Stalin Was Stalinism a More

Stalin

Was Stalinism a more extreme form of Bolshevism?

The Communist Manifesto describes socialism as a society without "classes and class antagonisms (Arnove, 2000)." In place of class society, "we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all (Marks and Engels, 1967)." Stalinism is, in many ways, the negation of socialism. It put an end to workers' control, democracy, a classless society and the unity of the state.

Joseph Stalin became the leader of Russia after the death of Lenin in 1924 (Arnove, 2000). Stalin's dictatorship arose from the defeat of the Russian Revolution and the failure of revolution to catch on in more advanced capitalist countries in Europe.

Stalinism is a term that describes the political and economic system implemented by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. Building on the foundations of Lenin, who led the Bolsheviks, Stalin expanded the centralized bureaucratic system of the Soviet Union during the 1930s. This system is largely perceived as an extreme system of totalitarianism, as Stalin slaughtered many people to achieve his goals.

Many historians have argued that Stalinist barbarism was the inevitable outcome of any attempt to make revolutionary change, and some have even suggested that it was a more extreme form of Bolshevism.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks led the workers to power, fighting against the bourgeoisie and those who opposed socialism (O'Mahoney, 2004). Far from substituting for the working class, the Bolshevik party, through its leadership and farsightedness, allowed the working class to reach and sustain a level of mass action never before seen in history.

The Bolsheviks relied on a system of democratic working class councils (Soviets). Their goal was working class democracy. According to O'Mahoney: "The Bolsheviks were fallible human beings, acting in conditions of great difficulty. Mistakes they may have made in the maelstrom of civil war and economic collapse are proper subjects for socialist discussion and debate. As their critic and comrade Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1918, the Bolsheviks would have been the last to imagine that everything they did in their conditions was a perfect model of socialist action for everywhere at all times. But what the Bolsheviks never were was the root of the Stalinist counter-revolution, which amongst its other crimes, murdered most of those who were still alive in the mid-1930s."

The Bolsheviks stood their ground through good times and bad (O'Mahoney, 2004). The workers' risings were defeated in the West. Invasions and civil war destroyed the soviets. The Bolshevik party was divided. One section followed a path that ended up leading the bureaucratic counter-revolution. The surviving central leaders battled the counter-revolution on a program of working class self-defence and of renewing the soviets.

Those Bolsheviks lost to bloody defeat (O'Mahoney, 2004). Stalinism emerged in the wake of the Bolsheviks, just as it rose above the murdered socialist hopes of the Russian and international working class. By the late-1930s Stalin had killed the leading activists not only from the Trotskyist, but also from the Right Communist and even the Stalinist factions of the Bolshevik party of the 1920s.

According to O'Mahney: "Stalinism was not Bolshevism, any more than it was any kind of socialism. Trotsky, who was to die at the hands of Stalin's assassins put it well and truly when he said that a river of working class and socialist blood separated Stalinism from Bolshevism."

The Bolsheviks, who led the October Revolution, knew that a workers' state in an isolated and backward Russia could only survive if it spread and received major support for industrial development from economically advanced countries that had made a workers' revolution (Arnove, 2000). A civil war in Russia, which lasted from 1918 to 1921, squelched the dreams of the Bolsheviks. Russia's supplies and trade and the nation was forced into battle on multiple fronts. Industrial and agricultural productivity decreased as resources were directed to fighting the invading armies. The working class was literally decimated. Without a working class and without production, workers' control of production was impossible and the workers' state became unhinged from its social basis.

Stalinism emerged as a break from the Bolshevik tradition. Stalin had to defeat the Bolshevik Party of 1917 in order to consolidate his power and the victory of the bureaucracy. Stalin's plan is summed up in the phrase he first used in the fall of 1924: "socialism in one country.

After decades in power, first in Russia and later in many other countries, it is finally obvious that Stalinism is the total opposite of a liberated society (Knabb, 1997). The origin of this phenomenon is less obvious. Many experts have tried to distinguish Stalinism from the earlier Bolshevism of Lenin and Trotsky. According to Knabb (1997): "There are differences, but they are more of degree than of kind. Lenin's the State and Revolution, for example, presents a more coherent critique of the state than can be found in most anarchist writings; the problem is that the radical aspects of Lenin's thought merely ended up camouflaging the Bolsheviks' actual authoritarian practice. Placing itself above the masses it claimed to represent, and with a corresponding internal hierarchy between party militants and their leaders, the Bolshevik Party was already well on its way toward creating the conditions for the development of Stalinism while Lenin and Trotsky were still firmly in control."