Soviet Union rests on world revolution¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter argues that the defence of the Soviet Union remains a progressive task for the international working class, but that this obligation in no way entails support for the Stalinist bureaucracy that rules it. The text opens by establishing the historic achievement of the October Revolution: the expropriation of the landowners, the nationalisation of industry, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a workers’ state. Against all capitalist states, the defence of this nationalised property is a necessary duty for workers everywhere. However, the failure of the revolution to spread to industrial Western Europe, combined with economic backwardness and the exhaustion of the Soviet masses, created the conditions for the growth of a vast bureaucratic layer. The chapter draws a direct parallel between Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy and figures such as Bevin and Citrine in the British trade union movement — bureaucratic castes that control and live off the organisations they nominally lead. Just as workers will defend their trade unions against capitalist attack, so they will defend the Soviet Union; but this defence does not imply support for the bureaucracy’s policy.
The polemic is sharp and unambiguous. Stalin is accused of pursuing a reactionary Bonapartist national policy, making major concessions to world imperialism, and manipulating foreign Communist parties as puppets. By dissolving the Comintern, the text contends, Stalin formally severed the last nominal link to world revolution and passed over openly to the position of an agency of imperialism within the Soviet Union. The timing is presented as damning: the dissolution occurs on the eve of the Italian revolution, demonstrating the bureaucracy’s mortal terror of revolution in Europe.
The chapter’s core strategic perspective rests on the coming insurrection of the German working class. This, it is argued, will have profound repercussions on the Russian masses, and the relationship of forces can change overnight. The bureaucracy’s rule can be overthrown as rapidly as Mussolini’s fall in Italy. A crucial distinction is drawn: revolutions in capitalist Europe will be social revolutions, seeking to end capitalism, whereas the revolution in Russia will be a political revolution, taking place on the basis of nationalised property and the revolutionary traditions of Bolshevism. The prisons are filled with thousands of Bolsheviks grounded in the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, who will reconstruct proletarian leadership and introduce Soviet democracy on a higher plane. The fate of the Soviet Union rests directly on the new wave of revolutions; further defeats would usher in bourgeois counter-revolution. The chapter concludes by asserting that the bourgeoisie and Stalin are miscalculating: the epoch of reaction is ending and the masses are preparing to pass to the counter-offensive.