Statement of the International Committee of the Fourth International
Part Seven
I. Spartacist and Stalinism
The Workers Vanguard series contains a retrospective glorification of the Kremlin bureaucracy. The same nationalist outlook which characterizes all of Spartacist's conceptions underlies this organization's long-standing attraction to Stalinism.
Following the collapse of the middle class protest movement of the 1960s and 70s, the Spartacist League turned sharply toward the Stalinist bureaucracy, promoting its supposed revolutionary potential and apologizing for its crimes.
In 1979 Workers Vanguard praised the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan under the headline "Hail Red Army." With the confrontation between the Solidarity independent union movement and the Jaruzelski dictatorship in Poland it called for Moscow's military intervention, pledging in advance to defend whatever atrocities the Stalinists might commit against the Polish workers. And, in 1984, it marked the death of the former KGB and Soviet party chief Yuri Andropov with a black-bordered death notice on its front page. The collapse of the Stalinist regimes has by no means dampened Spartacist's adulation of Stalinism.
In its attempt to deny the significance of the globalization of capitalist production, Spartacist maintains that the vast changes that have taken place in class relations on a world scale have their source, not in these economic processes, but rather, in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It declares enthusiastically that the Moscow bureaucracy developed "the second-strongest state in the world" and functioned as a "counterweight" to the "global hegemony of American imperialism." The disappearance of this counterweight, Workers Vanguard argues, paved the way for the "triumph of capitalist 'globalization'", which Spartacist understands as merely an increase in capitalist investment in the former colonial countries.
According to its thesis, the absence of Soviet support left the bourgeois nationalist regimes defenseless in the face of "the devastating power of the Pentagon war machine" and they therefore surrendered to the penetration of foreign capital. This changed relationship was supposedly signaled by the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
As we have already seen, Spartacist's elevation of the role of armed force to the principal motor of history is a hallmark of its petty-bourgeois politics. In this case, to advance the Gulf War and the Soviet Union's dissolution as the catalysts for the changes in economic policy by the former colonial countries is patently absurd. In reality these changes were well under way during the period in which Workers Vanguard was hailing the Moscow bureaucracy's reactionary adventure in Afghanistan and clamoring for the massacre of Polish workers.
The foreign debt crisis combined with the collapse in commodity prices beginning in the early 1980s reconfirmed the overwhelming dominance of the world market over the backward economies of the former colonial countries. One regime after another abandoned national development schemes in order to comply with IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs.
It was not fear of US cruise missiles which motivated the economic changes introduced by the national bourgeoisie in these countries. Rather, the global integration of capitalist production had rendered the old nationalist policies unfeasible and an attempt to sustain them would have threatened the power and privileges of the national bourgeoisie itself.
When the International Committee explained in 1992 that the Soviet Union had been liquidated and could no longer be considered even a "degenerated workers state" the Spartacists denounced this as a "betrayal". Now they have been forced to adapt themselves to the logic of the facts and refer to the "destruction of the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers' state" without ever explaining how this came about.
While Spartacist makes the liquidation of the USSR the source of all of the changes in world economic and social relations, it offers no materialist explanation for this world historic event. The Workers Vanguard articles explicitly reject any attempt to trace the crisis of Stalinism to underlying economic and social contradictions.
Instead, they insist, the Soviet Union's collapse is to be blamed on Gorbachev and... the Trotskyist parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The former for having organized "the retreat of Soviet global power" and the latter for "having done all within their power to promote counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe."
Having placed the ICFI at the center of a conspiracy to bring down the USSR, Spartacist denounces it for having the gall to suggest that the restoration of capitalism there was "objectively determined."
They quote a passage from the 1993 perspectives document of the Workers League, The Globalization of Capitalist Production and the International Tasks of the Working Class, which states the following: "The collapse of the Soviet Union was only the first major political convulsion produced by the transformation of the forms of production. The qualitative advances in the integration of world economy dealt the final blow to the autarchic national policies of the Stalinist regime."
II. The USSR's dissolution and the crisis of capitalism
In other words, the Soviet state, because of its prolonged economic isolation, was the first victim of global economic processes which had intensified the contradiction between the world economy and the nation-state system. These same processes, however, are preparing immense crises and revolutionary eruptions within the capitalist countries themselves. This was the essential perspective developed by the International Committee.
Spartacist's demoralized response to the Soviet Union's liquidation excluded any connection between it and a wider global crisis. Behind its radical rhetoric, it adapted itself to the "death of socialism" propaganda developed by the bourgeoisie.
Workers Vanguard asserts that by pointing to the objective source of Stalinism's crisis, the International Committee had "effectively repudiated the program of proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy as even a historical possibility in this supposedly new era of 'globalized' capitalist production." They go on to assert that, for the IC, "the Soviet working class simply did not exist as a potential force in deciding the fate of the Soviet Union."1
This assertion is refuted by the documented record, which makes clear that the International Committee fought to arouse the Soviet and international working class to the dangers it confronted. Indeed, as Gorbachev was being lauded by the petty-bourgeois radicals around the world, and his program of glasnost and perestroika was being hailed as the political revolution, the International Committee alone warned that the bureaucracy's program was aimed at the restoration of capitalism.
In the event, the working class was not able to overthrow the bureaucracy before the Stalinist regime carried through the restoration of capitalist relations and began to integrate itself within the structure of the world capitalist economy as a type of comprador bourgeoisie, organizing the plunder of the resources of the former Soviet economy.
No amount of denunciations of the International Committee by the Spartacists can cover up the basic question, which the Spartacists dare not address: what were the objective causes for the collapse of the Soviet Union? In equating the attempt to uncover these causes with a renunciation of the perspective of political revolution against Stalinism, Spartacist only reveals the logic of its own position.
Certainly the assessment that the crisis of the Soviet Union was bound up with international economic processes did not represent a recent theoretical innovation for Trotskyism. More than 70 years ago, Trotsky spelled out the profound contradiction between the global character of the productive forces built up under capitalism and the restricted national character of socialist construction in the USSR. It was this understanding which underlay his attack on the Stalinist theory of "socialism in one country."
Both Lenin and Trotsky wrote repeatedly that the degeneration and destruction of the October Revolution were not only "objectively determined" but inevitable, in so far as the USSR remained isolated and encircled by a hostile capitalist world.
They insisted, as opposed to the anti-Marxist conception of "socialism in one country", that the Soviet Union could obtain the resources necessary to overcome the backwardness inherited from Tsarism and construct a socialist society only through the extention of the socialist revolution internationally.
The contradiction between the world economy and the nationally-isolated workers' state could be resolved in only one of two ways: either on a socialist basis, through the working class taking power in the rest of the capitalist countries and establishing a world socialist republic; or by the bureaucracy restoring private property and reintegrating the USSR into the structure of world capitalism. The political revolution within the USSR was conceived within this international context.
The International Committee, basing itself on the whole theoretical heritage of Trotsky, has explained that the liquidation of the USSR was rooted in the transformation in the forms of production, which rendered the nationalist methods of the Stalinist bureaucracy unviable.
Trotsky had explained that, in the short term, military intervention by the imperialist powers posed an immediate danger to the Soviet Union. But in the longer term, the greatest danger was that the productivity of labor in the advanced capitalist countries remained, and would continue to remain, far higher than that attained in the Soviet Union. As Trotsky put it, an even greater danger than military intervention was the cheap goods in the baggage trains.
The bankruptcy of the Spartacists' subjectivist method, and its glorification of the military apparatus, is revealed when some basic questions are posed. How was it that the Soviet Union was able to defeat the 14-nation imperialist intervention in the aftermath of the revolution, and 20 years later roll back the Nazi invasion, yet, collapsed in the 1980s? Today, the economy of the former Soviet Union operates under the dictates of the IMF and the World Bank, without a single shot having being fired. What neither the imperialist armies nor the Nazis could accomplish -- the plundering of the resources of Russia and the other former Soviet republics -- is now being carried out through the operations of the capitalist financial system.
The history of Vietnam, likewise, demonstrates that it is far easier to defeat the armies of the imperialist powers than break the grip of the international financial system. The Vietnamese workers and peasants were able to militarily defeat the interventions by French and then United States imperialism in a 10,000-day war. But Vietnam today is even more firmly in the grip of international finance capital than it was in the days when it was occupied by the US armed forces.
III. National state socialism
In rejecting an objective source of Stalinism's crisis, the Spartacists are affirming their essential agreement with the Stalinist conception of socialism in one country. What they saw in Stalinism was the possibility of national-state socialism, a conception that has a definite appeal to the petty bourgeois radical. From Beatrice and Sydney Webb in the 1930s, to James Robertson in the 1980s, this socio-political layer saw in the Stalinist bureaucracy a "strong state" which would play a mediating role between the excesses of capitalism and the danger of revolution.
Spartacist's use of the phrase "political revolution" has nothing to do with the perspective elaborated by Trotsky. Rather than the independent mobilization of the Soviet workers to overthrow the bureaucratic dictatorship as part of the world socialist revolution, Spartacist adhered to the perspective of "socialism" imposed by the rifle and the tank. It looked to sections of the bureaucracy itself to prevent capitalist restoration. It directed its appeal not to the working class, but rather to the hard-line Stalinist factions and the repressive forces, urging them to undertake a renewed crackdown.
Spartacist describes the Soviet Union as having been "the second strongest state in the world," as if this should be a source of great pride to Marxists, who, on the contrary, associate the realization of socialism not with powerful states, but rather with the progressive dismantling of the state itself.
The Spartacists never explain that the main function of that powerful state was to repress the working class and exterminate its revolutionary leadership. It acted to insulate the workers within Russia from the international working class, to hermetically seal the borders of the USSR against the impact of cheap western commodities. Far from liberating the masses within its borders from the pressure of imperialism, the state within the Soviet Union and the semi-sealed character of those borders were the direct expression of the influence exerted by imperialism over the USSR.
The growth of this state corresponded to the ever greater differentiation between the interests of the privileged bureaucracy that administered it and the Soviet working masses. At the same time, the more Soviet industry developed, due to the advantages of planning and the nationalized economy, the more it required the most advanced techniques and the more dependent it became on world trade.
Where does the real blame for the collapse of the Soviet Union lie, in the view of Spartacist? In predicting the fate of the USSR, Trotsky gave a prognosis of an alternative character. He wrote prophetically that the issue would be decided according to whether or not the working class proved able to overthrow the bureaucracy before the bureaucracy devoured the workers state.
As it happened, the bureaucracy was able to devour the workers state. The leading sections of the bureaucracy proceeded to restore private property and transform themselves into capitalist owners. But for Spartacist, this equation was reversed. It saw the working class as responsible for counterrevolution and looked to the bureaucracy to suppress it.
The Workers Vanguard article states: "Widespread apathy and cynicism as well as, to a certain degree, illusions in Western-type bourgeois democracy among the masses allowed the ascendancy of the counterrevolutionary forces centered around Boris Yeltsin in Russia and around anti-Soviet nationalists in the non-Russian republics."
Spartacist continues: "...our tendency unambiguously and consistently called for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states against imperialism and internal counterrevolution, as we do today in regard to the remaining deformed workers states -- Cuba, China, North Korea and Vietnam."2
This slogan of "unconditional military defense" was the brainchild of Spartacist. Trotsky and the Fourth International always saw the defense of the Soviet Union as a tactic, subordinate to and conditioned by the strategy of world socialist revolution, which encompassed as well the overthrow of the Kremlin bureaucracy.
As was stated in the Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, drafted at the outbreak of the Second World War: "The Fourth International can defend the USSR only by methods of revolutionary class struggle."3
Spartacist's appeal for the use of "unconditional military" methods in defense of the Soviet Union and the other mentioned states was not directed to the working class, and this group certainly possessed no means of executing this tactic itself. Instead it amounted to an hysterical appeal to the Stalinist bureaucracy itself to pursue a more confrontational military stance abroad while using violent repression against its political opponents at home, principally the working class.
IV. The Chinese "workers state"
Spartacist today demands the defense, by "unconditional military" means, of the People's Republic of China. It asserts that this regime "...remains a bureaucratically deformed workers state," and therefore constitutes a great conquest of the working class.
The International Committee categorically rejects this contention. The term "deformed workers state" was developed by the Trotskyist movement in the 1940s to define the new regimes that had been established by Stalinism in both China and Eastern Europe. It was used to describe states that were crippled from birth by the parasitic and totalitarian bureaucracy, and that would inevitably destroy the limited gains won by the working class unless it was overthrown.
This highly conditional and somewhat makeshift definition was seized upon by organizations like Spartacist as some sort of stamp of approval. The emergence of these new state forms served to bolster their belief that socialism could be brought about without the mobilization of the working class in a conscious revolutionary struggle.
In the case of China, the Maoist regime was brought to power not by the working class, but by a peasant army, led by the Stalinist Communist Party, which took control of the cities and suppressed all independent organizations of the workers. For more than a quarter of a century the Stalinist regime has pursued an openly pro-imperialist policy on the world arena. From the late 1970s on, the Beijing regime has moved steadily to reintegrate China into the capitalist world market by throwing open the doors to foreign capitalist investment and privatizing state-owned industries.
An article that appeared recently in Foreign Affairs gives a fairly graphic description of the state of the working class in this "bureaucratically deformed workers state." It cites a newspaper in Beijing, called Workers Daily, which reported on conditions in a capitalist joint venture called Zhao Zhi footwear in Guangdong province:
"The company beats, abuses and humiliates workers at will. Everyday punishments include forcing workers to stand facing the wall or on a stool or outdoors in the sun. Contrary to law the employees are sometimes made to work all through the night to finish a rush order. They work under 24-hour watch of a hundred security guards." This is Spartacist's workers' state.
The article reports that "some 17 million Chinese people work in coastal factories funded by foreign investors, largely from Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea. The workers, the great majority of them women from rural areas, make shoes, toys, garments and other products for export, all under sweatshop conditions. Low wages are not the worst of the workers' problems. The most repugnant abuse is physical punishment, including beatings inflicted by supervisors or private guards. Some carry electric batons. As a result even verbal threats are intimidating. In some cases the coercive regulations that management imposes on workers during and after working hours are unbelievably detailed: prohibitions on talking, even while eating; marked routes for walking within the factory-dormitory compound; bans on leaving the compound at any time without special permission; prohibitions against getting pregnant, married or even engaged. In one factory anyone using the toilet more than twice in a work day forfeits nearly a fifth of her monthly wages. There was a fire in November 1993 at a factory in Guangdong which killed 87 workers and injured more than 60. Once again, this tragedy was made even worse by the fact that escape was blocked by barred windows and locked doors."
The article asks, "why does the Chinese government allow foreign companies to abuse its citizens so outrageously?" and they quote a Hong Kong executive who describes his discussions with the government. He said, "We told them this is toy biz. If you don't allow us to do things our way we will close down our Chinese factories and move to Thailand. Taiwanese businessmen there whom we recently interviewed talked about relocating to Vietnam where labor costs are even lower."4
Since Spartacist published its polemic against the International Committee, events have further exposed its claims that the Peoples Republic of China constitutes a "workers state" which must be defended "unconditionally." Less than two months after Workers Vanguard concluded its four-part attack on the International Committee, President Jiang Zemin announced that the ruling bureaucracy would carry out a massive privatization program, ending state ownership in all areas of the economy with the exception of strategic sectors like weapons production, chemicals and grain distribution. In the first half of 1997 alone, ten million workers lost their jobs at state-run enterprises. Mass demonstrations, strikes and clashes between security forces and workers protesting layoffs have become increasingly common in China.
Meanwhile, the Beijing "workers state" has demonstrated its commitment to capitalism by intervening in the recent turmoil on the Asian financial markets, both to stabilize the Hong Kong stock exchange and to bail out the crisis-ridden economy overseen by the Indonesian military dictatorship.
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