BOOK REVIEW.

A Critical Essay.

David W. Lovell

Department of Government, Royal Military College, Duntroon.

Reviewed by Tony Clark.

Serious bourgeois, scholarly writings, with all their limitations, are often on a higher level than some pseudo-left writings of Trotskyists and people of a similar ilk. Arguably, David Lovell's work 'Trotsky's Analysis of Soviet Bureaucratisation - A Critical Essay', would fall comfortably into this category of writing. To the extent that it grapples with the issue of bureaucracy and the related term, bureaucratisation, Lovell's work is superior to Trotskyist writings on this issue, while remaining inferior to Marxism-Leninism.

Disregarding the point that Lovell confuses Marxism-Leninism with Trotskyism, a trait which is common to most intellectuals who write from a bourgeois point of view, Lovell actually manages to throw light on a few of Trotsky's weaknesses and even his left-opportunist responses in his attempts to understand the political process confronting him in the post Lenin period. However, since he does not possess Marxist-Leninist theoretical tools, Lovell fails to penetrate to the essence of Trotsky's mistakes, and therefore does not rise to a level where he can begin to understand the contradictions between Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism. As he is not a Marxist-Leninist, we cannot hold this against him; in fact, he is anti-Marxist and this must not be forgotten in reading his work.

Lovell's aim is to stress the point that Trotsky's contribution to the debate on the nature of the post Lenin Soviet Union is fundamentally of a moral character. In the preface to this work, Lovell informs the reader

'... that Trotsky's analysis of Soviet bureaucratisation is inadequate to explain the character of the Soviet State under the rule of Stalin; that it does not substantiate his charge of 'degeneration'; and that it avoids the real issues posed by the existence of a one-party state which profess an historic mission'. (p. Vi)

We can agree with Lovell when he dismisses Trotsky's view concerning the degeneration of the Soviet State. This is a view which is central to Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union, but the degeneration argument presupposes some golden age of Soviet rule, followed by degeneration, hardly an accurate picture of the Russian socialist revolution.

As for Lovell's concern about the existence of the one-party state, which he claims that Trotsky did not address, Lovell fails to grasp that the emergence of such a state was not the result of abstract theorising, at least not to begin with. What he is suggesting of course is that Trotsky's condemnation of bureaucracy would have been more sincere and would have made more sense if he had linked this to a campaign for a multi-party system. Lovell is from the bourgeois, liberal school of thought so there is no point in expecting anything better from him. What Lovell fails to understand is that the one party State developed out of a period of intense class struggle, that is to say the struggle between revolution and counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. To suggest that the Bolsheviks should have legalised the counterrevolution, which was concealed under various political labels, would have been to ask too much of the Bolsheviks. For Marxists, this would have been a repudiation of the class struggle, or more precisely, the revolution, in particular in the specific conditions of the Soviet Union. The issue can be posed quite clearly. For the Marxist, the issue is whether counterrevolutionary parties should be allowed to exist under socialism. It is the class struggle which ultimately, in the concrete sense, determines which of those parties claiming to espouse socialism are in fact counterrevolutionary.

However, what Lovell wants to stress is the moral dimension of Trotsky's critique of the Soviet Union, and thus he remarks that

'It is important to determine whether his (i.e. Trotsky's. Ed.) major contribution is to the literature of bureaucratic rule, as is often held, or to the literature of revolutionary morality'. (p. Vii)

But Marxist-Leninists argue that the Soviet bureaucracy, in the Stalin period, did not rule. It was the working class which ruled through the communist led Soviets. It is far from clear what Lovell means by revolutionary morality when he ascribes this quality to Trotsky. Lovell writes that

'I believe that moralism is a central ingredient in Trotsky's thought, and especially in his response to the outcome of the October revolution'. (Vii)

This is based on the Trotskyist view that the Bolsheviks underwent a process of moral degeneration. In this interpretation, Trotsky saw his mission as one of restoring the Bolsheviks to their previous moral rectitude.

But was Trotsky simply motivated by revolutionary self-righteousness?

The only thing which is certain is that after Trotsky lost political power he began to argue that the revolution and the party began to degenerate. This seems less like revolutionary morality and more like political opportunism.

Lovell begins his introduction with the arrival of Trotsky in Petrograd, May 1917. We are told that Trotsky joined the Bolshevik party with his Mezhrayontsi group, but no mention is made of the July-August crisis of the party, when the Bolshevik party was hounded by the counterrevolution. This was also the time of the 'anti-Lenin conspiracy' when the counterrevolution tried to prove that Lenin was a German agent and demanded his arrest and appearance in court to answer the charges against him.

This development split the Bolshevik party into two camps: those who argued that Lenin should appear in court and those who argued against his appearance. Those who argued against, Lenin suggested, were closer to the working class. Stalin was in this group. Trotsky, on the other hand, sided with those arguing for handing Lenin over to the counterrevolution.

What was Trotsky's motive?

It is reasonable to assume that Trotsky was aware that Lenin's life was in danger at this point, consequently, Trotsky's concealed motive was to remove Lenin from the revolutionary leadership. This can hardly be said to be an example of revolutionary morality.

Lovell dismisses Trotsky as a theorist. His view is that theory was never Trotsky's strong point. With respect to theory he contends that Trotsky was superficial and suggests that Trotsky was good at picking up the theories of others and embellishing them.

'Trotsky had insights rather than theories'. (p. 2)

Lovell gives an example of Trotsky's theory of 'permanent revolution', which Trotsky took over from Parvus and developed. This theory became the foundation of Trotskyism. Dealing with the transition from the bourgeois democratic to the socialist stage in the Russian revolution, and subsequently applied to all countries with a belated capitalist development, the theory does not take account of the concrete factors involved in the transition, and therefore represents a form of ultra-leftism. The insight that the revolution would be continuous was not subordinated to a more concrete analysis of the various stages of this continuous process.

Lovell argues that Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union is sometimes seen 'as one of the most cogent explanations of the Soviet phenomena' (p.3) This is a view that Lovell does not share. For him Trotsky offers a moral condemnation of the Soviet regime. In Trotsky's view, according to Lovell, Bolshevik moral standards declined because of the integration of the party and State, and also because the cream of the revolution were lost during the civil war.

Lovell reproaches Trotsky for not rejecting the one party system. Trotsky had agreed with the one party system to begin with, but it was only at a later date he came out in favour of a muti-party system. However, it is necessary to point out again that the nature of the socialist political system is decided by the class struggle, that is the struggle between revolution and counterrevolution.

Lovell points out that Trotsky did not begin the criticism of bureaucracy. There was such criticism even before Trotsky raised the issue. Lovell, however, seems to be unaware that Leninist criticism against bureaucracy, at least on a theoretical level, actually began as a criticism against Trotsky in the trade union disputes of the early 1920s. This was a period when Trotsky and his supporters were seen as underwriting bureaucracy and were exposed by Lenin and his supporters, including Stalin.

Lovell argues that Trotsky does not offer an analysis of bureaucracy, but rather his writings on this issue are about 'bureaucratisation'. He suggest that

'Trotsky does not tell us much about Soviet bureaucracy, even though he claimed to analyse it and its power'. (P.4)

What Trotsky emphasises, according to Lovell, is the moral character of the leadership, therefore in Trotsky's view, the descent into bureaucracy can partly be explained in terms of bad leadership. Lovell is at pains to stress that the moral dimension was central to Trotsky's critique of the process of bureaucratisation in the Soviet Union.

Lovell explains that Trotsky's condemnatory stance in regard to bureaucracy was linked with his proposal for industrialisation, which by eliminating backwardness would undermine what Trotsky considered one of the major sources of bureaucratisation. Trotsky, of course, did place before the party his proposals for industrialisation. The truth is that the Stalinist leadership, guided by Marxism-Leninism, did not oppose industrialisation as such. Indeed, all communists were in favour of industrialisation. However, industrialisation could be pursued only if linked to a policy of collectivisation in the countryside. At the time when Trotsky wanted industrialisation to begin, the political strength of the communists, particularly in the countryside was not sufficient to make such a policy immediately feasible. Only when the Stalinist leadership built up the minimum strength necessary would the policy of industrialisation prove to be expedient. In other words, Stalin's opposition to Trotsky's call for industrialisation was not about aims but rather about timing.

'Lovell's argument that

'Trotsky's isolation in the politburo, and Lenin's effective absence after mid-1922 meant the end of any degree of fair play for Trotsky's proposals', (p.23)

misses the point completely. Lenin's presence in the politburo would hardly have made any significant differences where Trotsky's proposals were concerned. It was Lenin who argued that NEP was a necessary retreat, necessary, that is, to build up the forces for a socialist offensive. In fact, Trotsky himself was the first to make proposals similar to NEP, before Lenin later convinced the party to adopt his own policies.

The whole foundation of Trotsky's analysis of the post-Lenin Soviet Union rests on the view that the Soviet bureaucracy, which the Trotskyists started to call the 'Stalinist bureaucracy', had seized political power from the working class. Lovell finds this analysis flawed. What does it mean for a bureaucracy to seize political power and, indeed, can a bureaucracy really seize power as a bureaucracy? Lovell goes some way in exposing the contradictions in Trotsky's thoughts over this matter. An example of this is that he points at Trotsky's initial argument that Stalin's defeat of Trotskyism was due to the degeneration of the old guard, which presumably had supported Stalin in the struggle with the Trotskyists. Later, Trotsky performed a somersault, turning this analysis into its opposite, arguing that Stalin's success was due to his removal of the old guard.

Lovell writes that Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed was written before the famous purge trials of most of the remaining Old Bolshevik leaders of 1937-1938. He explains that

'During these trials, Trotsky altered his arguments to support the view that Stalin had triumphed because he had eliminated the Old Guard, now represented implicitly as exemplars of Bolshevism'. (P.42)

No one need look any further to see the left-opportunist nature of Trotsky than on this particular issue. Previously denouncing the 'Old Guard' for moral turpitude and political degeneration and selling out the revolution, Trotsky now portrayed them as the upholders of Bolshevism without whom the revolution would be betrayed.

Although able to recognise some of the weaknesses in Trotsky's ideological armour, Lovell fails to go beyond certain of Trotsky's basic assumptions. He uses, for instance, the Trotskyist term 'Stalinist bureaucracy'. The idea of a specifically 'Stalinist bureaucracy' is a central component of Trotsky's ideological school, and one would expect that Lovell would have explored this category as part of his examination of Trotsky's analysis of Soviet bureaucratisation.

Without the ideological fiction of a 'Stalinist bureaucracy', Trotsky would have had great difficulty in maintaining his case for a political revolution. In fact, it is on this very question that Trotsky's rejection of Marxism-Leninism is most salient. If the Soviet bureaucracy were indeed pro-Stalin, as Trotsky wants us to believe, how would we explain the purges, which were, in the main, directed against the bureaucrats?

Trotsky's depiction of the Soviet bureaucracy completely excludes the real picture of the constant struggle going on between the Soviet bureaucracy and the communist leadership. With the exclusion of this basic contradiction, Trotsky was able to argue that his rival, Stalin, betrayed the revolution to the bureaucracy. Stalin thus became, in Trotsky's scenario, the representative of the bureaucracy, its chief defender. In the Trotskyist version of history, the Soviet bureaucracy promoted Stalin because the Stalinist group served the interest of the bureaucracy. However, as Getty, who is no Marxist-Leninist although a serious scholar, remarks

'The evidence suggests that the Ezhovschchina - which is what most people mean by the 'Great Purges' - should be redefined. It was not the result of a petrified bureaucracy stamping out and annihilating old radical revolutionaries. In fact, it may have been just the opposite. It is not inconsistent with the evidence to argue that the Ezhovschchina was rather a radical, even hysterical reaction to bureaucracy'. (J. Arch Getty: The Origins of the Great Purges - The Soviet Communist Party reconsidered, 1933-1938; p.206)

Elsewhere I have argued that for practical purposes, Trotsky's operational theory of the Soviet bureaucracy is one-sided. Trotskyism based itself on the notion of a 'counterrevolutionary Soviet bureaucracy'. Although in theory Trotsky occasionally referred to the contradictory nature of the Soviet bureaucracy, and even showed signs of wanting to establish the contradictory aspect of the bureaucracy as his main thesis regarding the nature of the Soviet Union, this did not, in the long term, influence his political and programmatic stance.

Trotsky and his band of followers failed to see the obvious, which is: if the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy was contradictory, attaching the label of 'counterrevolutionary' to it was inappropriate.

Trotsky thus arrived at the anarchistic and ultra-left conclusion that a political revolution was required to overthrow the Soviet bureaucracy, which, for factional reasons, he had labelled 'Stalinist'. Marxist-Leninists completely reject this absurd Trotskyist view of a counterrevolution Soviet, or Stalinist bureaucracy which needed to be overthrown, and instead refer to counterrevolutionary elements within the Soviet bureaucracy which needed to be purged.

Trotsky's one-sided conclusion about a counterrevolutionary Soviet bureaucracy led to anarchistic proposals about how to fight bureaucracy in the period of transition from capitalism to communism. In the State and Revolution, one of Lenin's most well known works, Lenin, almost as if pre-empting the emergence of ultra-leftist views about how to fight bureaucracy, warned that

'There can be no thought of abolishing the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely. That is utopia. But to smash the old bureaucratic machine at once and to begin immediately to construct a new one that will permit to abolish gradually all bureaucracy - that is not utopia'. (Lenin: The State and Revolution; p.272)

For Marxist-Leninists, the State, a necessary outgrowth of class society, is something which will wither away gradually with the ending of class society. Bureaucracy is part of this withering away process, although communists take an active part in fighting its negative sides. To talk of a political revolution to overthrow bureaucracy, as the Trotskyists do, can be seen to be, from the viewpoint of Marxism-Leninism, a form of ultra-left utopianism. In other words, on the question of how to fight bureaucracy or bureaucratisation in the Soviet Union, Trotskyism went over to petty-bourgeois anarchism.

When it comes to the question of how to struggle against bureaucracy, Marxist-Leninists argue that Trotskyism went over to a form of anarchism on three counts, which are the following:

Firstly, Trotskyists reject the Marxist-Leninist view that the struggle against bureaucracy in a society undergoing socialist transformation is a long-term process.

Secondly, Trotskyists fail to see that bureaucracy, like the state, cannot be abolished, but withers away, while communists struggle against its negative sides.

Thirdly, Trotskyists fail to understand that the struggle against bureaucracy is a contradictory process, which means that communists must fight against bureaucracy while using it at the same time.

These are Marxist-Leninist points which Lovell does not deal with, although he is aware of Lenin's attitude to the question of 'abolishing' bureaucracy. Lovell's account of Trotsky's analysis of Soviet bureaucratisation, although exposing some of Trotsky's theoretical shortcomings as a theorist, is written from an anti-Marxist-Leninist perspective. Confusing Marxism-Leninism with Trotskyism, Lovell fails to grasp the essence of the Marxist opposition to Trotskyism on the issue of bureaucracy.