is scientific socialism without the working-class movement? A compass which, if left unused, will only grow rusty and then will have to be thrown overboard. What is the working-class movement without socialism? A ship without a compass [that] will reach the other shore in any case but would reach it much sooner and with less danger if it had a compass. Combine the two and you will get a splendid vessel, which will speed straight towards the other shore and reach its haven unharmed. Combine the working-class movement with socialism and you will get a Social-Democratic movement [that] will speed straight towards the ‘promised land’.²⁷

Stalin was convinced that the Russian proletariat would have no problem in assimilating and adopting Social-Democratic revolutionary politics. Directly opposing the line of Georgian Menshevik critics on the issue of the intelligentsia originating socialist theory, he said:

“But that means belittling the workers and extolling the intelligentsia!” – howl our ‘critic’ and his Social-Democrat [Menshevik Tiflis newspaper] … They take the proletariat for a capricious young lady who must not be told the truth, who must always be paid compliments so that she will not run away! No, most highly esteemed gentlemen! We believe that the proletariat will display more staunchness than you think. We believe that it will not fear the truth!

There is not a trace in this of any predestination towards some anti-proletarian bureaucratic hell and Stalin merely comes across as an energetic, if entirely unoriginal, supporter of Kautsky and Lenin, adept at employing their arguments against local Mensheviks in Georgia.

Stalin remembered the ‘merger theory’ when he was editing the 1938 Short Course. Among his very substantial reworking of chapter two, which dealt with the period of What Is To Be Done?, Stalin wrote that Lenin’s work: “Brilliantly substantiated the fundamental Marxist thesis that a Marxist party is a union of the working-class movement with socialism.”²⁸ He also repeated his line of 1905 in suggesting that belittling socialist consciousness meant “to insult the workers, who were drawn to consciousness as to light”. ²⁹It is a bitter irony of historiography that this quack Stalinized history, on this particular issue at least, offers more light on the topic than the vast majority of academic or Trotskyist treatments of What Is To Be Done?.

Deutscher and ‘Foreshadowing’

Stalin’s early writings have been tied up with a problem of ‘foreshadowing’, where they become a roadmap to his future career as a labor dictator. A good example of this occurs in Isaac Deutscher’s famous biography, when he discussed Stalin’s first comment on the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, made in an article entitled ‘The Proletarian Party and the Proletarian Class’ from January 1905. This piece dwelt upon the dispute over party membership that had arisen at the RSDLP’s second congress in 1903. Stalin presented Lenin’s formula as: “… a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party is one who accepts the program of this party, renders the party financial support, and works in one of the party organizations”. The Menshevik Julius Martov’s was presented as: “A member of the RSDLP is one who accepts its program, supports the party financially and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organizations.”³⁰³¹

Deutscher argued correctly that the Stalin piece is mostly a re-rendering of Lenin’s arguments on the subject but suggested that Stalin added his own sinister confection with an emphasis on the “need for absolute uniformity of views inside the party”.³² This “smacked of that monolithic ‘orthodoxy’ into which Bolshevism was to change after its victory, largely under Koba’s own guidance”.³³ Deutscher used the following passage from ‘The Proletarian Party and the Proletarian Class’ to illustrate the point:

Martov’s formula, as we know, refers only to the acceptance of the program; about tactics and organization it contains not a word; and yet, unity of organizational and tactical views is no less essential for party unity than unity of programmatic views. We may be told that nothing is said about this even in Comrade Lenin’s formula. True, but there is no need to say anything about it in Comrade Lenin’s formula. Is it not self-evident that one who works in a Party organization and, consequently, fights in unison with the party and submits to party discipline, cannot pursue tactics and organizational principles other than the party’s tactics and the party’s organizational principles?³⁴

‘Unity’, such as that unity gained, for example, around a democratic vote at a congress between contending factions that have argued out their differences, should not be immediately transposed into ‘monolithic unity’, particularly if one bears in mind that this is the Stalin of 1905 and not 1935 talking. Deutscher half-conceded this point almost immediately by arguing “that ‘monolithism’ was still a matter of the future”.³⁵

However, Stalin had no issue with Lenin’s formulation around acceptance, not agreement, in relation to the party program:

To the question – who can be called a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party? – this party can have only one answer: one who accepts the party program, supports the party financially and works in one of the party organizations. It is this obvious truth that comrade Lenin has expressed in his splendid formula.³⁶

Acceptance implies diversity, in that one can clearly accept something without agreeing with everything about it.

Stalin’s real problem with Martov was over the issue of party organization and discipline. What clearly lay behind Stalin’s emphasis was the dispute at the RSDLP second congress over the appointment of the Iskra editorial board. Martov refused to serve on the three-man board that had been newly elected at the congress and joined the three former members of the board (Axelrod, Zasulich and Potresov) in declaring a boycott on their own participation in party institutions.³⁷ After a succession of maneuvers, the old editorial board rejected by the congress reconstituted itself, a move that lacked political legitimacy. Stalin remarked bitterly on this in 1905 that “these obstinate editors did not submit to the will of the party, to party discipline”. He added: “It would appear that party discipline was invented only for simple party workers like us!”³⁸ This then led to a Bolshevik emphasis on partiinost: acting like a modern political party with a sovereign congress and a disciplined membership. This was opposed to a kruzhok, or ‘little circle’, mentality that did not recognize the larger bonds of partiinost.³⁹ The apparently unmovable Iskra editorial board was clearly an example of the latter.

It therefore becomes obvious that Stalin’s ‘The Proletarian Party and the Proletarian Class’ article shared this partiinost standpoint in terms of its emphasis on working in a disciplined manner in party organizations. Stalin had previously polemicized against the restrictions involved in limiting the movement to small circles as opposed to a party, arguing that it was “the direct duty of Russian Social Democracy to muster the separate advanced detachments of the proletariat, to unite them in one party, and thereby to put an end to disunity in the Party once and for all”.⁴⁰ Stalin was thus extremely disappointed that this hadn’t been the outcome of the second congress: “We party workers placed great hopes in that congress. At last! – we exclaimed joyfully – we, too, shall be united in one party, we, too, shall be able to work according to a single plan!”⁴¹

The above offers important contextualization for the arguments offered in ‘The proletarian party and the proletarian class’. Stalin said:

What are we to do with the ideological and practical centralism that was handed down to us by the second party congress and which is radically contradicted by Martov’s formula [on party membership]? Throw it overboard?⁴²

This should not be read as some kind of paean to future dictatorship but rather a reflection of a partiinost attitude in terms of what he sees as vital to the future success of the RSDLP and annoyance with the likes of Martov that this had not been achieved. Similar conclusions should be gleaned from Stalin’s statement that: “It looks as though Martov is sorry for certain professors and high-school students who are loath to subordinate their wishes to the wishes of the party.”⁴³ This is not a universal plea for unpleasantness towards professors and students but a reflection of a practical situation in which Martov and the other Iskra editors had refused to subordinate themselves to what Stalin saw as a sovereign RSDLP congress and to submit to the same sort of party discipline that he himself was prepared to. Stalin clearly thought that had serious implications for Martov’s definition of party membership.

Deutscher’s argument that ‘The Proletarian Party and the Proletarian Class’ was the herald of future totalitarianism is a particularly lurid fantasy on his part. If anyone other than Stalin had written such an article in 1905, it is almost certain that it would be an entirely plausible and non-controversial statement of Bolshevik views in response to the situation after the RSDLP’s second congress.

Form and Content in Stalin

Given that questions of style and form cannot be mechanically separated from political ones, and considering that Stalin’s prose in the articles that have been discussed above can at best be classed as somewhat plodding, often repetitive and generally unremarkable in the canon of Marxism, does this not prove something? Does it not show that a bureaucratic soul lurked deep within what were ostensibly run-of-the-mill Bolshevik writings? I think not, but to explore this question we need to go back to Trotsky.

Trotsky was not flattering about Stalin’s early journalism, arguing it sought to “attain a systematic exposition of the theme” but such an “effort usually expressed itself in schematic arrangement of material, the enumeration of arguments, artificial rhetorical questions, and in unwieldy repetitions heavily on the didactic side”.⁴⁴ Trotsky made the harsh judgement: “Not a single one of the articles [Stalin] then wrote would have been accepted by an editorial board in the slightest degree thoughtful or exacting.”⁴⁵ Of course, this was not true of 1913’s Marxism and the national question (another work heavily influenced by Kautsky⁴⁶), which was highly esteemed by Lenin. However, Trotsky attributed any positives almost solely to Lenin’s inspiration and editing.⁴⁷ However, Trotsky did qualify his thoughts on Stalin’s early writings, stating that underground publications were not notable for their “literary excellence, since they were, for the most part, written by people who took to the pen of necessity and not because it was their calling”.⁴⁸ This sense of necessity spills over into the way Trotsky sees that these works were received by their audience:

It would, of course, be erroneous to assume that such articles did not lead to action. There was great need for them. They answered a pressing demand. They drew their strength from that need, for they expressed the ideas and slogans of the revolution. To the mass reader, who could not find anything of the kind in the bourgeois press, they were new and fresh. But their passing influence was limited to the circle for which they were written.⁴⁹

So, Trotsky seemed to conclude that Stalin’s work was mediocre, unexceptional but necessary. Similarly, if Stalin suffered an “absence of his own thought, of original form, of vivid imagery – these mark every line of his with the brand of banality”⁵⁰ then one would wonder whether this is just a paler reflection of what Lih has called Lenin’s “aggressive unoriginality”.⁵¹

Trotsky also alluded to Lenin’s unoriginality in his comments on the development of ‘Leninism’. In its Soviet bureaucratic form, ‘Leninism’ was a unique development of Marxism, or Russian Marxism sui generis; in Trotsky’s words, “trying to work up to the idea that Leninism is ‘more revolutionary’ than Marxism”.⁵² This is coded in notorious formulas such as this one from Stalin’s ‘The Foundations of Leninism’ (1924):

Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution. To be more exact, Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular.⁵³

Trotsky steadfastly denied that Lenin developed anything new, stating that his former leader “was a million miles away from any thought of inventing a new dialectic for the epoch of imperialism” (which is interesting, because this tenet of ‘Leninism’ is repeated by many of Trotsky’s current epigones).⁵⁴ To underline the point, Trotsky argued that Lenin “paid his debts to Marx with the same thoroughness that characterized the power of his own thought”⁵⁵, “failed to notice his break with ‘pre-imperialistic Marxism’”⁵⁶; and that “Lenin’s work contains no new system nor is there a new method. It contains fully and completely the system and the method of Marxism”.⁵⁷ But once this idea of the absolute uniqueness of ‘Leninism’ is knocked off its pedestal and we begin to understand the power of Lenin lay in his unoriginality, we do then begin to lessen the difference between other unoriginal writings such as the early works of Stalin. This is not to equate Lenin and Stalin – the latter was simply a follower of his leader – but it is not a sin in the annals of Bolshevism to be repetitive and unoriginal, even though figures such as Lenin had more obvious theoretical power.

Conclusion

This is not an exercise in rehabilitating the early career of Stalin in order to shine a light forward onto the so-called progressive aspects of the Soviet Union. After around 1928, Stalin’s bureaucratized regime was not a ‘workers’ state’ in any sense. Projecting positivity forwards would only repeat the methodological errors of ‘foreshadowing’, as Stalinists do, rather than projecting negativity backwards, as many Trotskyists do. What this article is attempting to establish is that the contours of Stalin’s early ideological development were shaped by the contours of being a Bolshevik praktik, with a consequent heavy reliance on the revolutionary ideas of the Second International’s leading thinkers. The later, ‘other’ Stalin was the product of an isolated and poverty-stricken revolution that had run out of steam by the early 1920s. There was no ideological ‘original sin’ or ‘smoking gun’ before that time.

2019.05.122019.06.07

Leon Trotsky and Cultural Revolution

Doug Enaa Greene argues that in Trotsky’s work a theory of cultural revolution can be found, one which differs from Mao Zedong’s that was developed in the context of the Russian Revolution and its struggle against bureaucracy.

The argument that a “cultural revolution” is a necessary part of a socialist revolution is generally associated with Mao Zedong and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) that he initiated in China. However, Leon Trotsky, in a vastly different way than Mao, stated that Russia needed a cultural revolution. According to Trotsky, a cultural revolution was needed along with industrialization to construct socialism. Trotsky’s industrialization plan for Russia would increase the social weight of the proletariat. A cultural revolution would raise the masses’ cultural level by eradicating mass illiteracy and superstition and change their habits and customs, which would make the working class fit to rule society.

The Heritage of Underdevelopment

According to Marx, socialism would develop first in industrialized capitalist countries with their vast productive powers and rich cultural heritage that the working class would use to build a new order. Contrary to Marx, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred in a backward country, which complicated matters in regards to cultural transformation. Although the major urban centers were “islands of capitalism” with a high concentration of workers in modern factories, large portions of the countryside were just emerging from feudalism. As the Bolsheviks recognized, Russia did not possess the material and cultural conditions needed to overcome capitalism on its own. Both Lenin and Trotsky believed that one of the tasks of the new Soviet republic was to begin the process of creating them. However, the low levels of culture, technical skill, etc., for most of the population along with the isolation of the revolution meant that options were limited.

For Lenin, questions of culture and ideology were intimately connected with the goals of communism – how to overcome the legacy of capitalism and class society. According to Georg Lukács, Lenin’s cultural strategy had three goals:

To abolish the difference between village and city, to abolish the difference between physical and intellectual labour, and to restore the meaningfulness and autonomous nature of labour. Here, too, economic construction and cultural revolution appear inseparable. The electrification of the village, the mechanisation of agricultural production, and such like, directly serve purely economic goals: increased production. However, this increase is not achievable by means other than continuously raising the cultural level of the village; so, too, it requires that agricultural production draw ever closer to the principles of planned factory-production, to principles supported by the latest achievements of science, which master nature ever more thoroughly, and which demand of the labour-force scientific capabilities.¹

Lenin’s vision, shared by Trotsky, was that the working class had to not only master the achievements and culture of bourgeois society but overcome their limitations in the construction of socialism. The development of a socialist planned economy coincided with not only economic modernization, but also cultural transformation. Modernization and the increase of productive forces were not seen as ends in themselves – this would merely reinforce the inequalities of capitalism – but were part of an all-around transformation of the conditions of life.

Trotsky and the Proletkult

The Russian Revolution not only brought the working class power, but unleashed great artistic and cultural creativity. Among the changes there were assaults on the traditional family, divorce was made easy, women expanded their horizons, social privilege was rejected, new laws put national equality in place of Great Russian chauvinism (anti-Semitism was outlawed). There was social experimentation in everything from factory organization to education. The Revolution saw the flowering of the artistic avant-garde, as can be seen in the symbolic image of the “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” or the emblem of the hammer and sickle that are powerful representations to convey the values of the revolutionary cause to communists, artists, and workers. Lastly, there was the Proletkult, a movement of Bolshevik intellectuals, artists and workers inspired by the ideas Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky, who rejected class culture and wanted to create a culture, science, and art based on the values of internationalism, materialism, and atheism. A new proletarian culture, stripped of bourgeois influences, would be the basis of modern socialist society.

Lenin did not think very highly of the Proletkult movement, stating:

Proletarian culture is not something that suddenly springs from nobody knows where, and is not invented by people who set up as specialists in proletarian culture. Proletarian culture is the regular development of those stores of knowledge which mankind has worked out for itself under the yoke of capitalist society, of feudal society, of bureaucratic society.²

Lenin’s negative view of the Proletkult movement was shared by Trotsky, who argued that

It is fundamentally incorrect to contrast bourgeois culture and bourgeois art with proletarian culture and proletarian art. The latter will never exist, because the proletarian regime is temporary and transient. The historic significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consist in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture which is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.³

According to Trotsky, every class creates its own art and culture, but bourgeois culture developed in a protracted period of several centuries before taking power, while the proletariat did not develop its own culture before the revolution. Furthermore, a proletarian dictatorship was transitory (lasting years or decades) and during that time, the attention of the working class would mainly be absorbed in fierce political struggles. There would be no development of a distinctive proletarian culture, since the dictatorship of the proletariat leads to the end of class distinctions and the creation of a universal human culture. Considering the backwardness of the Russian proletariat in regards to culture, Trotsky said they needed to critically appropriate, absorb and assimilate the old culture. According to Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky said the working class

ought to view the cultural legacy dialectically and see its historically formed contradictions. The achievements of civilization had so far served a double purpose: they had assisted man in gaining knowledge and control of nature and in developing his own capacities; but they had also served to perpetuate society’s division into classes and man’s exploitation by man. Consequently, some elements of the heritage were of universal significance and validity while others were bound up with obsolete or obsolescent social systems. The communist approach to the cultural legacy should therefore be selective.⁴

Cover of Furnace, an official organ of Proletkult, designed by Aleksandr Zugrin

Economic Development and Cultural Revolution

Trotsky’s conception of a cultural revolution involved the proletariat eliminating illiteracy, superstition and raising their cultural level, so they would be fit to rule. However, Russian backwardness meant that different and contradictory conceptions of the world coexisted together among the people, even among communists:

A man is a sound communist devoted to the cause, but women are for him just “females,” not to be taken seriously in any way. Or it happens that an otherwise reliable communist, when discussing nationalistic matters, starts talking hopelessly reactionary stuff. To account for that we must remember that different parts of the human consciousness do not change and develop simultaneously and on parallel lines. There is a certain economy in the process. Human psychology is very conservative by nature, and the change due to the demands and the push of life affects in the first place those parts of the mind which are directly concerned in the case.⁵

A resolute struggle was needed to raise the cultural level of the proletariat and peasantry so they wouldn’t reproduce systems of oppression and domination under a socialist veneer. The battle against backward ideas and attitudes was not simply a struggle for ideas, habits, and attitudes needed to be connected with uprooting the material conditions that engendered them.

Socialism would overcome those conditions by creating modern industry, improving the standard of living and increasing the weight of the proletariat in Soviet society: “The decisive factor in appraising the movement of our country forward along the road of socialist reconstruction, must be the growth of our productive forces and the dominance of the socialist elements over the capitalist—together with an improvement of all the conditions of existence of the working class.”⁶ At the same time, the bureaucracy who ruled had to be combated and the workers needed to be in firm control of the Soviets, trade unions and the Party. Although Trotsky did not believe that the USSR would be secure until the worldwide victory of socialism, they had a task to hold out until they could receive aid from revolutions abroad. Ultimately, the worldwide victory of socialism, the development of industry and culture would free the proletariat from the shackles of feudalism, make them fit to rule.

Trotsky’s ideas on cultural revolution and developing industry formed a single integrated strategic vision:

even the slightest successes in the sphere of morals, by raising the cultural level of the working man and woman, enhance our capacity for rationalizing production, and promoting socialist accumulation. This again gives us the possibility of making fresh conquests in the sphere of morals. Thus a dialectical dependence exists between the two spheres.⁷

A cultural revolution could not be delayed until the productive forces were already developed but needed to be done simultaneously, otherwise, old customs, relations, habits of Russian backwardness would engulf the revolution.

Soviet underdevelopment meant the bureaucratization of the party and state were real and pressing problems. There was a tendency among the bureaucracy to protect its monopoly to information from the working class. As Marx said, the bureaucracy “is a hierarchy of knowledge.”⁸ The Soviet bureaucrats did not want the masses involved in the life of the country:

What is the use, they say, of wasting time in discussions? Let the authorities start running communal kitchens, creches, laundries, hostels, etc. Bureaucratic dullards usually add (or rather imply, or say in whispers—they prefer that to open speech): “It is all words, and nothing more.” The bureaucrat hopes…that when we get rich, we shall, without further words, present the proletariat with cultured conditions of life as with a sort of birthday gift. No need, say such critics, to carry on propaganda for socialist conditions among the masses—the process of labour itself creates “a sense of socialness.”⁹

Trotsky said this problem would not be solved by replacing the “bad” bureaucrats with “good” ones, but the working class taking charge in the construction of socialism.

Trotsky’s approach to the bureaucracy was guided by several considerations:

1) The party and state could not possibly know everything. Bureaucrats tend to be inert and distrust initiative, but socialism requires the masses taking conscious leadership to solve the problems of economic development and cultural change.

2) Socialist consciousness will not emerge in a spontaneous way. Although the “state can organize conditions of life down to the last cell of the community,” but unless the workers themselves were involved in the process, then “no serious and radical changes can possibly be achieved in economic conditions and home life.”¹⁰ Whereas the previous generation of workers learned communism through class struggle and revolution, the next generation will learn “in the elements of construction, the elements of the construction of everyday life. The formulas of our program are, in principle, true. But we must continually prove them, renew them, make them concrete in living experience, and spread them in a wider sphere.”¹¹ While the state will play a major role in constructing socialism, the masses had to be the guiding force: “The proletarian state is the structural timber, not the structure itself. The importance of a revolutionary government in a period of transition is immeasurable… It does not mean that all work of building will be performed by the state.”¹²

3) The course of socialist development meant that change could not from enlightened bureaucrats, but through coordination of local needs within an overall plan. Ultimately, socialism requires revolutionary practice by the working class and not administration by bureaucrats.

Although the party needed to promote their own cultural workers (artists, writers, etc), this did not mean that the party had a monopoly on knowledge. A cultural revolution needed pluralism and competing currents of artistic and literary schools – save for those who were openly and unambiguously counterrevolutionary. While the party should provide guidance in the realm of culture, it should not enforce a state-led cultural revolution. According to Trotsky: “The state is an organ of coercion and for Marxists in positions of power these may be a temptation to simplify cultural and educational work among the masses by using the approach of ‘Here is the truth – down on your knees to it !”¹³

Trotsky rejected the claims of the Proletkult that Marxism was a universal system which provided a master key for every problem. According to him,

The Marxian method affords an opportunity to estimate the development of the new art, to trace all its sources, to help the most progressive tendencies by a critical illumination of the road, but it does not do more than that. Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic. …The domain of art is not one in which the Party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but it can only lead it indirectly….And at any rate, the Party cannot and will not take the position of a literary circle which is struggling and merely competing with other literary circles.¹⁴

Trotsky’s plan for a cultural revolution and economic development was to realize the communist dream where “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”¹⁵ A communist society would mean a transformation in the arts where “technique will become a more powerful inspiration for artistic work, and later on the contradiction itself between technique and nature will be solved in a higher synthesis.” Art and culture would be cleansed of the inequities of class society and flourish under communism. People would finally be free to develop their capabilities to the fullest. In a lyrical passage, Trotsky described the untold possibilities of cultural development under communism:

It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psychophysical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts—literature, drama, painting, music, and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.¹⁶

Construction on White (Robot), by Aleksandr Rodchenko 1920

Trotsky and Mao

At the 1942 Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, Mao rejected Trotsky’s approach to culture as one of “dualism” or “pluralism” which confined the party’s leadership extended to “politics,” while art remained “bourgeois” (a mischaracterization of Trotsky’s position):

Party work in literature and art occupies a definite and assigned position in Party revolutionary work as a whole and is subordinated to the revolutionary tasks set by the Party in a given revolutionary period. Opposition to this arrangement is certain to lead to dualism or pluralism, and in essence amounts to “politics–Marxist, art—bourgeois”…¹⁷

For Mao, art and culture needed to be subordinate to the requirements of politics, since they

are part of the whole revolutionary cause, they are cogs and wheels in it, and though in comparison with certain other and more important parts they may be less significant and less urgent and may occupy a secondary position, nevertheless, they are indispensable cogs and wheels in the whole machine, an indispensable part of the entire revolutionary cause. If we had no literature and art even in the broadest and most ordinary sense, we could not carry on the revolutionary movement and win victory. Failure to recognize this is wrong. Furthermore, when we say that literature and art are subordinate to politics, we mean class politics, the politics of the masses, not the politics of a few so-called statesmen.¹⁸

While art and culture had previously served the bourgeoisie, now Mao said both would serve the proletariat.

Since art and culture were stamped by class and politics, reactionary ideas needed to be struggled against. Like Trotsky, Mao does not believe the working class should reject art from previous epochs, stating

We should take over the rich legacy and the good traditions in literature and art that have been handed down from past ages in China and foreign countries, but the aim must still be to serve the masses of the people. Nor do we refuse to utilize the literary and artistic forms of the past, but in our hands these old forms, remoulded and infused with new content, also become something revolutionary in the service of the people.¹⁹

It was the task of revolutionary artists, cultural workers, and intellectuals to take the stand of the working class and the masses, not those of the elite. Art had to be produced for the masses and taken up by them as a weapon of struggle. In order for writers and artists to accomplish this, their primary task was to know the people (their daily lives, “common sense,” feelings, struggles, etc) and develop the cultural forms created by the people and tease out the elements of “good sense.” Art and culture must reflect the problems and aspirations of ordinary people and not the aspirations of the old ruling classes. Mao’s conception of culture was successfully able to mobilize millions to take the fight against the Japanese and the People’s Liberation.

There was a potential for abuse in Mao’s conception of culture, which can mean cultural control by the party – who could determine what was or was not revolutionary. In contrast, Trotsky granted a greater scope for culture outside of the control of the party (save for openly counterrevolutionary voices).

Mao’s theory behind the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was that a series of cultural revolutions were necessary to “continue the revolution” since bourgeois survivals remained in both the economy and the superstructure that conflicted with new political, cultural and ideological ideas. According to Mao, the superstructure did not automatically change in response to developments in the base, rather there was a lag as the old culture lingered. A conscious effort is needed through mass campaigns and action. If a conscious effort is made to change the superstructure, this would in turn spur development of the economic base as encapsulated in the slogan “grasp revolution, promote production.”

Since the People’s Republic was a transitional society, the birthmarks of capitalism continued to exist and were reproduced – such as the law of value, disparities in decision-making, inequality, access to resources, education, culture, and the persistence of patriarchy which encouraged a breach between the party and the masses. Mao feared that these tendencies would lead to the growth of capitalist restorationist elements within both the party and state.

The Cultural Revolution rejected the premise of developing the productive forces and recognized that the class struggle continued under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only the continuing revolutionizing of the productive relations would increase the control of the masses in society, overcoming capitalist economic relations and the ideological and political relations which reproduce them, in order to continue on the socialist road.

The Cultural Revolution was launched in May 1966 a call to the masses, inside and outside of the party, to overthrow the “capitalist roaders” in the party and state, and root out old ideas and culture:

Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do the exact opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure not in correspondence with the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.²⁰

The Maoist vision of Cultural Revolution was voluntaristic and idealistic with an under-estimation of the weight of economic factors. While socialists need to reject economism, this doesn’t mean socialism can be built by political will regardless of unfavorable conditions. The ultimate criteria for determining the capitalist or socialist character of a society was whether or not it followed the correct political line (in this case, Mao Zedong Thought). This can lead to declaring that the class character of the party and socialism have little to do with the working class, but that socialism is solely determined solely by ideology and political line.

The Soviet Cultural Front

Although Trotsky was ousted from power, at beginning of the Five Year Plans, the USSR did embark on its own cultural revolution. The Soviet cultural revolution opened vast avenues of educational and cultural mobility for the working class throughout society. According to the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, the purpose of the cultural revolution was “both asserting party control over cultural life and opening up the administrative and professional elite to a new cohort of young Communists and workers.”²¹ Although the Soviets had a long-standing policy of placing workers into administrative positions, this was done on an unprecedented scale during the cultural revolution. According to Fitzpatrick: “Of the 861,000 persons classified as ‘leading cadres and specialists’ in the Soviet Union at the end of 1933, over 140,000- more than one in six had been blue-collar workers only five years earlier. But this was only the tip of the iceberg. The total number of workers moving into white-collar jobs during the First Five-Year Plan was probably at least one and a half million.”²² Furthermore, the numbers of workers receiving higher education swelled: “About 150,000 workers and Communists entered higher education during the First Five-Year Plan, most of them studying engineering since technical expertise rather than Marxist social science was now regarded as the best qualification for leadership in an industrializing society.”²³ These newly educated workers and administrators rejected the claims of bourgeois experts to leadership in production, leading them to view some elements in the party “as protectors of the bourgeois intelligentsia, over-reliant on the advice of non-party experts, complacent about the influence of experts and former Tsarist officials within the government bureaucracy, and prone to infection by ‘rotten liberalism’ and bourgeois values.”²⁴ The Soviet cultural revolution (whatever its limitations) struggled against bourgeois values, intellectuals, culture, elitism and bureaucracy in all aspects of society. The cultural revolution fired the imaginations of young party members and workers who were encouraged to attack any manifestation of liberalism or capitalism, “but at the same time they were instinctively hostile to most existing authorities and institutions, which they suspected of bureaucratic and ‘objectively counter-revolutionary’ tendencies.”²⁵ Many of the cultural revolution’s initiatives were spontaneous and outside of party control, but their ideas “were also taken seriously, receiving wide publicity and also, in many cases, substantial funding from various government agencies and other official bodies.”²⁶

Despite the great advancements in education and upward mobility for the Soviet working class during the 1930s, the same period also saw the growth of the bureaucracy and a “cult of personality” surrounding Stalin. In the USSR, the traditions of Marxism mixed uneasily with those of Tsarism and Greek Orthodoxy. As time passed, the structure of the Communist Party and society more and more resembled the spirit of the Orthodox Church with its dogmas, orthodoxy, heresies, and inquisitions (most grossly on display during the Purge Trials). Furthermore, the social weight of the peasantry and backwardness took their revenge as beliefs in “primitive magic” found expression in the party and state. According to Deutscher, primitive magic was common amongst the peasantry and “expressed man’s helplessness amid the forces of nature which he had not yet learned to control; and that, on the whole, modern technology and organization are its deadliest enemies. On the technological level of the wooden plough primitive magic flourishes.”²⁷ Initially, the Bolsheviks spoke a language of reason to the peasantry, but as the revolution’s emancipatory energies were exhausted, the party “lost the sense of its own elevation above its native environment, once it had become aware that it could only fall back on that environment and dig itself in, it began to descend to the level of primitive magic, and to appeal to the people in the language of that magic.”²⁸ Nothing exemplifies the Soviet embrace of primitive magic more than the cult of personality surrounding Stalin, who was seen as the all-knowing and all-wise leader. In the later Stalin years, rampant chauvinism was fostered in the USSR “to convince the Soviet people that the Russians, and the Russians alone, had been the initiators of all the epoch-making ideas and of all the modern technical discoveries…[which] goes back to that remote epoch when the tribe cultivated a belief in its own mysterious powers which set it apart from and above all other tribes.”²⁹

By the time of the Great Purges, the sheer weight of Russian backwardness and isolation took their toll as the cultural revolution and emancipatory initiatives were rolled back. In their place, the Soviets reasserted old moral and cultural values, a need for order, authority and social hierarchy, promotion of the traditional family and increasingly, Russian nationalism. The USSR shed its iconoclasm in the cultural sphere and promoted “Socialist Realism” which glorified the achievements of the Soviet state and society. According to the Marxist cultural critic Ernest Fischer, Socialist Realism was a “tendency to control the arts, to administer and manipulate them, to drive out the spirit of criticism and free imagination, and to transform artists into officials, into illustrators of resolutions.”³⁰ Trotsky viewed Socialist Realism as a symptom of Thermidorian decline, disillusionment, and a move towards conservative uniformity:

The style of present-day official Soviet painting is called “socialist realism.” The name itself has evidently been invented by some high functionary in the department of the arts. This “realism” consists in the imitation of provincial daguerreotypes of the third quarter of the last century; the “socialist” character apparently consists in representing, in the manner of pretentious photography, events which never took place. It is impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust, mixed with horror, or to look at reproductions of paintings and sculpture in which functionaries armed with pens, brushes, and scissors, under the supervision of functionaries armed with Mausers, glorify the “great” and “brilliant” leaders, actually devoid of the least spark of genius or greatness. The art of the Stalinist period will remain as the frankest expression of the profound decline of the proletarian revolution.³¹

Conclusion

Trotsky’s vision of a cultural revolution, just like that of industrialization, was connected with questions of working-class emancipation and socialism. Economic development would increase the proletariat’s social weight in society. The proletariat would need to assert their own interests by controlling both the party and state (meaning both had to be democratized). To enable the working class to rule, the USSR had to build a modern society with education, social provisions, and raise the standard of living. Therefore, a cultural revolution was necessary to raise the spiritual and cultural level of the working class so they could consciously create socialism.

2019.03.142019.03.15

Opposition to Unity and Unity of Opposition: Spain and the POUM

The experience of the POUM in Spain demonstrates the importance of Marxist unity and the dangers of Popular Fronts, writes Finlay Gilmour.

“It is the workers alone who, through their initiative, have vanquished fascism. Through their organization they will crush it. They alone have the right to construct Spain’s new regime.” – La Révolution Espagnole. February 15, 1937

In the wake of the power struggles within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the state of international opposition to official communist leadership was in shambles. What seemed like the last hope of saving the revolutionary leadership in Russia had failed. The Executive Committee of the Comintern and the Central Committee of the party had finally stamped out the last open expressions of opposition. Elsewhere those who continued their fight were threatened with punishments of varying degrees. The 1920s showed the strength of opposition could only be harnessed with unity: something ignored in Russia, where the “left” opposition and “right” opposition failed to unite. However, this was not the case during the Spanish Civil War, which saw the Communist “Left” and “Right” united in opposition to fascism and Stalinist opportunism. The formation of the Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) promised a flourishing optimism for revolutionaries in a period where revolutionary leadership often betrayed revolution itself, while demonstrating the importance of working towards principled unity.

A History of Opposition

Within the Soviet Union, the history of the opposition was a continuous farce. Trotsky refused the possibility of unity with Bukharin’s “rightists”, fearing them more than Stalin’s center. Kamenev and Zinoviev united their New Opposition with Trotsky’s Left under the United Opposition with little success; ending with the complete ousting of the United Opposition’s members within the party leadership. Trotsky finally formed his own International Left Opposition and called for the formation of a Fourth International after a short stint within the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre, finally giving up the notion that the Third International could be saved from within. After defeating all oppositions, Stalin finally turned on Bukharin, accusing him and his program of “supporting Kulaks” and having his supporters removed from their positions. The exact nature of Stalin’s agitation toward Bukharin vary; at times people he assumed to be NKVD agents were surveying him and his family, while phone taps and constant affronts within the party functions saw him mentally worn down. After disbanding the Right Opposition and capitulating to Stalin he still continued to be marginalized, culminating with Bukharin battling with the idea of using his party-issued revolver to take his own life. Unable to bear the thought of leaving his family he went about his business regardless of his marginalization until finally in 1936 he was arrested as the ‘Great Purges’ began. He was accused of various crimes with no evidence; supporting Kulak uprisings, from sabotaging Soviet works to even putting glass into the food of workers. Bukharin denied every charge until his family was arrested, finally, he confessed to whatever charge was given and was subsequently shot in 1938.

Bukharin was not the only leader of the Right Opposition to be marginalized by Stalin. Martemyan Ryutin was born to a poor peasant family in 1890, and after having served in the Red Army for some years he became a leading party official in the 20s. Ryutin refused to follow Bukharin in his capitulation to Stalin and entered into the “Union of Marxist-Leninists” as a militant opposition to the party leadership, writing Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship: Platform of the “Union of Marxists-Leninists. In this polemic, he stated that only an armed ousting of Stalin and the leadership could save the worker’s state- -in doing so assuring his own death. Validating the very existence of the document was seen as treason; Kamenev and Zinoviev read the platform and were expelled from the party in retaliation for not informing the leadership of its existence. After the Union of Marxist-Leninists was destroyed, Ryutin was arrested and shot, his youngest son was tried and shot, his eldest shot in a prison camp and his remaining family exiled to Siberia for hard labor. With Ryutin’s death the last opposition of the 1920s was gone; what fight the communists of the Soviet Union had started was now thoroughly scattered and left for revolutionaries in other countries to continue.

Unity in Spain

The POUM was formed in 1935, the year before the Spanish Civil War began, by revolutionaries from vastly different backgrounds. Andreu Nin had been a loyal follower of Trotsky since his time long stay in the Soviet Union during the 20s where he found himself deeply rooted in the Left Opposition and became instrumental in the formation of the (Trotskyist) Communist Left of Spain (ICE). As Trotsky advised the leadership, the Communist Left began to engage in entryism into the youth wing of the (Stalinist) Communist Party of Spain (PCE). This strategy was outlined in a letter to Andres Nin in 1931:

In principle, the question of the official party is posed differently, since we have not renounced the idea of winning to our side, the Comintern, and consequently each of its sections. It has always appeared to me that many comrades have underestimated the possibility of the development of the official Communist party in Spain. I have written you about this more than once. To ignore the official party as a fictitious quantity, to turn our back on it, seems to me to be a great mistake., On the contrary, with regard to the official party we must stick to the path of uniting the ranks. Still, this task is not so simple. As long as we remain a feeble faction, this task is in generally unachievable. We can only produce a tendency toward unity inside the official party when we become a serious force.

The leadership of the Communist Left saw this as a dead-end maneuver that would not garner real progress for them, beginning their break with Trotsky and the 4th International. After some time Nin entered into talks with Joaquín Maurín, the leader of the Workers and Peasants’ Bloc (BOC) which had been affiliated with Bukharin’s International Communist Opposition. Outraged at this, Trotsky claimed Nin to be a “traitor communist” and that if Nin had followed his advice, the Communist Left of Spain would have held the status of leaders of the proletariat in Spain, under the discipline of the Fourth International. He smeared the newly formed POUM as a “confused organization of Maurin – without program, without perspective, and without any political importance.”. The POUM now stood as the sole independent communist leadership in Spain and immediately began fostering working class support, building a massive base in Catalonia where the BOC had its origins. While critical of the Comintern Popular Front policy, the POUM still entered into the Spanish front against Fascism in 1936. Internationally, the POUM became officially linked with the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre in London after the destruction of the International Communist Opposition. As the POUM continued its fight against Stalinist opportunism, its membership soared over the years. In July 1936 its membership was roughly 10,000, growing to 70,000 in December 1936, and down to 40,000 in June 1937. This party that Trotsky had previously slated as “without program, without perspective, and without any political importance” was now in direct opposition to the official Stalinist PCE and stood as the second largest proletarian leadership in the Spanish Civil War, refusing to surrender the call for socialist revolution. We can see now the only hope for the Spanish proletariat was revolution and the proletarian dictatorship; the popular government was weak and disjointed, unable to collectivize agriculture or unite the workers into war production at a level that could rival the international support of the Fascists. This was a breaking point with the Stalinists in the PCE who refused to support proletarian seizure of state power out of fear it would break the Popular Front, favoring ‘progressive’ reforms to placate the bourgeois elements of the popular government. Spain highlighted the importance of communist unity; the fight for power is meaningless if sought after by a divided working class. One united leadership under a proletarian program can go about building proletarian political power, but this is impossible if the leadership can’t go beyond petty divides. The CNT-FAI and POUM were unified insofar as they called each other “comrades” and fought the same enemies, but this unity was on paper only – true unity is forged through struggle and defined in structure. One class, one leadership. In the case of Spain, the absence of a united class leadership – a leadership that arises from the class struggle but validates itself through fostering the unity of the class itself – doomed the workers’ hopes of liberation.

Oppositions in Opposition

The unification of communist oppositions in Spain saw militants of differing sides united under the shared experience of a communist partisanship – dogmatism cast away and workers’ power the only interest at play. However, this unity was not met with bright smiles from those both within Spain and outside. As was mentioned before, the state of the communist movement was one of deep fragmentation. Splinters were the norm absent the strict organization of the Stalinists that was validated by their connection to international structural support from the Comintern and its mass membership, regardless of its political degeneration. Unity was not a nice fantasy – unity was the only thing that could assure the proletarian leadership rise counter to the bourgeois domination of the front against fascism. We can look now and confidently say the unification of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ within the POUM was good, while others say that the POUM was instead a total sham. This view is dominant among non-Stalinists because of the prominence of Trotsky, who is enshrined today as the level-headed alternative to Stalin’s sloppy and anti-Marxist collectivization. Yet the shared vulgarity of the two is glaring. The denial of the role of the peasantry in constructing socialism within Soviet Russia is one of the most obvious shared traits. The opposition to forced collectivization – either by gun or taxation – was chiefly Bukharin’s terrain (as well as that of Kamenev and Zinoviev) and elaborated in his defense of the New Economic Policy, following Lenin’s prior layout for collectivization. This was met by Trotsky’s Left Opposition with claims of “rightism”. Dogmatic opposition carried over from Soviet Russia with Trotsky into Spain. Regarding the notion of unity the “Left” and the Bukharin centered “Rightists”, Trotsky carried a disdain for the very basis of communist organization, the organizational strength of the unified working class; spitting in the face of Lenin who (as we all know, was the great divider of communists into neat camps!) to deny the possibility of any actual revolutionary action being carried out. This dogmatic senselessness played into the hands of the Stalinists more than anything else. Why fear oppositions when they’re too busy opposing each other? The POUM was slandered on every side; Trotsky claimed they were traitors to communism and the Stalinists claimed they were fascist collaborators. Trotsky lacked an understanding of the conditions within Spain, yet saw no need for differentiation in tactics and pushed the Communist Left into the dead-end of entryism. Trotsky couldn’t bear to admit he didn’t understand the nature of the work that the Spanish communists had to carry out, and when they did not meet his expectations and turned against his supposed wisdom from abroad, he responded with sectarian slander; a petty reaction to what was the natural conclusion to his ham-fisted involvement in Spain.

Yet even after all this, the POUM was willing to allow Trotsky safety within Spain after his exile. They carried a level-headed mentality. As revolutionaries, they were tasked with building the revolutionary leadership. This placed them in mortal danger, as their leadership found out, there is no space for pettiness when death is the certainty of defeat. The only hope for the communist movement was for the oppositions to unite under a central leadership as the POUM had: in Russia unity came too little or too late and all opposition was crushed, in every country during the crisis of proletarian leadership the absence of opposition allowed the official Communist Parties to carry out Stalinism in accordance with the “loyal opposition” of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Without a unified leadership, the proletariat lacks the ability to successfully destroy the bourgeois state and form the proletarian class dictatorship.

Collaboration and Workers Power

The Popular Front saw the unity of all classes through their shared interests in the defeat of fascism, but by 1937 the Spanish Popular Front was of no use for principled communists, as working class support had already been garnered. Notions of direct opposition to the Popular Front began to grow within the POUM. Spanish agriculture mirrored that of Russia, it was formed mostly by small tenant farmers. Like Bukharin, the POUM supported gradual and voluntary collectivization into communal agriculture against the rushed forced collectivization that many in the Popular Front wished for. In other areas, the POUM found itself again clashing with the status quo of the Popular Front, specifically the Stalinists in the PCE. Even before the post-war years of cowardly “loyal opposition” to the bourgeoisie that the Comintern supported all across Europe, the PCE was already lowering its weapons and supporting bourgeois dictatorship, as exemplified by these quotes:

“The struggle of the armed Spanish people against fascism is a struggle that concerns all the workers and all the democrats of Europe and the world.” (José Diaz PCE leader, party broadcast.)

“Once victory is obtained, the Communist Party will follow the line of conduct dictated by its fidelity to its promise to support and maintain the Popular Front government, whatever its ideology.” (Dolores Ibárruri, leader of the PCE.)

This betrayal of the call for workers’ power was a direct product of the Stalinists’ capitulation to the bourgeois state and began the long road down full betrayal of dissident Marxists to defend it. The POUM refused to defend such action as Andreu Nin himself stated in a party bulletin; “We are not fighting for the democratic republic. A new day is dawning, which is the socialist republic.” The POUM’s youth wing followed with “Working youth, which has received nothing but ill treatment from the bourgeois republic, are ready to pursue the struggle until the triumph of the proletarian revolution. All of us united, we must continue the struggle with this slogan: ‘Unity of action of the working class. A WORKERS GOVERNMENT. SOCIALIST REVOLUTION.‘”. This continued opposition to the PCE led them into direct hostility. The PCE began a campaign of smear tactics against the POUM, claiming that their true loyalty was to Franco and that they were intent on destroying the Popular Front government. Within a Popular Front the elements of workers’ power can either be disjointed or unified. Within the Spanish Popular Front, the unified communists proposed that the workers should cast away the bourgeois leadership and install workers’ power – not popular power. As the POUM stated in the party paper La Révolution Espagnole in February 1936:

“The militiaman with his rifle, the worker with his hammer, and the peasant with his scythe all fight against Spanish fascism and its supporters Hitler and Mussolini, at the same time that they combat the bourgeoisie of their own country. Taking over the factories and the land, they are in the process of constructing the Iberian Socialist Republic. No national or international force can make them deviate for their chosen path.”

The PCE stood as the direct opposite to the POUM’s demands for proletarian power – becoming the guardian of capitalism and the defender of exploitation. They laid down the weapons of class struggle and instead took up the duties of the bourgeoisie’s hatchetmen. Popular power is an ignorant notion that denies the possibility of proletarian dictatorship. While communists can use a Popular Front for their own ends, the nature of the front and the duty of communists within it must never be forgotten – build workers power, garner working class support, and go about the agitation of the working class into establishing the proletarian dictatorship. Communists use the Popular Front for the realization of their own demands, Popular Fronts must not be allowed to use communists for its own end. The POUM never fetishized the role of the Popular Front just as Lenin never fetishized the role of parliaments, and just as with parliaments, the Popular Front reaches a point where the workers’ movement and its leadership will only be hurt by partaking in it.

“The Workers Party of Marxist Unification, the product of the fusion of the Workers and Peasants Bloc and the Communist Left, believes that it isn’t possible to work towards the entry of all Marxists in an already existing party. The problem isn’t one of entry or absorption but of revolutionary Marxist unity. It’s necessary to form a new party through revolutionary Marxist fusion.” – Program of the POUM, 1936

POUM women’s demonstration

The May Day Betrayal

“Last Sunday’s issue of l’Humanité” reproduces an article by Mikhail Koltsov, Pravda’s Madrid correspondent, with the tawdry title of “The Trotskyist Criminals in Spain are Franco’s Accomplices,” where he pours out ignoble slanders against the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). He speculates on the ignorance of the Russian and international proletariats concerning the political position of POUM and the role the latter played in the first days of the revolution and in the period since then, an ignorance caused in large part by the confusion and the more or less voluntary errors published in the Popular Front press — particularly the Stalinist press — concerning the events in Spain.” – The POUM’s Response to ‘Official Communist’ Articles in Pravda and l’Humanité

After July 1936 the workers’ militias in Barcelona had full control of the city and Catalonia as a whole. Most militias were loyal to the CNT and after negotiating with the Generalitat, a government was formed. Established as the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias of Catalonia, it consisted of delegates from the trade unions and parties within the Popular Front. The popular government had no power over this formation of workers’ political power. The arms industries within Barcelona were collectivized by the Catalonian government. However, the central government refused to support the industry (under the influence of the PCE) who feared the growing power of the opposition in favor of ‘popular’ unity. These divisions only grew further as time went on. The POUM and CNT shared a line that the civil war and seizure of state power were directly linked as it had been in Russia. In Valencia, the PCE held a conference in collaboration with Comintern delegates and NKVD agents that concluded with the unanimous decision to immediately liquidate the POUM, its leaders accused of being Nazi agents working with Leon Trotsky to overthrow Stalin and the Central Committee – supported by the same ‘evidence’ of the show trials against the Soviet oppositionists like Bukharin. The popular government began disarming the workers’ militias and liquidating all organs of political power with support from the PCE. In the administrative district, the PCE’s supporters and workers’ militias formed barricades, aiming guns at one another. The militias loyal to the POUM, the Friends of Durruti Group, the Bolshevik-Leninists, and the Libertarian Youth took control of their own areas and after a short while, all factions had barricades of their own. All across the city battled raged between the different sides as utter chaos broke out. After six days of drawn-out conflict and the constant murder of revolutionaries, the CNT-FAI, Libertarian Youth, and POUM had all been defeated in Barcelona, their militants either disarmed and arrested or killed, their leaders in dismay and mostly in hiding or fully retreated to safety.

After the May Days were over, the PCE lobbied the government to delegitimize the POUM and brand the party illegal, which the government gladly obliged. Alexander Orlov, the leader of the NKVD in Spain, ordered his agents to arrest the POUM’s leadership en masse and sent to the small city of Alcalá de Henares, outside Madrid. This included Nin and the rest of the POUM leadership, with the exception of Joaquín Maurín, who had attempted to escape Spain through Aragon before being captured by Francoists in 1936 and was detained until 1944. The exact details of Nin’s death have never been confirmed, however, the Communist Party official and Popular Government Minister of Education, Jesus Hernández, admitted that Nin was tortured to death. “Nin was not giving in. He was resisting until he fainted. His inquisitors were getting impatient. They decided to abandon the dry method to get results. Then the blood flowed, the skin peeled off, muscles torn, physical suffering pushed to the limits of human endurance. Nin was subjected to the cruel pain of the most refined tortures. In a few days, his face was a shapeless mass of flesh.”. After Nin’s death and the final purging of the POUM’s leadership, the same tragedy that was occurring in Russia had now occurred in Spain. The communist opposition was murdered and silenced, workers’ power was no longer the mission of the “official” leadership, and the defense of bourgeois dictatorship was now the true goal of those who had decried the oppositionists in the ICO and POUM as ‘traitors’ and ‘reactionary collaborators’.

The Human Cost of Opportunism

As with every part in the history of the workers’ movement, there is a lesson to be learned from the story of the POUM. Just as the Spanish communists learned from the Russian oppositionists’ failures, so too can we learn from the failures of the Spanish communists. The lessons are rather easy to sum up; never surrender the call for workers’ power, the fight for working-class political power never ends regardless of context, and the presence of communists in a Popular Front is not for the purpose of defending bourgeois dictatorship, but for the garnering of power so that once the working class is strong enough the proletarian leadership can cast away the bourgeoisie and conclude in the only way possible – proletarian dictatorship. The PCE turned its guns on the POUM to defend the bourgeoisie, they spilled communist blood to save the bourgeoisie from having their own spilled. In times when Marxism enters a crisis that shakes it to its very core, the legitimacy of revolutionary leadership and the realization of the workers’ dictatorship rests on more than the confines of leadership alone, but the Marxist movement as a whole. The world movement and the movements within national confines are linked beyond the veil of promises and action, but by the nature of communism itself – this link carries over into opposition; oppositionists in every country are irrespectively linked by their struggle to save the movement. Just as the workers’ movement is doomed to fail without the world movement, so too is the opposition doomed to fail when it secludes itself to the confines of the nation. The only assured denial of revolutionary change in the movement is the violent oppression of those who dissent, as Nin’s fight ended in the NKVD camp where he met his death. The revolutionaries in the POUM set an example of what militant communist opposition resembles, though their betrayal and murder is made even more bitter by the fact it was at the hands of other ‘communists’. Their deaths stand as both a testament to the monumental crimes of Stalinism and to their movement in general, no different to the workers gunned down in Russia or the militants murdered in Hungary and Bavaria. If the red flag symbolizes the spilled blood of the workers then that same flag carries with it the blood of the revolutionaries who died fighting for their liberation, regardless of who spilled it.

References

POUM, The General Policy of the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) (1936)

POUM, War of National Independence or Proletarian Revolution? (1937)

Schwartz, Stephen, New Perspectives on The Spanish Civil War (2006)

POUM, Saving the Democratic Republic or Socialist Revolution? (1936)

POUM, POUM’s Response to the Articles in Pravda and l’Humanité (1937)