Lenin’s generation was able to guide the engine of war towards the realisation of a revolutionary strategy, while the engine of the peasantry’s disintegration was filling the cities of European Russia with millions of young new proletariats, and the terrible working conditions gave rise to the growth of a spontaneous class struggle which millions of our class comrades joined. In the trenches and ships of the first imperialist world war there were thousands of Bolsheviks, anarchists, and SR Maximalists that held the experience of class struggle and the consciousness forged by it. It was this very strength that made up the backbone of October’s proletariat revolution, but it wasn’t enough: the civil war, the petty-bourgeois wave, and, eventually, the Stalinist counter-revolution under the conditions of a defeated revolution attempt in Europe did not allow the struggle to reach its objective.
Nevertheless, even in the second half of the 1920s, the Decists – group of Democratic Centralism led by old Bolsheviks Timofei Sapronov (1887-1937) and Vladimir Smirnov (1887-1937) – stalinism’s most coherent critics, numbered about 2,000, of which 500 alone were in Moscow and Leningrad. Someone called them the Levellers of the Russian Revolution – in honour of the most radical wing of the English Revolution of the 17th century. They were not interested in positions inside the hierarchy of Stalin’s party or state; they were fighting for the interests of the proletariat, staying true to their principles. Almost all of them were executed, but none could be brought to court and forced to slander himself and his comrades.
The clandestine centres of the “Groups of proletarian opposition”, as they began calling themselves in 1928-1929, coordinated quite massive leafleting campaigns, mostly directed at industrial enterprises where they had a serious support amongst workers. It’s right to highlight this aspect: even in the darkness of the thirties, when the Stalinist counter-revolution in the USSR along with nazism and fascism in Europe brought the class rule of the bourgeoisie to extreme forms of repressive dictatorships, revolutionary Marxists still held the support of the proletarian masses.
In their leaflets they called things by their name: the counter-revolution had won in the USSR; the State, the union’s Communist Party, and the so-called “public” organizations (the official trade unions, etc.) were hostile towards the proletariat, they were tools of oppression and exploitation; it was necessary to prepare for a new revolution, build a new workers’ party, and, in the meanwhile, lead a defensive fight in opposition to the offensive of the dominant class against the workers’ rights and interests. It was clear to them «that the terms of global revolution had been postponed to an unknown future» and that building socialism in just one country «is equivalent to building socialism in just one county»[1], as Edouard Dune (1899-1953) writes in his memoire. He was one of the few surviving members of the group who spent many years in the camps of Vorkuta but managed to emigrate from the USSR during WWII. In France he joined the resistance, and then, finding himself alone, he joined the Mensheviks but remained loyal to his principles, as a text published in 1947 testifies.
Already in the autumn of ‘26 the Decists had left the Trotskyist-Zinovievist united opposition, believing its policies towards the Stalinist leadership to be unacceptably incoherent and reconciling. As Sapronov put it with working-class bluntness «We won’t polish Trotsky’s boots!». It is important to mention that in some of the “United Opposition“‘s bigger regional centres – in Donbass, Bryansk, and Sverdlovsk – the decist’s influence was predominant.
The decist’s organisation at the beginning was built not as a faction of the party, but as a clandestine cell system. In this way it differentiated itself from Trotskyist groups who worked hard to participate in party meetings in an unsuccessful attempt to fight the party apparatus with “constitutional means”. It’s significant that the group accepted both old Bolsheviks and those who weren’t part of the party.
«The fight for reform within the party won’t produce anything of substance regardless of whether Trotsky or Stalin is in power. The RCP(b) is already (1926) no longer a working class party nor does it express the class’s interests» wrote Dune. It was for this reason that the Decists did not set themselves the task to replace Stalin with Trotsky, or anyone else, instead they realised that ahead of them was a «long-term, arduous work» to create «a true proletarian party». It was an incredibly difficult choice, «Stalin intimidated his party with the danger of a schism and the death of the dictatorship of the proletariat – soviet power. Even the Trotskyists were frightened by the danger, not realising that the split was necessary for Stalin, that soviet power had been liquidated under Stalin. But now? Now, as before, the ex opposition inside the party is fragmented and unable to create a united organization between people with the same beliefs who are sitting in the cells of political isolation […] It is morally painful to break with one’s own past, to admit that decades of conscious life must be written off as mistakes. It’s not a matter of facts, but of psychology, nevertheless it (our psychology) has not always allowed us to see the true state of things»[2].
Having created an autonomous organisation, the Decists did not speak openly, nor did they gather signatures for their documents, preferring instead to work individually with people and conduct leafleting campaigns. «Our base organisations (cells) contained up to five people, if there were more, another cell was created in the same enterprise. The representatives of the cells chose the representatives of the centres. I know of these centres: in Ukraine (Kharkiv), in Donbass (Lugansk), in the Urals (Sverdlovsk), and in Moscow. In Moscow, in addition to a local centre, there was a “literary centre”. In Leningrad there wasn’t such a centre, because there were very few of our supporters (I know, because I brought a suitcase full of literature there)»[3]. Leningrad was the main centre of the Trotskyist-Zinovievist opposition. «Only those who had revealed themselves [i.e., had been exposed] could speak on behalf of the group and speak at meetings. In the inevitable cases of party disputes they could speak on behalf of Trotskyists. Such a condition could not satisfy the hot-blooded youth. It longed for active participation. For Trotsky, the youth were the party’s barometer. Indeed, the Trotskyists absorbed excellent young people, among whom talented figures grew up in the course of the struggle, whose words the old guard listened to and often followed the lead of these young people […]. All Trotskyist’s supporters became known and exiled. The decist’s supporters suffered less»[4]. The Decists paid serious attention to setting up illegal printing houses and purchasing copying equipment. They even created their own “Red Cross” to aid political prisoners. It was due to the conspiratorial nature of the organisation that some Decists were killed by the Gestapo rather than the Stalinists, while others continued their activities after the Second World War without ever being arrested: one worked at the Institute of Red Professors, and another at the Institute of World Economy and International Affairs. Were there others? We don’t know. But even in Brezhnev’s time, in Kharkiv, where during the Stalinist era there had been a decist centre, there were groups of young workers and students who asserted that the USSR has a capitalist basis and that the State was a dictatorship of capital. There was hardly any direct connection between the Decists and these groups, but if there had been, today we would most likely be a force able to hoist the flag of proletariat internationalism.
«The decist’s organisation didn’t have big names, popular in the party or the country. We didn’t have Lenin, Plekhanov, or Trotsky. There was confidence that time would’ve helped us find them»[5]. There was also confidence that time would’ve helped prove the correctness of the assertions and the choices made on the basis of them.
This is one of the many little-known pages in the history of our class, experience from which the new generations of Marxists must learn. Through the Decists, Bolshevism made an unsuccessful attempt to save within itself that which connected it to the strategy of world revolution. In this sense, they can be called “the last Bolsheviks”.
The dividing line of the ‘Left Course’
In 1925, following the XIV conference of the RCP(b), the transition from the course towards a world communist revolution to the course towards building socialism in a single country was cemented. A long counter-revolutionary phase began. In this condition the so-called “United Opposition” was formed, an unstable bloc of four groups fighting between themselves: Trotskyists, Zinovievists, Decists and the “Worker’s Opposition”. The history and positions of each one requires separate consideration. Here, instead, we’ll talk about their short-lived union into a single bloc and its inevitable collapse. The main views of the United Opposition were set out in the ‘Declaration of the Thirteen’ (July 1926), the ‘Declaration of the Eighty-Three’ (May 1927) and the main programme document – the ‘Draft Platform of the Bolsheviks-Leninists (Opposition) to the 15th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) [VKP(b)]’ (September 1927), which was signed by 13 members of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the party: N. Muralov, G. Evdokimov, K. Rakovsky, G. Pyatakov, I. Smilga, G. Zinoviev, L. Trotsky, L. Kamenev, A. Peterson, I. Bakaev, K. Solovyov, G. Lizdin, P. Avdeev. Members of the bloc condemned the party regime, criticised Stalin’s leadership for concessions to the kulaks, sought accelerated industrialisation, demanded the fulfilment of ‘Lenin’s will’ to remove Stalin from the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), asserted the course of a world proletarian revolution, criticised the Comintern leadership for making ‘concessions’ to bourgeois and reformist forces, rejecting the idea that socialism could be built in a single, isolated country.
By July 1926 Zinoviev was removed from the Politburo and in October the same happened to Trotsky and Kamenev. In November of the same year, the XV conference of the VKP(b) accused the United Opposition of opportunistic “social democratic deviation”. In October-November of the following year Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev were expelled from the Party’s Central Committee.
The centre of the United Opposition was in Moscow. Local chapters referred back to the regional centre or directly to Moscow. The centre coordinated the work through special couriers and emissaries. The former were only responsible for delivering instructions and opposition literature to their destinations, the latter had broader powers. Some settled in a particular city, establishing opposition work there, while others visited the regions periodically, with the authority to monitor and intervene in the activities of local groups, even going so far as to remove their leaders and appoint new ones. The groups collected donations. Thus, there were all the signs not only of ideological but also organisational unity, and since the United Opposition continued to operate within the party, this constituted factional activity. Already in 1926 the Decists and the Workers’ Opposition had left the bloc due to ideological differences.
In 1927 the XV Congress took place where it was decided that «adherence to the Trotskyist opposition and the propagation of its views were incompatible with membership of the Bolshevik Party» at the same time 75 leaders of the opposition were expelled among which were Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, Bakaev, Yevdokimov, Zalutsky, Lashevich, Muralov, Radek, Rakovsky, Safarov, Smilga, Smirnov, Sosnovsky and others. The same happened to 23 members of Sapronov’s «obviously counter-irevolutionary» group. Simultaneously, a process was underway to expel ordinary members of the opposition and local activists. Over a period of two and a half months beginning on the 15th of November 1927, 2,288 people were expelled for ‘factional activity’.
At the same XV Congress, the United Opposition effectively collapsed. On the 19th of December, the Zinovievites submitted a statement of capitulation to the Congress Presidium. The fact that not everyone took this leap – for example, the group led by Safarov did not sign the declaration and was sent into exile alongside the Trotskyists – suggests that the United Opposition continued to exist in name only until 1928, when the last of Zinoviev’s supporters capitulated.
These capitulations were not solely due to repression. What else happened at the 15th Congress? Following Molotov’s report, a motion was passed on work in the countryside, which outlined the intensification of measures to establish collective farms and the strengthening of measures to restrict the kulaks, but in no way did it plan to get rid of them. In this, some oppositionists saw glimpses of a ‘leftist course’ and a reason to give up the fight against Stalin’s leadership.
Two weeks later, citing the «unsatisfactory progress of the grain procurement campaign» Stalin travelled to Siberia, where he remained from the 15th of January to the 6th of February 1928. There he actually announced the ‘New Course’: the implementation of a complete “collectivisation” of agriculture. «From the local authorities Stalin demanded extraordinary measures against the kulaks: the search of barns, blocking roads to prevent the kulaks from transporting their grain for sale on the free market, the confiscation of their grain, and the sale of 25 % of the confiscated agricultural produce to poor peasants at a low price»[6].
On the 28th of February, Pyatakov submitted a statement requesting reinstatement in the party. N. Krestinsky and V. Antonov-Ovseyenko followed suit. The departure from the opposition did not affect only prominent figures. Between 1926 and early 1928, 3,381 people declared their break from the opposition. In February 1928, a further 614 people joined them.
For Pyatakov, who had long served as chairman of the Central Committee for Concessions and deputy chairman of VSNKh, the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy, the long-awaited changes to the economic programme were sufficient reason to return to the VKP(b) and turn a blind eye to the fact that no changes had taken place either in the sphere of democracy inside the party or in international policy. Later, the same motivation would force the economists Smilga and Preobrazhensky to capitulate, having returned to the party in 1929.
As early as the end of 1924, Preobrazhensky’s book “The New Economy” was published. In it, he theorised about the «law of initial socialist accumulation», asserting that the country had only one powerful source of funds for an industrial leap forward – the village. This involved an «unequal exchange» between agriculture and industry with the aim of accelerating the latter’s development. The nationalisation of heavy industry inevitably leads to a planned economy and rapid industrialisation, he believed, and Stalin, having adopted the “left-wing course”, found himself bound by this necessity and would have to follow this path further and further. Trotsky did not accept the “left-wing course”, as it did not include any relaxation of the internal party regime – the dissidents remained in exile. Opposition groups resumed their activities in the central regions of Russia, the Urals, Ukraine and the North Caucasus. According to Yaroslavsky, all this activity was coordinated from Moscow by the «General Secretary of the Trotskyists», Boris Eltsin.[7] But the real centre linking the colonies of exiles and the emerging opposition groups was Alma-Ata. Between April and October 1928, more than 1,000 letters and 700 telegrams arrived there by legal channels alone. From there, Trotsky sent 800 political letters and 550 telegrams.[8]
But Stalin’s regime did not confine itself to changes in economic policy: in 1928, a campaign was launched against the “right wing deviation” and a struggle “against bureaucratism and degeneration” among party members. People in the country began to speak of the Smolensk and Artemovsk “ulcers”. An article entitled “The Smolensk Abscess” was published in the Pravda on May 12. It concerned the “Katushka” factory, where, out of over 500 workers, 200 were Party members and a further 80 were in the Komsomol. Despite this overwhelming proportion of Communist membership, the foremen extorted bribes from the workers in the form of vodka, snacks and money, and from the female workers… their bodies. Commenting on this article, a Decist named Stepan writes from exile to his unknown correspondent: «The author of the article […] never tires of repeating: unbelievable, unheard of, unprecedented. What vile hypocrisy! Is [this] really a rare exception, unbelievable and unprecedented? Nothing of the sort. After all, what you write about your factory is in many ways very similar to what took place at “Katushka”. And how many reports do we read – even in the official press – in which the same facts are revealed. And every time they are spoken of as exceptions, and they are called unbelievable, unheard of, unprecedented».
Fighting abscesses to prevent gangrene is a necessity for any organism, including the Stalinist state, and the need to fill the state treasury inevitably forces shifts in economic policy.
In 1927, a grain procurement crisis erupted in the country. On the private market, bread prices began to rise rapidly, and the acute shortage led to a reduction in exports: from 2.177 million tonnes of grain in 1926–1927 to 344,400 tonnes in 1927–1928. As a result, to ensure food supplies for the cities, 248,200 tonnes of grain had to be imported, costing 27.5 million roubles in foreign currency. This jeopardised the programme for importing machinery and equipment – the foundation of industrialisation.
This was the actual substance of the shift in the ‘general line’ of the VKP(b), which many exiled dissidents greeted either with jubilation or with delighted surprise, believing that their predictions had been confirmed. There was also hope that they would be called back into the party. This did indeed happen: given the limited number of trained cadres, the Stalinist leadership was prepared to welcome the repentant oppositionists into its suffocating embrace, albeit not to their former leadership posts, but to positions of a lower rank.
Conciliators were a mass phenomenon in Trotskyism, but the opposition to the Bolshevik-Leninists, as they called themselves, was not limited to them. While Radek wrote to Preobrazhensky in May 1928 that the “centre”, that is, the Stalinist leadership, should not be «regarded as the enemy» as long as it «moves to the left», and that one should «cast aside bitterness», Rakovsky, a member of Trotsky’s inner circle, like many of his like-minded comrades among the so-called irreconcilables, wrote from exile: «I consider any reform of the party that relies on the party bureaucracy to be a utopia».
From this, the Irreconcilables concluded: the “left course” was some kind of manoeuvre, a zigzag by the Stalinist group.
Whilst in exile on 6 August 1928, Rakovsky wrote a short piece, less than 20 pages long, entitled “Letter to G. B. Valentinov”. It was addressed to the author of the text “Reflections on the Masses”, well-known among the opposition, the former editor-in-chief of the newspaper Trud, who had signed the “Declaration of the 83” and was expelled from the party and exiled in 1927. Rakovsky’s work is the first in which the opposition attempted to analyse the phenomenon of party and Soviet bureaucracy. In it, he writes that this is a phenomenon of the «new order» and a «new sociological category», the study of which warrants a treatise in its own right.[9] Thanks to the passivity of the party masses and the working class, the bureaucracy usurps power. The new social stratum breaks away, at least in part, from the workers. This, in essence, is where Rakovsky’s reflections end – he does not answer the question of which class the bureaucracy belongs to.
Discussions regarding the nature of bureaucracy, the class character of the “Stalinist Thermidor”, and the stage it had reached were a constant feature within opposition circles. Whilst for most Trotskyists the Thermidor was not yet over, for the Decists it had already been fully realised. Hence their differences in tactics. «I am in favour of a bloc with the centre, or that part of it which will take up the fight against Thermidor», wrote Radek in March 1929. In early 1928, Trotsky wrote the programmatic document “On the New Stage”, the first point of which is entitled “The Danger of Thermidor”. In the article “Old Mistakes on the New Stage”, the Decists point to the «half-heartedness» of such an assessment, drawing attention to the fact that «until it has consolidated its de facto rule, the bourgeoisie may, for the time being, restrict itself to formal political rights and delegate these rights to the bureaucracy. […] The authors of the document […] do not dare to call a spade a spade and draw the necessary political conclusions. […] Denying Thermidor as a real fact – is this not helping the apparatus to mask the counter-revolution?».
Whilst for the Decists, who had concluded that the counter-revolution had come to an end, there was no alternative but to organise and fight against Stalinism, those who believed that Thermidor was still ongoing clung to illusory hopes of yet another “left turn”. In the second half of 1930, those who welcomed wholesale “collectivisation” and the rapid pace of industrialisation began to break away from the opposition. After 1930, the ideas of conciliation continued to bring individual Trotskyists back from exile, but no longer on the same mass scale as before.
Another inevitable consequence of conciliation was that the irreconcilable section of the Trotskyists, both in exile and at liberty, began to show solidarity with the Decists, and at times even joined them. The OGPU noted that both factions had repeatedly held talks on joint action and a possible merger. In particular, Vladimir Kosior, brother of Stanislav Kosior, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolsheviks), conducted such negotiations on behalf of the irreconcilable Trotskyists with the Decists in March 1928. However, among the Decists, a negative attitude towards the prospect of a merger with the Left Opposition prevailed, stemming from their rejection of the “reformist nature” of Trotsky’s tactics. Particularly serious differences emerged regarding strikes. Whilst Trotsky’s supporters considered it necessary to prevent strikes, the Decists set themselves the task of actively participating in them and, where possible, leading them. In the Decists’ practical work, secrecy became increasingly important (code words, ciphers, secret addresses, secret writing, meeting places, etc.). Arrangements were made for those facing arrest to go underground.
However, even among the irreconcilable Trotskyists there were those who were increasingly turning to open struggle against the Stalinists – a separate article will be devoted to them and their activities. For now, let us focus on how and on what grounds the Decists criticised Trotsky and his followers.
In August 1928, Yakov Agranov, deputy head of the OGPU’s Secret Department, passed on to Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, secretary of the Party Collegium of the Central Control Commission – whose duties at the time included combating the opposition – a document circulating among the Decists entitled “On Thermidor and Centrism”, which offered the following assessment: «Centrism is the main danger to the working class, the principal obstacle in its struggle against the bourgeoisie. Centrism is particularly dangerous for the opposition, not so much because of prison and exile, but because of the so-called “leftist course”. The most important and pressing issue for the opposition at present is the question of the class character of the current regime. Ambiguity and vagueness, and even more so falsehood, on this issue constitute the main danger to the opposition movement, the principal source of the oppositionists’ uncertainty and instability […]. […] anyone who sees Stalin’s attempts to crack down on the kulaks as a move towards a left-wing proletarian line is gravely mistaken; they fail to see the other side of Stalin’s line, the intensifying pressure on the workers, the persecution of the opposition, and the expulsion of all opposition supporters from foreign Communist parties and the Comintern».
In short, Trotsky’s main mistake lay in his failure to recognise the capitalist nature of Stalin’s state, which resulted in a centrist tactical approach that remains a defining feature of Trotskyists to this day.
THE ABCs OF REVOLUTION
On the 6th of October 1928, Vladimir Smirnov, one of the leaders of the Decists, sent a letter to his comrade Taras Kharetsko. It is well worth quoting at length: «Trotsky continues to pursue his vacillating line, […] even imprisonment and exile for himself and his closest associates have not cured him of these illusions. […] Trotsky’s entire line, from 1923 onwards, was […] that the opposition, together with the majority of the Central Committee (i.e. together with the so-called “centrists”), would fight against the “right-wing danger”. He expressed this […] at the Central Committee plenum in February 1927, and he now refers to this speech, as the basis of the Trotskyists’ tactical line, in almost every letter and document. […] To frighten the “centrists” with the danger from the right, to eagerly await “the blow of the right-wing tail against the centrist head”, to support this head […], to dream of a bloc with it […] – such is Trotsky’s tactic. What is this position called? A thoroughly centrist one, which stakes its hopes not on the struggle against the opportunists for its own line, but on a split among the opportunists […].
[…] In 1923, Trotsky frightened the Central Committee by claiming that if it did not yield to the opposition, anti-party currents would develop within the party. Instead of making concessions, the Central Committee stifled the party. Now Trotsky is threatening it that if the Central Committee does not yield now, the workers will “go beyond the limits of the Bolshevik Party and the dictatorship of the proletariat”. […] Indeed, fear of the only force one can rely on can only lead to impotence!
[…] And now it is time to examine what exactly constitutes this “internationalism” that Trotsky constantly holds up for display, and for our disagreement with which Sosnovsky accuses us of “cooling towards the international revolution”, of “the theory of opposition in a single country” and of “Stalinism in reverse”. In reality, Trotsky’s “internationalism” is merely an essential component of his entire centrist line.
[…] What does this “international perspective” consist of in domestic matters? “The internal development of the USSR and the ruling party”, writes Trotsky, “fully reflected […] the change in the international situation, serving as a clear refutation of the new reactionary theories of the isolated development of socialism in a single country. The course of the internal leadership was, of course, the same as that of the ECCI: centrism, sliding to the right” .
[…] “The well-known disillusionment with the international revolution”, Trotsky continues, “which had partly gripped the masses, pushed the central leadership towards purely national perspectives, which found their lamentable expression in the theory of socialism in one country”. Under the influence of these purely national perspectives, “the official leadership increasingly drifted towards the position of isolated, self-sufficient economic development”. As a result, “the question of the pace of our economic development was not raised by our leadership at all”. By failing to raise the question of pace, “we were losing momentum due to a false economic approach”. At the same time, there was already a “systematic loss of momentum in matters of the international revolution”, caused by “the centrists’ inability to assess the revolutionary situation and capitalise on it at the right moment”. But “the question of timing is the decisive question in any struggle” and, having missed it, we entered “a period of temporary, certainly, but profound weakening of the positions of the international revolution”.
All this is not only international in nature, but also dialectical: cause and effect constantly switch places: the leadership of the ECCI and the Central Committee of the RCP missed the revolutionary situation in Germany and led to the defeat of the German revolution. Then – the reverse effect of the consequence on the cause: the defeat of the revolution in Germany causes the leadership of the Central Committee of the RCP to lose faith in the world revolution. In its grief, it constructs the theory of socialism in one country, overlooks the question of the pace of our own construction, and becomes definitively centrist. Then – once again, the reverse effect of the consequence on the cause: due to the inability of centrism to assess the revolutionary situation, it misses the pace in the international movement as well – the revolutionary situation in England and China is missed. The result is a “profound weakening of the world revolution”. And the “culmination of the gigantic shift in the balance of world forces in recent years”, as stated in the letter of 9/V, was the defeat of the opposition here. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis – all in order.
There is one problem: as Marxists, we are accustomed to explaining changes in the political situation by changes in the balance of classes and the struggle between them. Yet, for Trotsky, all dialectical interaction takes place between the “world situation” and the minds of those who lead the ECCI and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party. Trotsky reproaches the Central Committee for the fact that “the official faction in 1923 discarded class criteria, operating with such concepts as the peasantry in general”. The criticism is valid. But what can be said of Trotsky himself, from whose “international perspective” even “the peasantry in general” had vanished, even the proletariat, and in whose entire chapter entitled “The Policy of 1923–26”, mentions in only one place “the pressure of new class strata, formed on the basis of the NEP, linked to the state apparatus, who wish not to be hindered in their rise and not illuminated by Lenin’s torch”?
[…] The dialectic of class struggle was missing from Trotsky’s work. But then, Trotsky’s entire “dialectic” is not Marxist dialectic, even though the term “international” was repeated every other word in his arguments. That the modern economy has long since outgrown national boundaries, that it has already become a global economy – no ideologue of the bourgeoisie would deny this. Nor would it occur to anyone to deny that, as a result, the political situation in every country is most closely linked to the political situation in other countries. However, Marxism differs from these general principles in that, from its perspective, the economy does not determine the political situation directly, but rather through class struggle. The class struggle of the proletariat is, first and foremost, a struggle against its own bourgeoisie. This follows from the simple fact that the bourgeoisie has not created and cannot create a world state, and that the state – the instrument of the bourgeoisie’s class rule – is a national state. In this sense, if you like, the class struggle is a “nationally limited” struggle.
[…] Only those who, in their pursuit of “internationalism”, have forgotten the ABCs of revolution could accuse us of “departing from the international standpoint” or of “Stalinism in reverse” for reminding them of this elementary truth. It is not the proletariat of a single country, but that of every country, that fights against its own bourgeoisie. And since the foundations of the bourgeoisie’s exploitation of the proletariat are the same in all countries, and since the basic features and forms of bourgeois rule are the same in all countries, the experience of the proletariat’s struggle in every country is an international experience. Furthermore, having set itself the task of eliminating the contradiction between the social character of production and private ownership of the means of production, the proletariat, in the course of resolving this task, must inevitably also eliminate the second contradiction – that between the global character of production and the national-state organisation of its parts. Moreover, the economies of, if not all countries, then at least entire groups of countries (such as the European nations) are so closely intertwined that a victory of the proletariat in one country cannot fail to cause profound upheavals in the economies of neighbouring countries – upheavals which sharply accelerate the onset of a revolutionary situation there. The proletariat’s struggle, which is “nationally limited” (due to the national fragmentation of the world economy), inevitably and very rapidly transcends national boundaries, breaks down state borders, and can only be brought to a conclusion – the building of socialism – on a global scale.
All this is elementary. But it follows from this elementary truth that, as long as the class structure of society remains, and as long as the division of the world economy into nation-state parts remains, one cannot say, as Trotsky does, that “the internal development of the USSR (or any other country) fully reflects the international situation”. Quite apart from the utter vagueness of a concept such as the “international situation”, it is perfectly clear that the political development of an individual country is determined by the “international situation” (and does not reflect it) not directly, but through changes in the balance of class forces, through the class struggle within that country. Our economy is not an isolated economy. It is part of the global economy; it plays a specific role within the global economy. Changes in the global economy are altering this role, and they are also altering the class relations that are formed on the basis of it. But the political situation here, the policy of the USSR, is determined by these class relations in our country.
[…] It is tedious to spell out these elementary truths. But what can one do, if, according to Trotsky, the “reflection of the international situation on the internal development of the USSR” consists in the fact that the defeat of the German revolution “reflected” on Bukharin, Stalin and others with “disillusionment” in the world revolution, that under the influence of this disillusionment they devised the theory of socialism in one country, failed to consider the relationship between the pace of our development and that of the world, lost the pace, and so on. What can one do when, under the guise of a “genuinely Leninist”, “international” point of view, smooth-sounding gibberish about internationalism is presented?
What, however, is the objective meaning of this chatter? It lies in the fact that behind the “subtle” analysis of how the notorious “international situation” settles “in the minds of the vanguard or the vanguard of the vanguard” (letter 9/V), they “forget” to analyse how the ideology of our “nationally limited” classes – whose interests are expressed by the “erroneous” theories of this vanguard – is reflected in the minds of this “vanguard”.
[…] its “international” viewpoint is merely a plausible cover for its centrist policy, which strives hard to portray the opportunists as misguided revolutionaries, whereas in reality they are renegades of communism and traitors to the revolution. With such an international perspective, we naturally cannot have anything in common.
[…] The Bolshevik Party was forged in the struggle not only against the outright right-wingers – the “economists” and “liquidators” – but also against centrists of every stripe, in all their various shades. It could not have been otherwise: it was only thanks to the centrists that the outright right-wingers were able, during the dark days of reaction, to recruit supporters among the workers; it was only the centrists’ left-wing rhetoric that could confuse – sometimes for a long time – honest and devoted revolutionaries.
Trotsky is now playing the role of such a centrist».
June – July 2025
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- Dune (Ivanov), E. Democratic Centralism // The Trotsky Archive. Kharkiv, 2001. Vol. 2. p. 391. ↑
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- Ibid. ↑
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- Ibid. p. 392. ↑
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- Ibid. pp. 392–393. ↑
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- Ibid. p. 392. ↑
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- Felštinsky, Yu., and G. Chernyavsky. Lev Trotsky: Volume 3. The Oppositionist. 1923–1929. Moscow, 2013. p. 191. ↑
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- Yaroslavsky, E. M. The Dead Walk Fast // Beyond the Final Boundary. Moscow; Leningrad, 1930. p. 159. ↑
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- Deutscher, I. Trotsky in Exile. Moscow, 1991. p. 14. ↑
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- Letter from H. G. Rakovsky on the causes of the degeneration of the party and the state apparatus // “The Betrayed Revolution” Today. Moscow, 1992. p. 55. ↑