No Talisman

The National Executive Committee of the ANC finished its meeting yesterday. There has been no press conference, and it would be useless to speculate on the content or outcome of this particular meeting. The Sunday Times and the City Press pretend they have something. But they are only displaying the front-page priority the bourgeois press so often gives to their own prejudice. They do not have the story. This NEC was a “no hiding place” NEC, where the political quality and the moral courage of each and every member would have been tested. There is very little other political news – only unclear reports from East Timor, and an earthquake in Java. Meanwhile, our little Communist University met on the ridge overlooking Johannesburg while the NEC was gathering. We debated for the first time the South African Communist Party’s discussion document on State Power. If you go to the document on our site you will now find an icon at the top where you can click to download the file in PDF format. And if you do a Ctrl-End, or scroll to the bottom, you will find links to the main preceding works referred to in the document. Our CU discussion was rich and passionate and indicative of a huge amount of work still to be done. A lot of the talk was of alliance, and of who should lead, as if this could settle the matter. Some of our comrades read Trotsky, and it is good that they do. They should read everything while they have the chance, and read widely now during the period of discussion in the Party. Hence some of our thoughts turned to Trotsky on this question and especially to the following passage from Trotsky’s 1937 “Stalinism and Bolshevism”. Whatever else Trotsky may have been at different times, and notwithstanding his pitifully grandiose optimism concerning the “Fourth International”, he was definitely a “struggle veteran” of the Great October Revolution in Russia. This short work in particular carries the mark of experience. Here is Trotsky: “Is it true that Stalinism represents the legitimate product of Bolshevism, as all reactionaries maintain, as Stalin himself avows, as the Mensheviks, the anarchists, and certain left doctrinaires considering themselves Marxist believe? … ”The flaw in this reasoning begins in the tacit identification of Bolshevism, October Revolution and Soviet Union. The historical process of the struggle of hostile forces is replaced by the evolution of Bolshevism in a 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, diverse 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 true name to do away with every trace of it. ”Bolshevism, in any case, 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, its ’Conscious’ factor - a very important but not decisive one. We never sinned on historical subjectivism. We saw the decisive factor - on the existing basis of productive forces - in the class struggle, not only on a national scale but on an international scale. ”When the Bolsheviks made concessions to the peasant tendency, to private ownership, set up strict rules for membership of the party, purged the party of alien elements, prohibited other parties, introduced the NEP, 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 10 times greater influence from all other elements in society. It can, by the direct attack by hostile forces, be thrown out of power. Given a more drawn out tempo of development, it can degenerate internally while holding on to power. It is precisely this dialectic of the historical process that is not understood by those sectarian logicians who try to find in the decay of the Stalinist bureaucracy a crushing 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.” There is no such thing as politics without class alliance even after a proletarian revolution, let alone before it. For example, the Bolsheviks led the working class into an alliance with the peasants. Peasants are bourgeois. They are the stuff out of which the bourgeoisie grows. They are more individualistic and personally acquisitive even than the big bourgeoisie. The Bolsheviks in power gave the peasants what they wanted, namely land. What do the South African poor (as in “workers and the poor”) want? Those that are still substantially peasants want land. What do the others want? Education, health care, support for the elderly – and then what? Bread and circuses like the idle Roman proletariat? The 2010 World Cup (perhaps as mere spectators as COSATU warns)? Or to be socialised in productive work, with quality jobs? All politics is class politics and all class politics is class alliance politics. If one alliance should fail, another one will have to be constructed from the ruins. All alliances share one characteristic: The allies must have an agreed common and material goal. What is that goal? Linked below are Trotsky’s “Stalinism and Bolshevism” and for comparison, Lenin’s 1919 lecture “The State”. Click on these links: Trotsky, Stalinism and Bolshevism, 1937 (6294 words) Lenin, The State, 1919 (7209 words)