Appendix¶
Core Argument¶
The appendix serves as a polemical coda, dissecting the theoretical and political retreat embodied in the doctrine of socialism in one country. It situates this doctrine as a defensive reflex of senile capitalism, a reactionary turn that abandoned the internationalist essence of the October Revolution. Lenin’s Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People had defined the new regime’s fundamental task as the establishment of a socialist society and the victory of socialism in all countries. Stalin’s initial position, articulated in April 1924, acknowledged that the final victory of socialism required the efforts of more than one country, especially a peasant Russia. This edition was later withdrawn. By autumn 1924, Stalin proposed building socialism in a single country, a theory that reflected the mood of the bureaucracy and was never systematically expounded or given foundation by its author. It introduced the fatal idea that the revolution was complete, that social contradictions would soften, and that the kulak would grow into socialism.
The Left Opposition, by contrast, insisted that in a capitalist environment, socialism could only be secured if the distance between Soviet and advanced capitalist industry clearly decreased. Stalin rejected any linkage between the tempo of domestic construction and international conditions. By November 1926, the 15th Party Conference acknowledged the need to catch up with and surpass advanced capitalist countries in a minimal historical period. The law of uneven development, the text argues, is supplemented by the law of combined development. The October Revolution produced a fundamental contradiction between low national productive forces and socialist forms of property. Prolonged isolation would end not in national communism but in a restoration of capitalism.
The appendix then turns its fire on Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose monumental study of the USSR treated the prospect of European revolution as futile, using this to validate the theory of socialism in one country. The real dispute, it insists, is not about building factories or using fertilisers in the USSR, but about whether revolution in Britain should be prepared and how. The Webbs answer “We do not know,” deeming the question unscientific. Lenin held fierce hostility toward the Webbs, calling them “obtuse eulogists of English philistinism” who dismissed Chartism as childishness. Without Chartism there would have been no Paris Commune, and without both, no October Revolution. The Webbs found in the USSR only an administrative mechanism, not revolution. Sidney Webb, as Colonial Minister, was the chief jail-keeper of British imperialism while compiling his book on the USSR. In 1923 they saw little difference between Bolshevism and Tsarism; now they praise Stalinist “democracy.” They defend the Soviet bureaucracy from Marxist criticism while, practically, defending the British Empire—refusing Trotsky a visa. The “friends” of the Soviet Union are reformists who accept an established dictatorship but reject revolutionary preparation. They worship the accomplished fact, acknowledging only the “bureaucratic posterior” of revolution. Marxist criticism, calling things by their real names, serves the working class, not reaction.