CLASSICAL MARXISM WORLD REVOLUTION

A CLAIM FOR A TRUE WORLDVIEW.

Chapter 11. JOSEPH STALIN WORLD REVOLUTION

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“Socialism in One Country was a theory put forth by Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin in 1924 and after. The Soviet Union eventually adopted it as state policy. The theory held that given the defeat of all the communist revolutions in Europe in 1917– 1923 except Russia, the Soviet Union should strengthen itself internally. That turn toward national communism was a shift from the previously held position by Classical Marxism that socialism must be established globally (world communism). However, the theory’s proponents contend that it contradicts neither the world revolution nor world communism.”

“The theory was in opposition to Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent Revolution.”

“The defeat of several proletarian revolutions in countries like Germany and Hungary ended Bolsheviks’ hopes for an imminent world revolution and began promotion of “Socialism in One Country” by Stalin.

In the first edition of the book Osnovy Leninizma (Foundations of Leninism, 1924), Stalin was still a follower of Vladimir Lenin’s idea that Revolution in one Country is insufficient. Lenin died in January 1924.

By the end of that year, in the second edition of the book, Stalin’s position started to turn around: the “proletariat can and must build the socialist society in one country.”

In April 1925 Nikolai Bukharin elaborated the issue in his brochure Can We Build Socialism in One Country in the Absence of the Victory of the West-European Proletariat?

The Soviet Union adopted “Socialism in One Country” as state policy after Stalin’s January 1926 article On the Issues of Leninism”.

Source: wikipedia.org/ wiki/ socialism_in_One_Country

In his 1915 article “On the Slogan for the United States of Europe,” Lenin had written: “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist Country alone.

“After expropriating the capitalists and organizing their socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that Country will arise against the rest of the world….”

Again, in 1918, Lenin wrote: “I know that there are, of course, sages who think they are very clever and even call themselves Socialists, who assert that power should not have been seized until the Revolution had broken out in all countries.

They do not suspect that by speaking in this way, they are deserting the Revolution and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the toiling classes bring about a revolution on an international scale means that everybody should stand stock-still in expectation. That is nonsense.” (Speech delivered at a joint meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Moscow Soviet, May 14 1918, Collected Works, Vol. 23, page. 9.)”

After Lenin’s death, Stalin used these quotes and others to argue that Lenin shared his view of Socialism in One Country. Grigory Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky vigorously criticized the theory of Socialism in One Country. In particular, Trotskyists often claimed, and still claim, that Socialism in One Country opposes both the basic tenets of Marxism and Lenin’s specific beliefs that the final success of socialism in one Country depends upon the Revolution’s degree of success in proletarian revolutions in the more advanced countries of Western Europe.

At the Seventh Congress in March 1918 Lenin explained that:

“Regarded from the world-historical point of view, there would doubtlessly be no hope of the ultimate victory of our Revolution, if it were to remain alone if there were no revolutionary movements in other countries … I repeat, our salvation from all these difficulties is an all Europe revolution” … At all events, under all conceivable circumstances, if the German Revolution does not come, we are doomed.”

However, in the Political Report of the Central Committee to the Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the R.C.P.( B.) Lenin wrote that: “

Yes, we shall see the international world revolution, but for the time being it is a very good fairy-tale, a very beautiful fairy-tale— I quite understand children liking beautiful fairy-tales. However, is it proper for a serious revolutionary to believe in fairy-tales?”
“There is an element of reality in every fairy-tale. If you told children fairy tales in which the cock and the cat did not converse in a human language, they would not be interested.

“In the same way, ‘if you tell the people that civil war will break out in Germany and also guarantee that instead of a clash with imperialism we shall have a field revolution on a worldwide scale, the people will say you are deceiving them.”

“In doing this, you will be overcoming the difficulties with which history has confronted us only in your minds, by your wishes. It will be a good thing if the German proletariat can take action. However, have you measured it, have you discovered an instrument that will show that the German Revolution will break out on such-and-such a day? No, you do not know that, and neither do we. You are staking everything on this card.

“If the Revolution breaks out, everything is saved.”

“Of course! However, if it does not turn out as we desire, if it does not achieve victory tomorrow— what then?

Then the masses will say to you; you acted like gamblers— you staked everything on a fortunate turn of events that did not take place, you proved to be unequal to the situation that arose instead of the world revolution, which will inevitably come, but which has not yet reached maturity.”

Also, in a Letter to American Workers 1918, he wrote:

“We are banking on the inevitability of the world revolution, but this does not mean that we are such fools as to bank on the revolution inevitably coming on a definite and early date…” ( Vladimir-Lenin, 1918)

JOSEPH STALIN PROFILE 1918

“From March, the Bolsheviks refer to themselves as Communists. Their party is the Communist Party. 1919 – Stalin elected as a member of the Politburo, the inner circle of the Central Committee and principal policy-making body in the Soviet Union. 1922 – Stalin is given the newly created post of general secretary of the Central Committee. The position places him in control of party appointments and allows him to develop his power base.

He consolidates his influence further by spying on his colleagues, a tactic that becomes a hallmark of his dictatorship. When Lenin suffered a stroke in May, a troika (triumvirate) composed of Stalin, Lev B. Kamenev, and Grigorii V. Zinoviev assumed leadership. Lenin recovers after three months and reasserts control. In letters written at the end of 1922 and the beginning of 1923, Lenin singles Stalin out for criticism.

“Comrade Stalin, having become general secretary, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution,” Lenin writes.

“Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing with us Communists, becomes intolerable in a general secretary. That is why I suggest the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead, who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin, in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc..”

“This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think … it is not a detail, or it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.”

Lenin also criticizes Stalin for using coercion to force non-Russian republics to join the Soviet Union, saying he has behaved like a “vulgar Great-Russian bully.”

“I think that Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with the pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious ‘nationalist-socialism,’ played a fatal role here,”

Lenin writes. “In politics, spite generally plays the basest of roles.” However, the party takes no action. Stalin remained as general secretary when Lenin died on January 21, 1924, 1925 – Following Lenin’s death, the Kamenev-Zinoviev-Stalin troika again comes to prominence. Stalin consolidates his power base until he can break with Kamenev and Zinoviev.

He has the city of Tsaritsin renamed Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and allows the development of a Stalin personality cult and propaganda campaign. From 1926 to 1930, he progressively ousts his opponents on the left and right of the party, silencing debate about options for the development of communism and the USSR.

By the end of the decade, Stalin has emerged as the supreme leader of the Soviet Union.

Cultists hail him as a “shining sun,” “the staff of life,” a “great teacher and friend,” the “hope of the future for the workers and peasants of the world” and the “genius of mankind, the greatest genius of all times and people.” 1928 – Stalin introduces the first five-year plan, the “revolution from above,” to develop the USSR. “We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries,” he said in 1931.

“We must cover this distance in 10 years. Either we do this, or they will crush us.”

The state takes control of the economy, introducing a program of rapid industrialization and agrarian consolidation and setting unrealistic goals for development. Industry and commerce are nationalized.

All social, political, and regulatory power is centered on the state. Twenty-five million peasant farmers are forced to collectivize their property and then work on the new state-controlled farms. Wealthy peasants (kulaks) and the uncooperative are arrested and either executed or deported to work camps in Siberia.

The collectivized farms are required to meet ever-increasing production quotas, even if this results in starvation on the farm. In the Ukrainian Republic, up to five million peasants starved to death in the famine of 1932 to 1933, when the state refused to divert food supplies allocated to industrial and military needs. About one million starve to death in the North Caucasus.

By 1937, the social upheaval caused by the “revolution from above” has resulted in the deaths of up to 14.5 million Soviet peasants.

1929 – The Politburo begins to discuss the expansion of the work camp system set up by Lenin following the Bolshevik Revolution.

The system comes to be known as the Gulag Archipelago or Gulag. (Gulag is an acronym of Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei – Russian for Main Camp Administration.)

1932 – Although the industry has failed to meet its production targets, and agricultural output has dropped in comparison with 1928 yields, Stalin announces that the first five-year plan has successfully met its goals in only four years.

The second five-year plan was introduced in 1933 and the third in 1938.

On November 8, Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, commits suicide following Stalin’s argument during a party at the Kremlin. Her suicide also reportedly comes after a group of students she is teaching are arrested for sedition after attempting to inform Stalin of the plight of the peasants. Nadezhda Alliluyeva’s suicide and the scathing personal note she leaves him are believed to have had a shattering effect on Stalin.

1934 – Stalin’s purges of party members suspected of disloyalty begin in December after Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov is assassinated. Thousands from the Leningrad party office are deported to work camps in Siberia. Not many returned alive. At show trials held in Moscow between 1936 and 1938, dozens of former party leaders are forced to confess to crimes against the Soviet state. They are then executed. Among those put to death are Kamenev and Zinoviev, the former members of the troika that included Stalin.

By the end of 1938, almost every leading member of the original Bolsheviks has been killed.

The campaign of terror, flamed by the secret police (the NKVD, or People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs – the forerunner of the KGB, or Komitet Gosudarstvenoi Bezopasnosti), extends throughout the party and into the general community, including the military high command. Also targeted are scientists, artists, priests, and intellectuals. All told, about one million are executed in what comes to be known as The Great Terror, The Great Purge, or the Yezhovshina (after the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov). At least 9.5 million more are deported, exiled or imprisoned in work camps, with many of the estimated five million sent to the Gulag never returning alive. Other estimates place the number of deported at 28 million, including 18 million sent to the Gulag. Stalin personally orders the trials of about 44,000 and signs thousands of death warrants. He also ends early release from work camps for good behavior.”