BEFORE Mao, Marxist-Leninists had regarded the main danger of counterrevolution in a society undergoing socialist transformation as an external danger, external to the country in question, and within the country, external to the party and state. This did not mean that Lenin and Stalin were somehow blissfully unaware of the internal sources of capitalist restoration in regard to the state and party. It was, for instance, Lenin who first referred to a concealed class struggle going on in party and state offices and he regarded the bureaucrats as

‘…the pampered "grandees" of the Soviet Republic’. (See: V.I. Lenin: C.W. Volume 32; p.132)

Lenin also noted the need to make a

‘…modest start in fighting the complacency born of the ignorance of the grandees, and the intellectualist conceit of the communist literati’. (See Lenin: Op. Cit.; p. 138)

and he referred to

‘…our intellectualist literati and bureaucratic grandees’. (See: Op.Cit; p. 140)

The repeated party purges, and of particular note, the later purges in the 1930s, carried out during Stalin’s tenure, were conscious attempts to root out the Soviet "fifth column" in party and State, which simultaneously underlined the importance attached to the danger of the internal sources of capitalist restoration. This struggle against the Soviet fifth column, that is to say the concealed enemies of socialism and pseudo-left elements occupying important positions in the Soviet party and State, the Revisionists and Trotskyist defeatists, the latter who argued that socialism was not possible in the Soviet Union, was a necessity. Regarding the defeatists in his time Lenin had asked and answered in the affirmative:

‘Is the immediate transition to socialism from the state of affairs predominating in Russia conceivable? Yes it is, to a certain degree, but on one condition, the precise nature of which we now know thanks to a great piece of scientific work that has been completed. It is electrification’. (See Lenin, The Tax In Kind: CW. Vol. 32;p. 350)

...a view which is certainly in clear opposition to the later Trotskyist repudiation of Stalin’s policy of building socialism in the Soviet Union.

While Marxist-Leninists were the first to recognise politically the danger posed by an internal source of capitalist restoration and therefore counterrevolution, the pressure of practical work and the removal of Lenin from the political scene resulted in no systematic theorisation of the problem of bureaucracy. Rakovsky, who gave vacillating support to Trotsky, not a Marxist-Leninist, was probably the first Communist Party member who attempted to give theoretical expression to the problem of Soviet bureaucracy. Rakovsky’s views were later taken over by Trotsky and used demagogically against Stalin although Lenin had warned that the struggle against bureaucracy was no short-term affair, and must avoid demagogy because

‘The fight against bureaucracy is a long and arduous one’. (See Lenin: CW. Vol. 32; p. 52)

And also that

"We shall be fighting the evils of bureaucracy for many years to come, and whoever thinks otherwise is playing demagogue and cheating, because overcoming the evils of bureaucracy requires hundreds of measures, wholesale literacy, culture and participation in the activity of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection". (See Lenin: CW. Vol. 32; p. 68)

While Marxist-Leninists have never denied the danger of a potential restorationist stratum in State and Party, they certainly reject totally the jaundiced view put forward by Trotsky whereby Stalin became the leader of the counterrevolutionary Soviet bureaucracy. At the same time we do not deny that Stalin was the ‘leader’ of the Soviet bureaucracy in the sense that, to the extent in which the transition from capitalism to communism cannot immediately dispense with the services of a bureaucracy, no one would deny that it is better to have a Communist leading it than a non-communist. This leadership is dependent on leading the working class. In other words, through the Communist Party the working class exercises its political leadership of the bureaucracy in the transition from capitalism to communism.

This relationship between the working class and the bureaucracy, in the transitional period, is not without its own problematic as some would like to imagine. For a start, all bureaucracies will try to escape control if given the chance. And no bureaucracy likes to be accountable by nature and are in a position to sabotage government decisions of which they disapprove. If given the chance bureaucracies will no doubt seize privileges for itself. What all this means is that there is a spontaneous tendency for a bureaucracy to transform itself, or elevate itself into a dominant position in a society, if not subordinated to the rule of a class. Obviously, this tendency is facilitated where there is a significant gap between the members of a bureaucracy and the ruling class in terms of education and culture.

In his critical treatment of the Chinese Critiques of Soviet society there are certain aspects of the original Chinese critique, which are certainly debatable. One, for instance, is the reference to the ‘negative side of the politics upheld by Stalin’, without further elaboration. Comrade Powell draws attention to the importance of viewing the process of capitalist restoration as a dialectical process whereby quantity is transformed into quality and the dictatorship of the proletariat is transformed into its opposite: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a process which is certainly completed in the ex-Soviet Union.

It is certainly right, in my view, for Powell to draw attention to Mao’s contribution in the theoretical recognition of how counterrevolution can spring from internal sources of party and State, and warning his close Comrades of this. Aspects of Powell’s argument which I would disagree with is the implied view that Lenin and Stalin may have subscribed to a "productive forces theory" of socialism, and the suggestion that from 1935, following the 7^th World Congress and the adoption of the United-Front Against Fascism policy, the Comintern leadership had been predominantly revisionist. Also another point of contention is the view that since the revisionist clique around Khrushchev captured power with relative ease, and because there was no mass, conscious resistance to the revisionist regime, this would imply that the dictatorship of the proletariat had ceased to exist long before then.

Whatever mistakes one deems the anti-revisionist movement to have made, and serious mistakes were made in my view, nevertheless Mao, again in my view, has earned himself an important place in the struggle against Soviet revisionism and in our understanding of the process of capitalist restoration in a socialist country. This was summed up in Mao’s remark to his Comrades, quoted by Powell, that