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. PPEAL September 25, 1937 September 25, 1937 SOCIALIST evism An Article Concerning the Roots and Traditions of the Movement for the Fourth International ups against which Schlamm now mobilten metaphysical absolutes.
logical mechanism of the ideological remm and his like, is not at all complicated.
ese people took part in a political movee by the class struggle and appealed, in thought, to dialectical materialism. In nd Germany the affair ended in a catasom draws a wholesale conclusion: this is alectics and the class struggle! And since revelations is limited by historical ex. by personal knowledge, our reformer or the Word falls on a bundle of old rags ntly oppones not only to Bolshevism but well.
nce Schlamm brand of ideological reacprimitive (from Marx. to Kerensky. But actually it is very instructive: premitiveness it represents the common deull other forms of reaction, particularly ed in a wholesale denunciation of Botshe BACK TO MARXISM. und its highest historical expression in nder the banner of Bolshevism the fiirst proletariat was achieved and the first stablished. Nothing can erase these facts But since the October Revolution has led tage to the triumph of the bureaucracy, of repression, plunder, and falsification orship of the lie. to use Schlamm happy ny formalistic and superficial minds leap conclusion: one cannot struggle against out renouncing Bolshevism. Schlamm.
know goes farther: Bolshevism, which o Stalinism, itself grew out of Marxism; e cannot fight Stalinism while remaining ion of Marxism. There are others, less nore numerous, who say on the contrary: in from Bolshevism to Marxism. How?
m? Before Marxism became bankrupt Bolshevism it had already broken down Social Democracy. Does the slogan Back sen mean a leap over the periods of the ird Internationals. to the First Intert too broke down in its time. Thus in the is a question of returning. to the comMarx and Engels. One can accomplish without leaving one study and even off one slippers. But how are we to sics (Marx died in 1883, Engels in 1895)
our own time, omitting several decades id political struggles, among them BolsheDctober Revolution? None of those who unce Bolshevism as an historically bankhas indic:tted any other course. So the ed to the simple advice to study Capital.
objeet. But the Bolsheviks too studied not with their eyes closed. This did not at the degeneration of the Soviet state of the Moscow trials. So what is to be Vacuum. Bolshevism, however, is only a political tendency, closely fused with the working class but not identical with it. And aside from the working class there exist in the Soviet Union a hundred million peasants, various nationalities, and a heritage of oppression, misery and ignorance. The state built up by the Bolsheviks reflects not only the thought and will of Bolshevism but also the cultural level of the country, the social composition of the population, the pressure of a barbaric past and no less barbaric world imperialism. To represent the process of degeneration of the Soviet state as the evolution of pure Bolshevism is to ignore social reality in the name of only one of its elements, isolated by pure logic.
One has only to call this elementary mistake by its real name to do away with every trace of it.
Bolshevism, at any rate, never identified itself either with the October Revolution or with the Soviet state that issued from it. Bolshevism considered itself as one of the factors of history, the eonscious factor a very important but not the decisive ane. We never sinned in historical subjectivism. We saw the decisive factor on the existing basis of productive forces in the class struggle, not only on a national but on an international scale.
When the Bolsheviks made concessions to the peasant tendency to private ownership, set up strict rules for membership in the party, purged the party of alien elements, prohibited other parties, introduced the granted enterprises as concessions, or concluded diplomatic agreements with imperialist governments, they were drawing partial conclusions from the basic fact that had been theoretically clear to them from the beginning: that the conquest of power, however important it may be in itself, by no means transforms the party into a sovereign ruler of the historical process. Having taken over the state the party is able, certainly, to influence the development of society with a power inaccessible to it before; but in return it submits itself to a ten times greater influence from all other elements of society. It can, by the direct attack of hostile forces, be thrown out of power. Given a more dragging tempo of development it can degenerate internally while maintaining itself in power. It is precisely this dialeetic of the historical process that is not understood by those sectarian logicians who try to find in the decay of the Stalinist bureaucracy an annihilating argument against Bolshevism.
In essence these gentlemen say: the revolutionary party that contains in itself no guarantee against its own degeneration is bad. By such a criterion Bolshevism is naturally condemned: it has no talisman. But the criterion itself is wrong. Scientific thinking demands a concrete analysis: how and why did the party degenerate? No one but the Bolsheviks themselves have up to the present time, given such an analysis. To do this they had no need to break with Bolshevism. On the contrary, they found in its arsenal all they needed for the clarification of its fate. They drew this conclusion: certainly Stalinism grew out of Bolshevism, not logically, however, but dialectically; not as a revolutionary affirmation but as a Thermidorian negation. It is by no means the same.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROGNOSIS OF BOLSHEVISM The Bolsheviks, however, did not have to wait for the Moscow trials to explain the reasons for the disintegration of the governing party of the Long ago they foresaw and spoke of the theoretical possibility of this development. Let us remember the prognosis of the Bolsheviks, not only on the eve of the October Revoiution but years before. The specific alignment of forces in the national and international field can enable the proletariat to seize power first in a backward such as Russia. But the same alignment of forces beforehand that without a more or less rapid vic the proletariat in the advanced countries the government in Russia will not survive. Left to it: Soviet regime must either fall or degenerate.
exactly: it will first degenerate and then fall. have written about this more than once, begini 1905. In my History of the Russian Revolutio Appendix to the last volume: Socialism in One try. are collected all the statements on this a made by the Bolshevik leaders from 1917 unti They all lead to one conclusion: without a revolu the West, Bolshevism will be liquidated either by nal counter revolution or by external intervention a combination of both. Lenin stressed again and that the bureaucratization of the Soviet regime a technical or organizational question, but the pe beginning of the degenration of the workers sta At the Eleventh Party Congress in March, 1923 spoke of the support offered to Soviet Russia at ti of the by certain bourgeois politicians, larly the liberal professor Ustrialow. am for t1 port of the Soviet power in Russia, said Ustria though he was a Kadet, a bourgeois, a supporter tervention because on its present course it is back into an ordinary bourgeois power. Lenin the cynical voice of the enemy to sugary comm babble. Soberly and harshly he warns the party danger: What Ustrialov says is possible, one mi it openly. History knows transformations of all it is absolutely trivial in politics to put one faith viction, devotion, and other excellent moral quali small number of people have excellent moral qu The historical outcome is decided by gigantic who, if they are not pleased with this small nun people, will treat them none too politely. In a wo party is not the only factor of development an larger historical scale is not the decisive one. One nation conquers another, continued Lenin same congress, the last in which he participated.
is quite simple and understandable to everyone. Bu of the culture of these nations. That is not so sim the conquering nation has a higher culture than feated, it imposes its culture on the latter, but if t1 trary is true then the defeated nation imposes its on the conqueror. Did not something like this a the capital of the and was it not in th that 4, 700 communists (almost a whole division of them the best) were submitted to an alien cul This was said in the beginning of 1923, and not. first time. History is not made by a few people, eve best. and not only that: these best can degene the spirit of an alien, that is a bourgeois culture only can the Soviet state abandon the way of soc but the Bolshevik party can, under unfavorable. conditions, lose its Bolshevism.
From the clear understanding of this danger the Left Opposition, definitely formed in 1923. ing day by day the symptoms of degeneration, to oppose to the growing Thermidor the conscio of the proletarian vanguard. However, this sub factor proved to be insufficient. The gigantic which, according to Lenin, decide the outcome struggle, became tired of internal privations a waiting too long for the world revolution. The the masses declined. The bureaucracy won the hand. It cowed the revolutionary vanguard, tri upon Marxism, prostituted the Bolshevik party.
ism conquered. In the form of the Left Oppositio shevism broke with the Soviet bureaucracy and it: intern. This was the actual course of developm To be sure, in a formal sense Stalinism dic from Bolshevism. Even today the Moscow burea continues to call itself the Bolshevik party. It is using the old label of Bolshevism the better to fi masses. So much the more pitiful are those th cians who take the shell for the kernel and the a ance for the reality. In the identification of Bols and Stalinism they render the best possible service Thermidorians and precisely thereby play a clearl tionary role.
VISM RESPONSIBLE FOR STALINISM?
COMING AS APAMPHLET hat Stalinism represents the legitimate hevism, as all reactionaries maintain, as Ivows, as the Mensheviks, the anarchists,. ft doctrinaires considering themselves. We have always predicted this, they tarted with the prohibition of the other. the repression of the anarchists, and the Bolshevik dictatorship in the soviets.
volution could only end in the dictatoreaucracy. Stalin is the continuation and ptcy of Leninism.
this reasoning begins in the tacit idenIshevism, October Revolution and Soviet storical process of the struggle of hostile red by the evolution of Bolshevism in a The essay Stalinism and Bolshevism is being reprinted here by arrangement with the Pioneer Publishers. It will appear a few days as a 32 page pamphlet for mass bution. Single copies are available at 10 cents. lers of five or more at reduced rates. Write to the publishers at 100 Fifth Ave. New York,