Here Trotsky tears deeper into Stalin's degenerate state. But he does not pretend that the correct path is simply a matter of wand-waving wizardry.
The "Complete Triumph of Socialism" and the "Reinforcement of the Dictatorship"
(aka ridiculous, unmarxist (stalinist), revisionist doublespeak)
There have been several announcements during recent years of the "complete triumph" of socialism in the Soviet Union—taking especially categorical forms in connection with the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” On January 30, 1931, Pravda, interpreting a speech of Stalin, said: "During the second five-year period, the last relics of capitalist elements in our economy will be liquidated." (Italics ours.) From the point of view of this perspective, the state ought conclusively to die away during the same period, for where the "last relics" of capitalism are liquidated the state has nothing to do.
"The Soviet power," says the program of the Bolshevik party on this subject, "openly recognizes the inevitability of the class character of every state, so long as the division of society into classes, and therewith all state power, has not completely disappeared.”
However, when certain incautious Moscow theoreticians attempted, from the liquidation of the "last relics" of capitalism taken on faith, to infer they dying away of the state, the bureaucracy immediately declared such theories "counterrevolutionary.”
Where lies the theoretical mistake of the bureaucracy—in the basic premise or the conclusion? In the one and the other.
Human Welfare -- Alien To The DoubleSpeaking Brute -- But Not Forgotten
On March 1, 1936, in a conversation with Roy Howard, Stalin offered a new definition of the Soviet regime:
“That social organization which we have created may be called a Soviet socialist organization, still not wholly completed, but at root a socialist organization of society.”
In this purposely vague definition there are almost as many contradictions as there are words. The social organization is called "Soviet socialist", but the Soviets are a form of state, and socialism is a social regime. These designations are not only not identical but, from the point of view of our interest, antagonistic. Insofar as the social organization has become socialistic, the soviets ought to drop away like the scaffolding after a building is finished. Stalin introduces a correction: Socialism is "still not wholly completed.” What does "not wholly" mean? By 5 per cent, or by 75 per cent? This they do not tell us, just as they do not tell us what they mean by an organization of society that is "socialistic at root.” Do they mean forms of property or technique? The very mistiness of the definition, however, implies a retreat from the immeasurably more categorical formula of 1931-35. A further step along the same road would be to acknowledge that the "root" of every social organization is the productive forces, and that the Soviet root is just what is not mighty enough for the socialist trunk and for its leafage: human welfare.
After a very depressing chapter about the real difficulties facing the Soviet Union at the time and a chilling picture of the miserable regime at the helm... Trotsky reminds us what we are fighting for.
Onward!
Logged
