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Introduction
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 In
Defence of the October Revolution
(Lecture given by Leon Trotsky to
an audience of Social Democratic students in Copenhagen, November 27th
1932)
Introduction By Robin Clapp
The republication of Leon
Trotsky’s marvellous ‘In Defence of the October Revolution’ is very
timely. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a whole new
industry of babblers and scribblers has sprung up determined to rubbish
the accomplishments of the Russian Revolution and dedicated to spreading
the lie that Socialism automatically begets dictatorship, poverty and
human suffering.
Even second-rate literary
dilettantes like Martin Amis have jumped on the bandwaggon. In an
intellectually embarrassing attempt to prove that Fascism and Communism
are political twins, he rails against Lenin and Trotsky, claiming their
policies provided the foundation for the later horrors of Stalinism.
All
the usual myths are resurrected in his shabby and incoherent little rant.
Trotsky is indicted for being as bloodthirsty and amoral as Stalin. Amis
denounces the international left for passing over in silence or seeking to
justify the famine in Ukraine in 1932, the infamous show trials when a
generation of Bolshevik leaders were tortured and murdered and the Kremlin’s
crushing of the Hungarian workers’ rising in 1956.
 This is a monstrous slur when
extended to Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition, as Amis
seeks to do. From 1923 when the embryo of Stalinism began to tighten its
grip around the neck of the weak and isolated workers’ state, Trotsky
courageously undertook what he was later to say was the most important
task of his life, that of combating the rise of the bureaucratic machine
around Stalin. His supporters were to be hounded, exiled and murdered.
Trotsky circa 1940
Let a leading Soviet figure from
that period eloquently answer Amis’s literary lies. Leopold Trepper, the
head of the legendary Soviet spy ring which managed to penetrate the
highest echelons of the Nazi leadership and provided key information that
decisively changed the course of the second world war, wrote when looking
back on the nightmare years of purges and executions:
"But who did protest at
that time? Who rose up to voice his outrage?
The Trotskyites can lay claim
to this honour. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded
for his obstinacy with the end of an ice axe, they fought Stalinism to
the death and they were the only ones that did…..Today, the
Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the
wolves.
Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous
advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of
replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of
their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed…" (‘The
Great Game’ – 1973).
Why do these hired ‘theoreticians’
of capitalism with their perjured pens, feel compelled to keep returning
to writing obituaries of the Soviet Union, if it’s so clear that
Socialism is obsolete as a theory and bloodily discredited in practice?
Precisely because a new
generation of workers and youth are moving into struggle and are looking
for an alternative to the waste and madness of the market economy.
Capitalism crows at ‘Socialism’s failure’ but remains deafeningly
silent about its own diseased system. Wars, environmental catastrophes,
persecution and poverty are the norm for millions. Even in the citadel of
Imperialism – the United States – hunger still afflicts 10 million
households.
Marxism remains the most modern
theory of our epoch. It is the only theory which correctly estimates the
course of development and can provide workers with the necessary strategy
and tactics for challenging and overthrowing capitalism.
Trotsky was fond of stressing
that Marxists don’t prepare revolutions, they prepare for revolutions.
As he states in his speech:
"No tactical recipes could
have called the October revolution into being, if Russia had not carried
it within its body. The revolutionary Party in the last analysis can
claim only the role of an obstetrician, who is compelled to resort to a
Caesarian operation."
‘In Defence of October’
is a robust and startlingly clear explanation and justification of the
October revolution. The speech is a condensing of the ideas elaborated in
his mammoth 3-volume ‘History of the Russian Revolution’ published
early in 1932. Trotsky explains the necessity for and key role of the
Bolshevik Party and argues that Lenin’s understanding and clarity were
decisive in 1917. He mocks those facile thinkers who try and label the
revolution as a mere coup and succinctly elaborates his celebrated theory
of Permanent revolution by explaining how in an economically-backward
country like pre-1917 Russia, the numerically-small working class could
overthrow capitalism before the more advanced German, British or French
workers.
Already in exile on the Turkish
island of Prinkipo, Trotsky received the invitation to make his speech
from Social Democratic students in Copenhagen, capital of Denmark. The
Danish government provided him with a visa for just 8 days and insisted
that the speech be limited to a historic-scientific elaboration of the
question of 1917.
Trotsky agreed and therefore
scrupulously abstained from dealing in his speech with the reasons for the
rise of Stalinism, limiting himself to a defence of the Russian
revolution. For a comprehensive understanding of Trotsky’s critique of
Stalinism, readers are advised to study his 1936 book ‘Revolution
Betrayed.’
Sailing from Turkey on 14th
November 1932, Trotsky was not allowed to disembark while the boat docked
at Greek ports, though a pro-Left Opposition demonstration took place at
Piraeus and another occurred at night as the boat made its way through the
Corinthian canal. All along the canal, cries of "Long live
Trotsky" and "Long live the Commune"
could be heard from the throats of Greek workers.
Upon arrival at Marseilles,
Trotsky was bundled into a car, which never stopped for 8 hours before
arriving at Dunkirk where he was thrust onto a boat bound for Denmark.
The speech delivered on 27th
November was the first public speech Trotsky had delivered for over 5
years and his first public speech to a western European audience since
1914. It was also to be his last. The dark curtain of Fascism was
descending in Germany, while at the same time economic crisis in the
western democracies caused the bourgeois politicians to fear Trotsky’s
words more than ever. Countries and whole continents slammed their doors
on him in a confirmation of the assertion he had made in his 1929
autobiography that the world for him was becoming a "Planet
without a visa."
At the same time as highlighting
the impressive economic progress made through the planned economy, Trotsky
emphasises the challenges still confronting the young Soviet state.
"But in the Soviet Union
there is no Socialism as yet. The situation that prevails there is one
of transition, full of contradictions, burdened with the heavy
inheritance of the past and in addition is under the hostile pressure of
the capitalistic states. The October revolution has proclaimed the
principles of the new society. The Soviet republic has shown only the
first stage of its realisation. Edison’s first lamp was very bad. We
must learn how to distinguish the future from the mistakes and faults of
the first Socialist construction."
In ‘Revolution Betrayed’
written 4 years later, Trotsky warned that the manacles of Stalinism had
all but succeeded in snuffing out the last vestiges of genuine workers’
democracy. A nightmarish totalitarian regime had been established and at
its head was the bureaucratic elite around the figure of Stalin, still
resting on the planned economy and living off of its produce in a
parasitic manner.
Trotsky defined the bureaucracy
as a caste and refuted the incorrect assertion that the Stalinists had
already transformed themselves into a property-owning class.
He argued that its position was
more akin to that of a managing caste, forced to defend the planned
economy but committed above all to the maintenance of its control of the
state apparatus and to the extension of its rights of ever-greater
consumption.
Such a regime was a hybrid,
neither a restored capitalist state, nor a healthy workers’ state, but
instead a regime characterised by Marxists as a proletarian Bonapartist
state. Two scenarios presented themselves given this analysis. Either the
working class would carry through a second revolution – a political
revolution that would restore workers’ democracy, or the bureaucracy
could transform itself into a property-owning class by literally
destroying the still-existing, though heavily bureaucratised planned
economy through a form of creeping social counter-revolution.
In the 1930s when the principal
economic task lay in building gigantic factories and vast hydro-electric
plants, then commandism from above and militarisation of huge armies of
labour sufficed, though production was up to three times as expensive as
in the west.
But the requirements of a
developed and modern economy were becoming more complex; a workers’
state needed democracy as a body needs oxygen. Without that it was
impossible for bureaucrats in the Kremlin with little knowledge of the
costs of production or even the purpose of the commodity being produced,
to run 100,000 industrial enterprises, many of which employed over 100,000
workers who produced more than one million separate commodities.
From being a relative fetter, the
bureaucracy gradually became an absolute fetter on the further development
of production, reflected by the falling graph of GNP growth, which by the
end of the 1970s limped along at just 2% per annum.
The potential of the
planned economy was caught in the straightjacket of bureaucracy – it is
estimated that European Russia had a productivity potential approaching
that of the west and in several key areas actually exceeded capitalism’s
performance, but under Brezhnev and Gorbachev, fully half of output was
wasted. For every act of waste, a case of corruption could be cited. In
1980 the state-auditing agency discovered that a new tractor repair
factory, supposedly handling 14,000 tractor motors annually, had never
been built.
Perestroika, under Gorbachev was
a desperate last fling of the dice as far as the bureaucracy was
concerned. While defending the privileges of the Soviet fat-cats who
increasingly felt their remoteness from society, Gorbachev leaned on the
younger middle layers of skilled technicians and managers, offering them
greater incentives to boost production.
Tinkering with symptoms of
malaise rather than removing the cause of slowdown (the bureaucracy
itself), was to lead to the worst of all worlds. Encouraged by a new
openness of debate (glasnost), workers scornfully rounded on the
bureaucracy.
Statistics began to pour out
revealing the true picture of the retrogressive economic and social
policies of Stalinism; between 1975-1985 there was zero growth after
taking out oil revenues and vodka sales. 15% of daily production was being
lost through alcohol abuse, while in the two decades since 1960, infant
mortality rates had risen from 24 per 1000 to 30 per thousand.
The breakdown of the benefits of
the planned economy led to cracks within the formerly monolithic
bureaucracy in every republic and throughout the eastern European
satellite states. Openly pro-capitalist wings began to appear in the late
1980s. The bureaucrat reasoned empirically, just as Trotsky had foresaw he
would; if the planned economy can’t deliver anymore, then why not
transform myself into a capitalist. The boom of the 1980s in the west
dazzled these scoundrels, many of whom as Trotsky had put it, did not need
to unload any ideological baggage before reappearing as entrepreneurs with
Swiss bank stashes.
The greatest indictment of
Stalinism is that when workers finally took to the streets and built
barricades, it was not to defend Socialism but to objectively help to
clear the ground for capitalist restoration. By its crimes, Stalinism had
temporarily thrown back the consciousness of workers in the Soviet Union
and elsewhere, summed up by the bitter sign on a banner: ‘72 years on
the road to nowhere.’
There is no question that the
planned economy raised Russia from centuries-old backwardness. Despite the
dead-weight of bureaucracy the achievements are without parallel. In 1913
there were 28,000 doctors in Russia. By 1982 there were 1 million. In 1989
alone 80,000 new inventions were patented – the same figure as in the
USA. One third of the entire world’s scientists and engineers are
educated and trained in the republics of the former USSR.
Unraveling this apparent paradox
and refuting the allegations of those illiterates who seek to besmirch the
potential latent in Socialism is a more vital task for Marxists today than
at any time since Trotsky spoke to the Danish student youth. Millions of
workers in the world seek an alternative to capitalism.
In ‘Marxism in Our Time’
written shortly before his murder, Trotsky put the question clearly:
"As a matter of fact, Marx
never said that Socialism could be achieved in a single country and
moreover in a backward country…the wonder is that under such
exceptionally unfavourable conditions, planned economy has managed to
demonstrate its insuperable benefits."
The enemies of Socialism claim
that the Bolsheviks’ taking of power stopped the growth of democratic
capitalism in Russia, plunging the masses into the long night of civil
war, famine, forced collectivization, labour camps and show trials. The
same people stay quiet about capitalism’s own ‘triumphs’ –
fascism, the Somme, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima.
Elemental movements of the
working class have never yet been halted by these finger-wagging critics
however. When all other methods of settling class struggle have been
exhausted, revolution presents itself as the only way out for the working
class.
History did not stop in 1991 with
the implosion of the Soviet Union. The idea that capitalism has won a
final victory and that Imperialism represents humankind’s highest and
final social and economic achievement is either a complacent display of
arrogance on the part of those multi-billionaires and their scribes for
whom Eden has arrived already, or a comfort-blanket for those who fear the
working class and its power and hope that the contagion of revolution will
never again affect the masses.
The Russian Revolution remains
the greatest event in human history. In the future when the working class
has taken power and hunger, prejudice, disease and illiteracy are just
obscure words in very old dictionaries, the names of Lenin, Trotsky,
Bolshevism and the Russian working class that shook the world will be
properly honoured once again.
September 2002
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