The Stalinist Legacy

Joshua Loo

№2, Volume V

Various

The Stalinist Legacy

Edited by Tariq Ali

ISBN 1608462196 / 9781608462193

Abstract

The Stalinist Legacy’s Marxist analysis is surprisingly comprehensible, thus smoothing the path to understanding Marxist literature in general, despite occasional lapses. Unfortunately, despite Ali’s reminder at the start that ‘it is possible to fight Stalinism in the name of both socialism and democracy’, it appears that this ‘democracy’ does not preclude some of the implicit revisionism of omission that characterises coverage of, in particular, China and Vietnam. This does not, however, afflict the entire book, to the extent that it is a compendium. It is also worth noting, in particular, the inclusion of interviews with a number of Communists at the time, which provides an inside account of the workings of revolutionary movements, a general problematic of polemic writing created by the length of chains of reasoning of which pieces will only cover a little, and the continuing relevance of the book in an age of renewed Stalinism in Xi Jinping Thought.

There are several ways to understand others’ analytic methods. One method is to read a foundational text; often, this foundational text will explicate the precise means by which, for example, a Marxist analysis is to come about. One can read others’ attempts to explain Marxist analysis: textbooks on political theory, or lectures on the logic of Rand’s acolytes. Another is to simply read some analysis. In the case of The Stalinist Legacy, the last approach may seem somewhat intimidating, but is ultimately fruitful. To arbitrarily choose a paragraph in the middle of the book:

But the line followed by Moscow during this crucial decade did not have the same effects in China and Vietnam. In China, Comintern policy was in open contradiction with the needs of the revolutionary struggle. This was not the case in Vietnam. Between 1925 and 1928, the Comintern forced the CPC to adopt a conciliatory attitude towards the national bourgeoisie: this at a time when the bourgeois was turning against its former ally and crushing the mass movement. The CPC was forced to remain within the Kuomintang at the very moment when it should have left it. In Vietnam, however, communists were told to work inside the nationalist movement and to begin to transform it from within. It should be noted that they did so by forming their own current (centred on the Thanh Nien) and not by passively following the line of the constitutionalist party (which was in any case much weaker than the Kuomintang).

It is not, for example, as alien as an arbitrarily selected paragraph of Foucault. Conciliation, the balance of power, and the familiar members of the Marxist model of society—‘the bourgeoisie’, those prosecuting ‘revolutionary struggle’, ‘Comintern’, ‘the nationalist movement’, the ‘constitutionalist party’, and so on—are not unique to Marxist analysis.

Of course, there exists a uniquely Marxist form of analysis, that will not generally appear in an arbitrarily chosen paragraph, but is, overall, fairly important throughout the book nevertheless. Thus Rakovsky writes in his letter to Valentinov:

When a class takes power, one of its parts becomes the agent of that power. Thus arises bureaucracy. In a socialist state, when capitalist accumulation is forbidden by members of the directing party, this differentiation begins as a functional one; it later becomes a social one. I am thinking here of the social position of a communist who has in his disposal a car, a nice apartment, regular holidays, and is receiving the maximum salary authorized by the party; a position which differs from that of the communist working in the coal mines and receiving a salary of fifty to sixty roubles per month. As regards workers and employees, you know that they are divided into eighteen different categories…,

the Marxist’s tendency to faux-mathematic notation appears in Mandel’s soul-searching ‘What is the Bureaucracy?’:

\(\text{mass trade union movement} = \text{reactionary bureaucracy}\\+ \text{betrayal},\)

and the langue de bois criticised later also is at its most wooden in Mandel’s article:

This social layer [the bureaucracy], conscious of its interests and privileges, will not simply abandon them under the pressure of an objective evolution—the development of productive forces and the growth of the numerical and cultural strength of the world proletariat—that continuously modifies the balance of forces at its expense and makes its hegemony increasingly difficult to maintain.

The faux-mathematic notation is particularly grating, even in context. This aside, reading The Stalinist Legacy would not be pedagogically unhelpful—between the two extremes, it is still possible to learn the terms and tropes of Marxist writing. The sentence above, for example, is not meaningless—it could not have been generated by a Marxist equivalent of the Postmodernism Generator¹; the writing of the sentence is not analagous to, say, Sokal’s views on much of postmodernist writing—it is hardly intended as performance, and is not ultimately meaningless in the same way that postmodernism (at least in its critics’ imaginations) is. The particularly wooden quality of certain sections is more attributable to three other factors: first, translation, second, the complexity of the phenomena described, and, third, the need to avoid heresy by remaining within Marxist theoretic strictures and structures.

It is generally the case that those who support a given idea are more likely to underestimate the problems associated with it and overestimate its advantages. The authors of many of the pieces are not immune to this general principle. This tendency should not be overestimated; K. Damodaran courageously admits his failings after a police shooting in Kerala:

Workers in a factory near Quilon, a town close to the capital city of Trivandrum, went on strike. …[N]ews was brought to us that three workers on strike had been shot dead by the police. …The immediate response of all the comrades present was to condemn the firing [and take various corrective measures] …[b]ut a discussion started …and at the end of it the decisions taken were completely different to our initial response.

It was decided that someone must go[sic] …to explain our view. …My response was to refuse …I was then formally instructed by the party leadership to go and defend the party. I went. …That night when I returned home I really felt sick inside. …I shouted at my wife. Instead of having shouted and hurled abuse at the party leaders, who had put me in such a situation, I took it out on my wife.

However, the general tendency to ignore the human cost of revolution becomes apparent in other passages. Irritatingly, the articles don’t appear to be dated. A small part of the preface is given to attribution, but it both is incomplete and highlights the almost incestuous quality of parts of the leftist press—Tariq Ali thanks The New Left Review, of whose editorial board it appears Ali was coïncidentally a member². It is therefore difficult to determine whether authors should have been aware of particular events; however, the criticisms that follow largely take this into account.

Pierre Rousset’s ‘The Peculiarities of Vietnamese Communism’ considers the relation between Stalinism and Vietnamese Communism within a framework that considers ‘bureaucratization’ and a rising Vietnamese nationalism that viewed Vietnam as a ‘historical invariant’.

Perhaps another relevant Stalinist aspect of the régime was the operation of reëducation camps³ that may have detained hundreds of thousands. A former Vietnamese official who defected claimed that hundreds of thousands were caught up in forced labour programmes in ‘new economic areas.’⁴ It may be that these are counter-revolutionaries, dedicated to unfairly attacking those who sought to reach utopia. It may also be that some of these numbers are exaggerated, perhaps by the trauma experienced by the victims of these régimes and the anger of researchers in the field. It would be unfair to blame the Rousset of the time for ignorance of work that he preceded, such as Rummels’ analysis⁵ of mass killings in, inter alia, Vietnam. Yet Rummel bases his estimate of killings under the revolutionary Vietnamese régime—between 242,000 and 922,000 people—in part on work available at the time. Again, it may be that they had some sort of counter-revolutionary agenda. Perhaps researchers at Amnesty International, who have regularly criticised the United States^6,7, such as Ginetta, are secretly in the pay of the CIA. Acknowledgement, however, of the spread of counter-revolutionary lies would, however, be helpful, if they should truly exist.

Then, Roland Lew on ‘Maoism, Stalinism and the Chinese Revolution’: again, Stalinism is the bogeyman. The langue de bois reäppears:

‘The party thus internalized a socialist aim which did not correspond to its social basis. The ‘authoritarian’ structure of the party, its rigorous centralization, resulted from this difficulty: the party, which, according to the Leninist tradition, was supposed to combine integration of its members in the class with separation of them from it, became transformed in Maiosm into a party that was isolated from its own class (the proletariat), but linked with the masses who took the plce of that class, whilst maintaining its Marxist orientation against the spontaneous, non-socialist tendencies coming from its peasant base.

Again, Lew suffers from the problem described earlier: there is no mention of the democide that occurred under Mao’s régime; there is no rebuttal of potential counter-revolutionary propaganda, if propaganda the exposure of the suffering of the Chinese people was; criticism is limited to that which the strictures of Marxist theory can tolerate. ‘Bureaucratism’, by its acceptability as a sin, dominates criticism; the manifestation of what is euphemistically described as ‘deformation’ is ignored. The vast number of excess deaths^{8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15} that occurred in Maoist China is but an effect of some fundamental ‘deformation’, and so, seemingly, is ignored. It is unlikely that precisely no evidence had come out at that point.

Ali reminds us at the start that ‘it is possible to fight Stalinism in the name of both socialism and democracy’. There can be no greater insult to those who reminded him of this—the authors of Charter 77—than the revisionism of omission that unfortunately characterises much of the coverage of Vietnam and China in The Stalinist Legacy.

To ascribe, however, these failings to the whole of the book would be to ignore its character as a compendium. There is, for example, much interesting source material—indeed, the whole book is now of historical interest as source material to the external researcher. The æsthete will find that the book is worth purchasing because of the appearance of the secret speech typeset to normal book quality in the middle of the book; unfortunately, 1984 (the date of first publication) was in the interregnum between hot-metal typesetting and the widespread adoption of high quality computerised typesetting in TeX et al., and so desiderata such as grid typesetting and footnotes instead of endnotes appear to have been omitted.

Also intriguing are original speeches from Tito and interviews with members of what might broadly be described as the humanist tendency within the Soviet block—Smrkovsky and Krasso. It is sometimes difficult to remember that the participants in these events are fellow humans; they must change clothes, and eat, and so on. It is therefore refreshing to hear Smrkovsky’s account of his detention near Moscow, and of the abrupt change in his treatment.

Another valuable aspect of the accounts is their portrayal of the workings of government. The outsider confronting an organisational chart cannot tell which of the ‘General Organisation Departments’ and sub-offices of the ‘Central Committee’ and secretarial entities related to the Plena thereof are of true import. Smrkovsky could—he was in the government, and the true structure of power of the Communist régime of which he was a part was not so much learnt to him as the default, just as a Briton understands the relationship between the Speaker, the judiciary, the Prime Minister, &c.—each, perhaps, ignorant and alienated in the same way of the other.

The general problematic of polemic writing in an era where the feet of the giants on whom we stand is not immediately visible will be particularly apparent to the liberal reader, for there is little justification of what might be termed ‘Marxism’ in The Stalinist Legacy; it is not so much dogmatically accepted as taken to have been proven elsewhere. Just as the theologian in the Church Times takes the existence of God to be a given, unless perhaps writing specifically on apologetics, so too the Marxist in The Stalinist Legacy takes Marxist reasoning to be implicit. Thus there are seeming logical gaps and appeals to unjustified dogmata that are really the product of a general failing to acknowledge intellectual influences; thus the reductio ad absurdum in Anderson’s ‘Trotsky’s Interpretations of Stalinism’ takes support for ‘the Right’ as axiomatically invalid, thus rigorously refuting many using non-Trotskyite criticisms of the Soviet Union:

Trotsky’s interpretation of Stalinism was remarkable for its political balance—its refusal of either adulation or commination…[Disagreement with] Trotsky’s firm insistence…that the USSR was in the final resort a workers’ state…invariably…[led to a] shift…to the Right. Kautsky, father of ‘state capitalism’ and ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ alike in the early 1920s, is emblematic of this trajectory; Schachtman ended his career applauding the US war in Vietnam in the 1960s.

In isolation, this is absurd. Yet Anderson is simply doing the same thing that the theologian and the mathematician of modernity—indeed, of any epoch that follows the last who ‘knew everything’¹⁶—will necessarily do, to avoid being bogged down in attempting to find elusive foundations.

All that, however, is to ignore that The Stalinist Legacy is written in the shadow of a Stalinism that no longer exists. Indeed, it is not even clear that it existed at the time of writing. How, therefore, can one maintain that it is still of import today?

First, there is a new Stalinism—Xi Jinping Thought; Putonghua seems to translate even more woodenly than Russian. It does, however, appear to be on a trend towards the same totality of control that Stalin acquired, except with the advantage of the technologies that have been developed in the intervening period. Whence this phenomenon emerges is an important question; The Stalinist Legacy helps to answer that question for its predecessor.

Second, it is invaluable as source material, as explained above. The accounts provided of the workings of communism are qualitatively superior to those that one might find ‘on the outside’, in that the authors of The Stalinist Legacy were the sort to reject the material inducements offered by ruling parties at the time—their consciences, one suspects, remained, to a great degree, intact, and this honesty carries over to their writing, and yet the systems described were still most familiar to them.