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SOCIALISM FROM BELOW
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by David McNally
International Socialist Organisation

<from back cover>: Socialism is a new society of freedom--or it is
nothing. This is the central argument of this pamphlet. Tracing the fate
of revolutionary socialism through the past 100 years, David McNally
shows that there are two currents in the socialist tradition. One is
Rsocialism from aboveS, that of the Rleave to usS reformers in the West
and the anti-democratic bureaucracies of the East. Neither has brought
the world any closer to socialism. The other is Rsocialism from belowS,
the living tradition of workersS struggle which has been hidden in the
years of compromise and betrayal. With world capitalism again in deep
political and economic crisis, humanity stands in desperate need of this
tradition, of a transformation of the world order from below.

CONTENTS:

Introduction: The Crisis of Socialism
1: The Dream of Freedom
2: Birth of the Socialist Idea
3: The Myth of Anarchist RLibertarianismS
4: Marxism:--Socialism from Below
5: From Marx to Lenin
6: International Socialism or State Capitalism?
7: Leon Trotsky and beyond
8: Socialism from Below Today
Sources for further reading

INTRODUCTION:THE CRISIS OF SOCIALISM

SOCIALISM TODAY is in crisis. Once the banner under which millions of
working people resisted the horrors of the factory system and demanded a
new society of equality, justice, freedom and prosperity, socialism has
become identified in the modern world with monstrous, bureaucratic
regimes that deny even the most elementary democratic rights.

At its birth, socialism promised the emancipation of labour, a society
founded on workers' control in which work would be transformed from
drudgery done in the pursuit of profit to collective activity done in
the service of human needs. Yet workers in the 'socialist states' today
cry out against the same kind of alienation and dehumanisation denounced
by the earliest critics of industrial capitalism. Indeed, so demeaned
have workers become in the world's largest 'communist' country, China,
that the Chinese government has offered to lease out its labourers to
western corporations, promising docility and labour discipline in
exchange for foreign currency. Meanwhile, all the states of Eastern
Europe, the Soviet Union included, have seen the emergence of mass
workers' movements that are demanding basic rights and freedoms. Such
working class resistance has exposed the pretence of the claims by these
regimes to be workers' states that are charting the course to a new
society of freedom.

In a world plagued by violence and war, socialism upheld the banner of
world peace and internationalism, of an end to military conflict between
the world's peoples. Today, self-proclaimed socialist nations such as
Vietnam and China are waging war with one another, creating human
tragedies that were once attributed exclusively to capitalism. At the
same time, Russia and China have placed hundreds of thousands of troops
on each other's borders, contributing to the increase in military
tensions around the globe.

The power of the socialist vision has always been that it offered for
the first time in the history of humanity a realistic means of
overcoming alienation and exploitation, inhumanity and misery, violence
and war. Yet, if nearly half the world is socialist and at the same time
plagued by these ills, then the very meaning of socialism is put into
question. Is socialism to be identified with liberation or oppression?
peace or war? abundance or poverty? freedom or totalitarianism? These
are the basic questions at the root of the contemporary crisis of the
meaning of socialism.

To most of the people of the world today, the word 'socialism' has
become a source of confusion. Called upon to assess the role of
socialism in the modern world, reporters for Time magazine were forced
to conclude in a 1978 special report that

'Socialism is a flag of convenience that accommodates technocrats and
market-minded economists, that allows fascist-type dictators or small-
time Bonapartes to perpetuate themselves in power ... socialism has
become a word appropriated by so many different champions and causes
that it threatens to become meaningless ...'.

Yet if ever an effort was needed to establish the meaning of socialism
it is today. The world is once again threatened by a return to
depression, to poverty and suffering on a massive scale. The threat of
war--and, with it, of human annihilation--is greater than at any time in
the past thirty years. Mass struggles for an end to old forms of
oppression are sweeping countries as different as Poland and El
Salvador, South Africa and Brazil. As we enter the second half of the
crisis-ridden 1980s, it is becoming a necessity to determine whether the
original vision of socialism--of a world society under the democratic
control of those who produce the world's wealth and services--holds any
validity; to determine whether it offers humanity any hope of escape
from poverty, war and oppression; indeed, to determine whether it offers
any meaningful chance of human survival.

This pamphlet is an attempt to do precisely that. It is written in the
conviction that, if we are to understand the crisis of socialism in the
modern world, we must begin by understanding how the socialist idea
first emerged in the nineteenth century and how it has taken shape--how
it may have been developed or distorted--in the course of the mighty
events of the twentieth century. It is also written in the conviction
that the heart and soul of socialism is the struggle for human freedom
and that now, more than ever before, humanity stands in desperate need
of a genuinely socialist transformation of the world order.

l:THE DREAM OF FREEDOM

THE DREAM of human freedom is as old as class society itself. So long as
one section of society has been held down and exploited by another, some
men and women have dreamt, spoken and written about the possibility of a
new kind of life. And sometimes they have fought to break the chains of
domination that have tied them to a life of drudgery and misery. We can
find hints of this dream of freedom in the oldest of historical
documents. The Old Testament of the Bible, for example, promises the
coming of the messiah who will vanquish the rich and liberate the poor.
Take the following passage from the Book of Isaiah, for instance, where
it is proclaimed that the messiah would come  ' to preach good tidings
to the meek ... to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to
the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.' In
the same vein, the New Testament announced that Jesus was this messiah
who had come to emancipate the poor and the oppressed.

Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, the legend persisted that some day
a new liberator would come to slay the sinful rich and free the poor.
When peasants rose in rebellion against their lords and masters,
particularly during the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
they continually looked for a powerful leader appointed by God who would
lead them into a new promised land.

All of these movements of popular rebellion had strongly religious
overtones. People did not conceive of themselves as having the capacity
together to overthrow their rulers and to build a new society out of
their own efforts. They looked to a mystical, not a human,
transformation of society. It would be God, through the agency of
certain human beings, who would cleanse the world of evil, violence and
oppression.

This essentially mystical outlook persisted even up to the mighty
struggles against the monarchy during the English Revolution of the
1640s. These struggles saw the emergence of powerful communist doctrine
based on the notion that all people should own and work the land in
common. The radical English writer Gerard Winstanley wrote, for example,
that 'True freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth.' At the same
time, Winstanley and his radical followers adhered to a religious view
of things in which the birth of a new society would be the work, not of
ordinary men and women, but of God.

It was not until the early nineteenth century that the idea began to
emerge that human beings could themselves refashion society. It was only
with the industrial revolution and the emergence of the modern working
class that critics of society began to think in terms of a human
transformation of social life. And it was with these developments that
the idea of socialism from below emerged. But at the start, socialism
was largely elitist and antidemocratic in character. It was only through
several decades of working class struggle that socialism took the form
of a movement devoted to the self-emancipation of the oppressed.

2:BIRTH OF THE SOCIALIST IDEA

THE TERM 'SOCIALISM' made its appearance in print in England in 1827.
Five years later, the term was used for the first time in a French
publication. It is no accident that the socialist idea --and the
socialist movement--first appeared in England and France. For socialism
was a product of two revolutions in human affairs, each with their
respective roots in those two countries: the industrial revolution in
England and the popular-democratic revolution in France.

The great French revolution of 1789-1799 involved the most massive
popular struggles that had yet been seen in history. Rooted in popular
hatred of an oppressive monarchy, the revolution rose on the backs of
the masses of poor people in Paris who united under the banner of
'liberty, equality and brotherhood'. Beginning as a rebellion against
the abuses of the monarchy, the revolution grew into a massive challenge
to all forms of oppressive authority-- whether it was that of lords,
priests or factory owners. Initially, the battle against the monarchy
unified large sections of society. As the revolution advanced, however,
a new ruling group tried to halt the process in order to maintain their
grossly unequal system of property and power. As a result, the popular
movement divided into conservative and revolutionary camps.

In the conservative camp were those who saw freedom simply in terms of
the freedom to own property. In the revolutionary camp were those who
represented the Paris poor and who recognised that freedom was
impossible without equality; that it was meaningless to talk of liberty
if this was confined to the right of some men and women to starve to
death while others grew rich off the labour of others. As the radical
leader Jacques Roux put it at the height of the French Revolution in
1793:

'Liberty is no more than an empty shell when one class of men is allowed
to condemn another to starvation without any measures being taken
against them. And equality is also an empty shell when the rich, by
exercising their economic monopolies, have the power of life or death
over other members of the community.'.

Out of the French Revolution, then, emerged the essential socialist idea
that democracy and freedom require a society of equality. The French
radicals recognised that genuine freedom presupposed the liberty of all
to participate equally in producing and sharing the wealth of society.
They understood that if some had the unequal right to own and monopolise
land, wealth or factories, then others might just as unequally be
condemned to a life of drudgery, misery and poverty.

But a society of equality requires a state of abundance. So long as
economic life remains relatively backward, equality can only mean the
common hardship of shared poverty. A healthy and thriving popular
democracy requires a state of prosperity in which all the basic needs of
people can be satisfied. Without a certain level of economic
development, therefore, the French revolutionaries' demand for liberty
and equality remained utopian. It was only with the enormous economic
development unleashed by the industrial revolution in England that a
society based upon equality and abundance became a realistic
possibility.

The English industrial revolution conjures up images of dark and dirty
textile mills, of ten-year-old children labouring in coal mines, of
women and men working 12 and 14-hour days--in short, of suffering and
misery. Such an image is largely correct. The industrial revolution that
swept Britain, beginning in the last quarter of the eighteenth century,
was a massive dislocation in social life: old communities were
destroyed; people were forced off the land and into the tyranny of the
factory; industrial diseases multiplied; hunger, poverty and illness
spread; life expectancy fell. At the same time, however, several
ingredients of the industrial revolution held out the prospect of an end
to these ills. The new machinery of production that developed,
especially during the early 1800s, offered the possibility of sharply
reducing drudgery and toil and of massively increasing the production of
wealth so as to eliminate poverty forever.

In reality, the industrial revolution did no such thing. Rather than
leading to an improvement in the conditions of labour, the new industry
was used to increase the fortunes of a few--the new industrial
capitalists. Nonetheless, some writers saw in the industrial revolution
an enormous potential for improving the human condition. Even some well-
intentioned bankers and factory owners came to believe that the forces
of the industrial revolution should be harnessed to serve human ends.
Many of these become early advocates of what has become known as
'utopian socialism'.

Britain's best known utopian socialist was the cotton manufacturer
Robert Owen. Like most of the early socialists drawn from the capitalist
class, Owen did not call for a mass, democratic restructuring of
society. For Owen, the working class was a pathetic and pitiful group.
Owen's socialism was based on appealing to wealthy leaders of business
and government in order to persuade them to improve the wretched
conditions of the labouring masses.

In this respect, Owen was similar to the two earliest French utopian
socialists, Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier. Saint-Simon was a
real estate speculator turned banker who rose to great wealth in the
decades after the French Revolution. Fascinated by the enormous
potential of science and technology, Saint-Simon began to argue the case
for a 'socialist' society that would eliminate the disorderly aspects of
capitalism. Saint-Simon's 'socialism' was decidedly anti-democratic. He
did not envisage an expansion of human rights and freedoms. Instead, he
hoped for a planned and modernised industrial society ruled over by an
international committee of bankers. In many respects, Saint-Simon
anticipated the development of state capitalism; he looked forward to a
capitalist system in which industry would be owned and directed by a
government made up of a scientists, managers and financiers.

The socialism of Charles Fourier had more to commend it. A self-taught
eccentric, Fourier developed some highly original ideas. But Fourier's
outlook suffered from two main defects. First, he dismissed the
potential of modern industry for bringing into being a society of
abundance and looked nostalgically for a return to preindustrial
conditions of life. Secondly, Fourier looked not to the masses of
working people but to enlightened rulers to usher in the socialist
utopia. He spent his time drawing up rigid blueprints for the new
society and sent copies to rulers like the Czar of Russia and the
President of the United States.

Indeed, this is the common thread that runs through the outlook of all
the early utopian socialists. Each of them looked to some well-
intentioned members of the ruling class to bring about a socialist
transformation of society. Each rejected the notion that socialism could
only be achieved democratically--through the. mass action of working
people. For this reason, all their views car be described as variants of
socialism from above--a view in which the masses of people are mere
playthings of an enlightened elite who will change society in the
interests of the masses of people. A the historian of socialism, George
Lichtheim, has put it:

'French socialism, at the start, was the work of men who had n thought
of overturning society, but wished to reform it, by enlightened
legislation if possible. This is the link between Robe Owen, Charles
Fourier, and Henri de Saint-Simon.'.

There was, however, one revolutionary doctrine of socialism during this
period. This consisted of what can best be called conspiratorial
communism. Out of the defeat of the popular struggles of the French
Revolution, one far-sighted group of rebel centered around a man named
Gracchus Babeuf, developed a communist perspective. Babeuf and his
followers believed that true democracy could only be constructed on the
basis of common ownership of wealth. But they could see no way of
winning a majority of society to support their communist programme. The
masses of French people sought little else than protection of their own
private property--their plot of land or their workshop. They showed
little interest in a socialist transformation of society. For this
reason, Babeuf--and his later follower, Adolphe Blanqui-- could only
conceive of a revolution made by a minority, the communist elite. As a
result, democracy remained foreign to their socialist programme as well.

3:THE MYTH OF ANARCHIST LIBERTARIANISM

ANOTHER RADICAL doctrine developed during the period of the 1830s--
anarchism. Anarchism is often considered to represent current of radical
thought that is truly democratic and libertarian. It is hailed in some
quarters as the only true political philosophy freedom. The reality is
quite different. From its inception anarchism has been a profoundly
anti-democratic doctrine. Indeed the two most important founders of
anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Michael Bakunin, developed
theories that were elitist and authoritarian to the core. While later
anarchists may have abandoned some of the excesses' of their founding
fathers their philosophy remains hostile to ideas of mass democracy and
workers' power.

It is certainly true that anarchism developed in opposition to the
growth of capitalist society. What's more, anarchist hostility to
capitalism centered on defence of the liberty of the individual. But the
liberty defended by the anarchists was not the freedom of the working
class to make collectively a new society. Rather, anarchism defended the
freedom of the small property owner--the shopkeeper, artisan and
tradesman--against the encroachments of large-scale capitalist
enterprise. Anarchism represented the anguished cry of the small
property owner against the inevitable advance of capitalism. For that
reason, it glorified values from the past: individual property, the
patriarchal family, racism.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, widely proclaimed 'the father of anarchism', is
a case in point. A printer by vocation, Proudhon strongly opposed the
emergence of capitalism in France. But Proudhon's opposition to
capitalism was largely backward-looking in character. He did not look
forward to a new society founded upon communal property which would
utilise the greatest inventions of the industrial revolution. Instead,
Proudhon considered small, private property the basis of his utopia. His
was a doctrine designed not for the emerging working class, but for the
disappearing petit bourgeoisie of craftsmen, small traders and rich
peasants. In fact Proudhon so feared the organised power of the
developing working class that he went so far as to oppose trade unions
and support police strike-breaking.

Worst still, he violently opposed democracy. 'All this democracy
disgusts me', he wrote. And his notes for an ideal society involved the
suppression of elections, of a free press, and of public meetings of
more than 20 people. He looked forward to a 'general inquisition' and
the condemnation of 'several million people' to forced labour. The
masses, he wrote are 'only savages ... whom it is our duty to civilise,
and without making them our sovereign.'

Consistent with this outlook, Proudhon supported nearly every backward-
looking cause available to him. He was a rabid racist reserving his
greatest hatred for Jews, whose 'extermination' he advocated. He opposed
emancipation for the American blacks and backed the cause of the
southern slave owners during the American Civil War. Likewise, he
denounced women's liberation, writing that 'For woman liberty and well-
being lie solely in marriage, in motherhood, in domestic duties ...'

George Lichtheim, in his book The Origins of Socialism, has written
quite accurately that

'It is difficult to name a single author, alive or dead, of whom
Proudhon ever found anything good to say. His other crochets included
antisemitism, Anglophobia, tolerance for slavery (he publicly sided with
the South during the American civil war), dislike of Germans, Italians,
Poles--indeed of all non-French nationalities--and a firmly patriarchal
view of family life ... After this it comes as no surprise that he
believed in inherent inequalities among the races or that he regarded
women as inferior beings.'

The Russian 'father of anarchism', Michael Bakunin, shared most of
Proudhon's views. Indeed, Bakunin was fond of claiming to his fellow
anarchists that 'Proudhon is the master of us all'. Bakunin shared his
master's anti-semitism--he was convinced that the Jews had constructed
an international conspiracy that included Karl Marx and the wealthy
Rothschild family. He was a Great Russian chauvinist convinced that the
Russians were ordained to lead humanity into anarchist utopia. And what
that utopia might have looked like is hinted at by Bakunin's
organisational methods, which were overwhelmingly elitist and
authoritarian. As one historian has written of Bakunin,

'The International Brotherhood he founded in Naples in 1865-66 was as
conspiratorial and dictatorial as he could make it, for Bakunin's
libertarianism stopped short of the notion of permitting anyone to
contradict him. The Brotherhood was conceived on the Masonic model, with
elaborate rituals, a hierarchy, and a self-appointed directory
consisting of Bakunin and a few associates.'

These characteristics of Bakunin and Proudhon were not mere quirks of
personality. Their elitism, authoritarianism and support for backward-
looking and narrow-minded causes are rooted in the very nature of
anarchist doctrine.

Originating in the revolt of small property owners against the
centralising and collectivising trends in capitalist development (the
tendency to concentrate production in fewer and fewer large workplaces),
anarchism has always been rooted in a hostility to democratic and
collectivist practices. The early anarchists feared the organised power
of the modern working class. To this day, most anarchists defend the
'liberty' of the private individual against the democratically made
decisions of collective groups. Anarchist oppose even the most
democratic forms of collective organisation of social life. As the
Canadian anarchist writer George Woodcock explains: 'Even were democracy
possible, the anarchist would still not support it ... Anarchists do not
advocate political freedom. What they advocate is freedom from politics
..' That is to say, anarchists reject any decision-making process in
which the majority of people democratically determine the policies they
will support.

There is, however, another trend which is sometimes associated with
anarchism. This is syndicalism. The syndicalist outlook does believe in
collective working class action to change society. Syndicalists look to
trade union action--such as general strikes--to overthrow capitalism.
Although some syndicalist viewpoints share a superficial similarity with
anarchism --particularly with its hostility to politics and political
action--syndicalism is not truly a form of anarchism. By accepting the
need for mass, collective action and decision-making, syndicalism is
much superior to classical anarchism. However, by rejecting the idea of
working class political action, syndicalism has never been able to give
real direction to attempts by workers to change society.

4: MARXISM: SOCIALISM FROM BELOW

THE RADICAL THOUGHT of the 1820s and the 1830s was profoundly elitist
and anti-democratic in character. Utopian socialism was the creation of
upper-class reformers. Anarchism originated in the anti-democratic
protest of the small property owner. Conspiratorial communism conceived
of a transformation of society brought about by a select and secret
group. The programmes of social change advocated by thinkers associated
with these trends of thought did not look forward to a collective
reordering of society by the mass of the oppressed. The idea of a new
democratic order that would be created by the self-activity of ordinary
people was foreign to all of these trends of radical thought.

By the 1840s, however, a new trend in socialist thought had started to
emerge. The industrial revolution in England and France had brought into
being a new social force that was pressing for widespread change in
society. This force was the industrial working class--a class of wage-
labourers concentrated in large factories and workplaces and
increasingly inclined to resort to collective action, such as strikes,
and collective organisation, in the form of trade unions. Between the
years 1830 and 1848--which mark two separate revolutionary uprisings in
France -- the industrial working class changed the shape of European
politics.

In Britain, major strike waves had taken place in the mid-1820s. In
1834, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union was founded. Mass
strikes took place in 1842. In 1847, on-going agitation among workers
forced the government to pass the Ten Hour Bill, thus limiting the
length of the workday. In France, the years 1831 and 1834 saw strikes
and insurrections among the silk weavers of Lyons. Uprisings among
Parisian workers occurred in 1832 and 1834.

This upsurge in militant working class activity powerfully influenced
the thinking of some radical writers and organisers. Increasingly, some
socialists began to think of the working class as the group that could
change society. Indeed, a few theorists began to talk in terms of the
working class liberating itself through its collective action. Notable
in this regard was the French revolutionary woman Flora Tristan, who
linked together ideas of working class self-emancipation and women's
liberation with the proposal for a world-wide organisation of workers.
But it was in the writings and the organising of a German socialist,
Karl Marx, that the working class took centre stage in socialist
thought. Inspired by the emergence of the modern working class, Marx
developed a wholly new socialist outlook based upon the principle of
socialism from below.

Marx was the first major socialist thinker who came to socialism through
the struggle for democratic rights. As a young man in Germany during the
early 1840s, Marx edited a newspaper which supported the widespread
extension of democratic liberties. Increasingly, Marx came to the view
that the political restrictions on democracy were a result of the
economic structure of society. When the government closed down his
newspaper in 1843, Marx moved to Paris. There he encountered a vibrant
working class and socialist movement. Several years later, Marx moved to
England where he undertook a painstaking study of the nature of the
capitalist economy. Out of his experience in France and England, Marx
developed a consistently democratic and revolutionary socialist outlook.

The young Marx came increasingly to believe that no society which was
divided into exploiting employer and exploited worker could ever achieve
full democracy. So long as the capitalists held the bulk of economic
power in society, they would continue to dominate political life. Full
democracy, Marx argued, required the overcoming of class division in
society. Only then could each individual fully and equally participate
in social and political affairs. Unlike the utopian socialists, Marx
insisted that socialism had to represent a higher stage of democracy
than anything yet seen. He opposed all socialist and communist views
that involved a curtailing of democracy. As he wrote in 1847 in a
pamphlet outlining the views of a socialist grouping he was involved in:

'We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal
liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a
gigantic workhouse. There certainly are some communists who, with an
easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like
to shuffle it out of the world because they consider that it is a
hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom
for equality. We are convinced that in no social order will freedom be
assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.'

Equally important, if socialism was to represent a new society of
freedom, then it had to be achieved through a process in which people
liberated themselves. Unlike the utopian socialists who looked to an
elite to change things for the masses, Marx argued that the masses had
to free themselves. Freedom could not be conquered for and handed over
to the working masses. Socialism could only be brought into being
through the mass democratic action of the oppressed.

Marx was the first major socialist thinker to make the principle of
self-emancipation--the principle that socialism could only be brought
into being by the self-mobilisation and self-organisation of the working
class--a fundamental aspect of the socialist project. As he wrote in the
statement of aims of the First International Workingmen's Association,
'The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working
class themselves.'

Unlike the conspiratorial communists, Marx insisted that there was a
majority force in society that would bring socialism into being. He
argued that the modern working class of wage-labourers was organised in
such a way that they would be pushed, in the course of struggle, towards
socialist objectives. Through his study of English economics, Marx came
to see that capitalism had created, for the first time in human history,
an oppressed class that worked collectively in large workplaces. If this
class was to liberate itself, he pointed out, it could only do so in
common. If it was to reorganise the economic basis of society, it could
only do so in a collective fashion. If the factories, mines, mills and
offices were to be brought under the control of those who worked them,
this could be achieved only through the coordinated action of thousands
upon thousands of working people. Thus, a working class revolution would
of necessity arrive at a new form of collective economy and society in
which the means of producing wealth--the factories, mines, mills and
offices -- would be owned and managed in common by the whole of the
working class.

Such a democratic and collective society would have to be based upon the
fullest possible political democracy. Marx made this point clear from
his earliest writings. But it was only with the workers' revolution in
Paris in 1871, the revolution that established the short-lived Paris
Commune, that Marx came to see some of the forms that a workers' state,
workers' democracy, would take.

In March of 1871, the army of France admitted defeat at the hands of
Prussia. Fearing a Prussian take-over of France, the workers of Paris
rose up and took control of their city. For more than two months, the
workers ruled Paris before their uprising was drowned in blood. In order
to secure their rule, the Parisian workers took a series of popular
democratic measures. They suppressed the standing army and replaced it
with a popular militia; they established the right of the people to
recall and replace their elected representatives; they decreed that no
elected representative could earn more than the average wage of a
worker; they instituted universal male suffrage and universal education.

Marx immediately rallied to the cause of the Paris Commune. He hailed
the action of the 'heaven-stormers' of Paris. Most important, he learned
enormous lessons from the experience of the first workers' revolution.
Prior to the Paris Commune, Marx had given little thought to the form
that a workers' revolution would take. Now he drew a conclusion of
tremendous importance. The working class, he wrote, could not 'simply
lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own
purposes. ' Rather, the working class had to create an entirely new form
of state in order to secure workers' democracy and workers' power.

Marx insisted that the abolition of the standing army, free and
universal education, universal suffrage, the right to recall
representatives and limits on the salary of any elected official were
all essential elements of any workers' state. The Paris Commune, Marx
wrote was 'essentially a working class government ... the political form
at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of
labour'. Economic emancipation, the elimination of class divisions and
private ownership of the means of producing wealth, could only take
place under the direct and democratic rule of the working class through
its own state.

Marx's socialist perspective represented a thorough fusion of the idea
of mass democracy with the notion of a commonly owned and managed
economy. His work signalled an entirely new direction in socialist
thought and socialist politics. Central to Marx's socialism were two
basic principles. First, that the working class had to emancipate itself
through its own collective action. Freedom could not be given over to
the working class, it had to be conquered by the oppressed themselves.
Secondly, in order to bring about a socialist transformation of society,
the working class would have to overthrow the old state and create a
new, fully democratic, state for itself. These two principles--of self-
emancipation and of the democratic workers' state -- became the very
essence of 'Marxism', of socialism from below.

5:FROM MARX TO LENIN

OUT OF THE interaction and conflict of the various radical and
revolutionary outlooks that emerged from the dual experience of the
French revolution and the industrial revolution in England, only one
combined a passionate commitment to popular democracy and a socialised
economy with an understanding that only the working class, through its
self-activity, could bring into being a new society of freedom and
abundance. That outlook, founded on the principles of socialism from
below, was the work of Karl Marx. Yet, in the 50 years after his death
in 1883, the 'Marxist' outlook was to undergo enormous--and conflicting-
-changes.

During the 1890s world capitalism entered into a 20-year period of
prolonged economic expansion. On the tails of economic growth, most
workers were able to achieve real improvements in their living
standards. In massive numbers, workers joined trade unions and socialist
parties, many of which were influenced by Marxist ideas. In Germany, for
instance, the Social Democratic Party had one million members by 1912
and received four million votes in the general election of that year. In
a period such as this, when life is improving without resort to militant
or revolutionary struggle, people become accustomed to the notion that
life will inevitably improve in the natural course of things. Socialists
are not immune to such ideas. In fact, most European socialists at the
time came to the view that socialism would be achieved gradually,
through the slow transformation of capitalism into a kind of welfare
capitalism under which workers would prosper.

Gone was Marx's notion that socialism could only come into being through
a revolutionary transformation of society from below. In its place
developed the view that capitalism would slowly grow over into
socialism. At most, such a transition to socialism was seen as involving
little more than the election of socialist members of parliament. The
German socialist Eduard Bernstein was the most outspoken theorist of
this reformist and top-down conception of socialism. But all the major
European socialist parties of the time were influenced by this outlook.
And, in a watered down form, it remains the perspective of social
democratic parties even today.

The dominant trend in socialist thought during this period, then, was a
variant of socialism from above. Working class struggle was seen as
having little or nothing to do with the creation of a socialist society.
Instead, elected socialist officials would be entrusted to oversee the
smooth evolution of capitalism into socialism. Yet, despite the wide
influence of this doctrine, some Marxists remained committed to the idea
of socialism from below. The most important of these was the Polish
revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.

Rosa Luxemburg became a revolutionary socialist in her native Poland at
age 16. Two years later, she fled to Switzerland in order to avoid
arrest by the Polish police. After several years of study, she moved to
Germany, where she became the acknowledged leader of the left wing
inside the Social Democratic Party. While in her twenties Luxemburg
wrote several major works criticising the attempts by reformists to
strip Marxism of its democratic and revolutionary essence. Against the
reformists, Luxemburg argued that capitalism would not indefinitely
expand; that sooner or later it would revert to crisis and militarism.
The only choice for humanity therefore, was socialism or barbarism.

This prognosis was proved overwhelmingly correct with the outbreak of
world war in 1914. Nearly the entire reformist wing of European
socialism abandoned the long-established principle of opposing all wars
between capitalist nations. Instead, they reverted to crass patriotism,
each party backing their national government. Rosa Luxemburg--along with
the Russian revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky--headed the
internationalist wing of the European socialist movement, the wing that
opposed all sides in the war and called for the workers of all countries
to reject the war and overthrow 'their' national governments. By the end
of the war, working class revolutions did break out--first in Russia,
then in Germany (and later in Hungary, Austria and Italy).

Rosa Luxemburg played a central role in the German revolution of 1918-
19. And in that struggle, she passionately and insistently affirmed the
basic principles of socialism from below. Time and time again, she
argued that the working class would have to build a new world from the
burning ashes of a Europe consumed by war, hunger and poverty. The
struggle for socialism, she asserted, depends upon the fight against
exploitation and oppression in every factory and workplace. The new
society could only be created by the mass action of the working class.
Nobody could give freedom over to the working class. As she wrote at the
height of the German revolution:

'The struggle for socialism has to be fought out by the masses, by the
masses alone, breast to breast against capitalism, in every factory, by
every proletarian against his employer. Only then will it be a socialist
revolution.
'...Socialism will not and cannot be created by decrees; nor can it be
established by any government, however socialist. Socialism must be
created by the masses, by every proletarian. Where the chains of
capitalism are forged, there they must be broken. Only that is
socialism, and only thus can socialism be created.'

Tragically, the struggle of the German workers was to be crushed--by a
government composed of reformist 'socialists'. In the process of
stamping out the German workers' revolution, this same 'socialist'
government organised the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and her comrade Karl
Liebknecht. Bureaucratic and reformist socialism from above would have
nothing to do with the self-mobilisation of the masses, with the
struggle for socialism from below.

But while the revolution was defeated in Germany, this was not the case
in Russia. There, a mass socialist party--the Bolsheviks led by Lenin--
had undertaken a successful working class seizure of power.

Since 1902, Lenin had been fighting to build a genuinely revolutionary
workers' party in the adverse conditions of Czarist Russia. Unlike the
socialists in western Europe, the Russian Marxists did not have
conditions of economic prosperity and expanding political democracy to
lull them into reformist illusions. Through all the stages of their
development, the Bolsheviks retained a revolutionary outlook.

With the crisis in the socialist movement brought on by World War I
Lenin revised and developed the outlook of the Bolsheviks on two
essential points. First, he went back to the writings of Marx and Engels
on the Paris Commune and came to the conclusion--as had Rosa Luxemburg
at an earlier date--that the Marxist view of the state and of a workers'
revolution had been grossly distorted by the reformists. In his
pamphlet, State and Revolution, Lenin restated the Marxist position that
the working class would have to overthrow the bureaucratic and elitist
state developed by capitalism and replace it with its own democratic
workers' state. 'The liberation of the oppressed class is impossible',
Lenin argued, 'without the destruction of the apparatus of state power
created by the ruling class.' The new workers' state would be a
'transitional state' based on the extension of democracy to such an
overwhelming majority of the population that the need for a special
machine of suppression will begin to disappear.'

Secondly, Lenin came over in 1917 to the views of Trotsky on the nature
of the coming revolution in Russia. For years, all major trends in
Russian socialism had believed that a bourgeois democratic revolution--a
revolution against Czarism and for the establishment not of socialism
but merely of liberal capitalism-- would have to precede a workers'
revolution in Russia. In 1906, Leon Trotsky developed a dissenting view.
Only the working class of Russia, Trotsky argued, would be willing and
able to carry through the fight for democratic reforms and for a
democratic republic. But why, he asked, should the workers be expected
to stop at that point? Why should they not extend the fight for
democratic rights into a struggle for workers' control and socialist
democracy? In fact, Trotsky asserted, democracy in Russia could only be
brought into being through a workers' revolution. The struggle for
democratic rights, therefore, would tend almost automatically to pass
over into a struggle for workers' power.

Answering the charge that Russia was too backward to be able to
construct a socialist society--of which a situation of abundance was a
central precondition--Trotsky argued that while Russia remained
backward, Europe as a whole did not. The Russian revolution, he argued,
would be part of a European-wide conflict. Aided by the advanced
workers' movements of central and western Europe, he contended, Russia
could skip a stage of liberal capitalism and proceed directly to the
construction of a socialist society. Trotsky described this process as a
permanent revolution. The revolution would have to be permanent in two
senses. First, the battle for democracy would have to pass over into a
revolution for workers' power. Secondly, the Russian revolution would
have to spread and become part of the European revolution--indeed, of
the world revolution.

When working women in the Russian city of St Petersburg took to the
streets demanding bread and peace in March of 1917, few realised that
the Russian revolution had begun. When the demonstration of the women
workers sparked a wave of revolutionary struggle against Czarism,
however, Lenin immediately embraced the perspective of Trotsky and
declared that workers' revolution was the order of the day. At the same
time, Trotsky recognised that without an organised political party no
revolution could succeed. He therefore joined the Bolshevik Party.
Together the two men pushed the Bolshevik Party into organising and
leading a workers' uprising in October (November by the western
calendar) of 1917.

The Russian revolution was based upon a wholly new kind of social
organisation, the workers' council or soviet. These councils, based on
elected delegates from the workplace and the neighbourhoods, became the
new decision-making bodies of Russia. They were organs of direct
democracy whose delegates, like those of the Paris Commune, could be
recalled by the electors. The soviets represented a new form of mass
democracy. It was for this reason that Lenin and Trotsky made the demand
for 'All power to the soviets!' the central slogan of the Russian
revolution. The soviets, they claimed, would be the basis of the new
workers' state; they would represent the embodiment of workers'
democracy. And after the Bolshevik-led uprising in October of 1917, the
soviets did indeed become the foundation of the Russian workers' state.
The American journalist John Reed, in Russia at the time, carefully
described the organisation of this new state:

'At least twice a year delegates are elected from all over Russia to the
All-Russian Congress of Soviets ...
'This body, consisting of about two thousand delegates, meets in the
capital in the form of a great soviet, and settles upon the essentials
of national policy. It elects a Central Executive Committee, like the
Central Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, which invites delegates from
the central committees of all democratic organisations.
'This augmented Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviets
is the parliament of the Russian Republic'.

The soviets, Reed pointed out, were amazingly vibrant and active
organisations, concerning themselves with all aspects of social policy.
'No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was
ever invented', he stated.

During 1917 and 1918, the Russian soviets teemed with revolutionary
initiative and enthusiasm. For the first time, millions of ordinary
workers and peasants found themselves able to participate in the major
decisions that affected their lives. Control of the factories was taken
over by the workers, land was seized by the poor peasants, the embryo of
an entirely new form of society was created .

But only the embryo. For the germ cell of socialism to grow, it required
several essential ingredients. One was peace. The new workers' state
could not establish a thriving democracy so long as it was forced to
raise an army and wage war to defend itself. A second essential
ingredient was abundance. Unless the basic material needs of all people
could be satisfied, it would be impossible to keep alive a direct and
active democracy. Hungry people can only keep their concern with
politics alive for so long. Sooner or later, the more pressing need for
bread intervenes. For these reasons, a third ingredient was
indispensible--the spread of the revolution. Only successful workers'
revolutions in Europe could remove the war threat and provide the
economic assistance upon which workers Russia depended. It was with
these considerations in mind that Lenin stated, four months after the
Russian revolution, 'The absolute truth is that without a revolution in
Germany we shall perish . '

6:INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM OR STATE CAPITALISM?

WORKERS' RUSSIA was not greeted by a revolution in Germany, by warm arms
and offers of fraternal assistance. Instead, it was greeted by the
invasion of 17 armies from 14 countries. Alone, isolated, encircled,
revolutionary Russia undertook the heroic task of defending itself.
Under the leadership of Trotsky, a Red Army was created that for nearly
three years criss-crossed Russia battling the armies of world
capitalism. In the end, the Red Army prevailed. But at a terrible price.
Russia was bled dry. Its industry had collapsed. It could no longer feed
its population. With economic and social collapse came political decay.
As workers' democracy disintegrated, a new bureaucracy rose to power.

The dimensions of Russia's collapse are truly staggering. By 1920,
industrial production had fallen to a mere 13 per cent of its 1913
level. There were massive shortages of every conceivable item. But most
desperately, there was a chronic shortage of food. Famine swept the
countryside. According to Trotsky, cannibalism emerged in some of the
provinces. There was a huge flight of people from the cities, where food
was nearly impossible to find, back to the country. The population of
Petrograd, the major industrial city, fell from 2.5 million in 1917 to
574,000 in August of 1920. And even those workers who remained in the
cities were often too sick or too hungry to work. Absenteeism reached an
average of 30 per cent. Disease swept the country. Between 1918 and
1920, 1.6 million people died of typhus, dysentery and cholera. Another
350,000 perished on the battle field.

By 1920, the very face of Russia had changed. Workers' democracy, in the
meaningful sense of the term, had disappeared--as had most of the
working class through death or retreat to the countryside. In many cases
elections to the soviets ceased. The Bolshevik Party remained alone in
power confronted by a country that was slowly dying. In the early 1920s,
this ruling party divided into a series of factions, each with a
different view as to how society should be governed and socialism
constructed. While many individuals crossed back and forth between the
contending factions, a few years after Lenin's death in 1924 (he had
been sick and largely incapacitated since 1922) there were two dominant
points of view.

Grouped around Joseph Stalin were those forces that represented the
rising Soviet bureaucracy. Stalin's group argued that the Russian
government should go about the task of building 'socialism in one
country'. For this group, 'socialism' lost all foundation in organs of
workers' democracy, soviets, and the international economy of abundance.
They came increasingly to identify socialism with a bureaucratic
monopoly of power which allowed no place for organs of mass democracy.
Further, they began to define socialism as a state-controlled and
planned economy which would industrialise backward Russia on the basis
of ruthless labour discipline and starvation wages.

Grouped around Leon Trotsky were the forces known as the 'Left
Opposition'. At the urging of Lenin before he died, Trotsky had started
to oppose many of Stalin's policies. By the mid-1920s, the programme of
the Left Opposition had two central planks. First, democracy had to be
re-established in the Bolshevik party and in the mass organisations such
as the trade unions and the soviets. Secondly, the Soviet government had
to abandon all such retrograde notions as socialism in one country--
which identified socialism with an impoverished and bureaucratically-
dominated society--in favour of a revolutionary and internationalist
perspective that understood that Russia's salvation lay in the spread of
revolution abroad.

By 1927 the debate was over. Trotsky's revolutionary perspective fell on
deaf ears. The working class, to the extent that it still existed, was
hungry and demoralised. It remained largely indifferent to the rallying
cry of the Left Opposition. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of careerist
elements had joined the Bolshevik party. Many of these were former
Czarist officials who foresaw the possibility of state employment if
they announced themselves 'communists'. With the Bolshevik party
dominated now by such elements (200,000 original communists had died
during the Civil War), Stalin's victory was assured. In November of
1927, Trotsky was expelled from the Bolshevik party.

At that point, Stalin undertook to reshape the entire nature and
direction of Russian society. This 'reshaping' had three main aspects:
the elimination of all dissent; the liquidation of all forms of
democracy and of working class organisation; the slashing of the living
standards of the working class and the physical annihilation of millions
of peasants. The purpose of these policies was to transfer economic
resources from fulfilling the consumption needs of human beings to the
building of a massive industrial/military complex that could compete on
the same footing as western capitalism.

The elimination of dissent began with expulsions from the Bolshevik
party in 1927. Then came sweeping arrests. In the mid-1930s a wave of
'show trials' led to the slaughter of the original Bolshevik leaders of
the revolution. But the most astounding and gruesome form of repression
came in the slave labour camps. By 1931, two million people had found
their way into these camps. By 1933, the figure was five million. In
1942 it reached a staggering 15 million.

The destruction of the remnants of workers' democracy proceeded apace.
Strikes were outlawed in 1928. After 1930 workers were no longer allowed
to change jobs without state permission. Trade unions were reduced to
bureaucratic playthings controlled by the state. Other democratic
reforms of the revolution were buried. Access to divorce was severely
curtailed. Abortion was made illegal. Homosexuality, made legal with the
revolution, was once again made a criminal offence. A regime of police
terror prevailed.

In 1929, the first Five-Year Plan was introduced. The aim Stalin
announced, was to 'catch up and overtake' the West. In order to take
control of food production, several million peasants were slaughtered.
In the towns, workers' wages were cut in half between 1930 and 1937. A
rate of growth of 40 per cent was declared. Such a growth rate could
only be achieved through ruthless exploitation of the working class--by
forcing workers to produce more and more output for lower and lower
wages.

>From this point on, the whole axis of Russian development changed. Gone
was the commitment to workers' democracy and international socialism. In
their place, a privileged bureaucracy had installed the aims of
industrial and military development in order to build a world power.
Under Stalin, the Soviet Union consciously adapted itself to the
dynamics of world capitalism. The objective of defeating international
capitalism through workers' revolutions was replaced by the aim of
building a modern military/industrial complex. And it would happen at
break-neck speed. Stalin expressed the logic clearly:

'To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind; and those who lag behind
are beaten. We do not want to be beaten ... We are fifty or a hundred
years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten
years'.

International socialism had thus been supplanted by state capitalism.
All of economic life was subordinated to the objective of competing with
western capitalism. The satisfaction of human needs was not the aim of
production. Rather, production was geared to constructing steel mills
and tank factories that could rival those of the West. After all, the
price of survival for any state caught up in the world capitalist system
is that it incessantly expand the industrial and military resources at
its command. The living standards of the working class are, therefore,
continually subordinated to the aim of endless expansion. For it is
impossible to build ever more factories and produce ever more weapons
unless workers are continually turning out more and more unpaid labour.

For Russia, competition is primarily military. But, in order to equal
the West in sophisticated weaponry, Russia must be capable of matching
the growth of western capitalism in all areas: in steel, electrical
goods, industrial chemicals and so on. The pressure of world capitalist
competition -- both military and economic-- shapes the structure and
direction of Russian society. Russia is thereby reduced to little more
than a state-owned economy that has adapted itself to the capitalist
system as a whole.

It is for this reason that Russia, both in Stalin's day and today, can
be described as state capitalist. For the defining feature of capitalism
is not that individual businessmen produce for their own gain. Rather it
is that owners of 'capital' (resources produced by workers) exploit
workers who are forced to sell their ability to work in order to make a
living. In a capitalist system, that exploitation takes place with a
view to expanding the wealth and power at the disposal of a corporation
or state so that they can hold their own in a world system of
competition.

7:LEON TROTSKY AND BEYOND

DURING THE TERRIBLE decades of the 1920s and 1940s when Stalin was
committing barbarous crimes in the name of 'socialism', the lone voice
of Leon Trotsky kept alive some of the basic elements of socialism from
below. Stalin had returned to an ideology resembling authoritarian pre-
Marxian socialism. Gone was socialism's democratic essence. Stalin's
'Marxism' was a variant of socialism from above. A bureaucratic elite
was to oversee the transformation of a poor and backward country into a
modern power, whatever the cost in human terms. That such a perspective
could be called 'socialist' or 'communist' was a horrendous infamy It
was Trotsky's great virtue to insist against all odds that socialism was
rooted in the struggle for human freedom. Furthermore, against the
nationalistic notion of 'socialism in on country', Trotsky asserted that
socialism could only come into being on a world scale. In so doing, he
defended the uncompromising internationalism of Marx, Luxemburg and
Lenin.

Throughout the 1920s and until his death at the hands of Stalinist agent
in 1940, Trotsky fought desperately to build a revolutionary socialist
movement based on the principles of Marx and Lenin. At a time when
Stalin's counter-revolution was reshaping Russia and the fascism of
Hitler and Mussolini was sweeping across Europe, crushing workers'
movements in its path, this was no mean task. Even if he had never
developed the theory of the permanent revolution, never played a leading
role in the revolution of 1917, nor built the Red Army, Trotsky's
contribution to keeping alive the socialist flame during the 1930s would
have insured him a lasting place in the history of international
socialism.

The conditions of the 1930s, however could not but affect Trotsky's
outlook. The great periods of Marxism have been those in which
revolutionary socialists have been actively bound up with mass movements
of the working class. The health and dynamism of Marxism has always
depended upon a certain unity of theory and practice. For Marx and
Engels, these great periods were the revolutionary wave of 1848 in
Europe and that of the Paris Commune of 1871. During the failed Russian
revolution of 1905 socialist theory was advanced by the likes of
Trotsky, Luxemburg and Lenin. The next great period was that of 1917-
1921. Then, revolutionaries such as Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky and the
Italian communist Antonio Gramsci played central roles in revolutionary
movements of the working class. During each one of these periods Marxist
theory was developed and enriched on the basis of the living experience
of the working class movement.

During the 1930s, however, Trotsky was cut off completely from any real
workers' movement. Throughout all of Europe, the working class was
reeling under defeat after defeat. The socialist and communist movement
was on the defensive, struggling desperately to protect itself from the
hammerblows of fascism While Trotsky's commentaries on the events of
this period are often brilliant, they were unable to inspire any
significant numbers of working people into action. Further, Trotsky's
new communist movement remained confined to the radical intelligentsia.
The divorce from mass struggles--indeed an incredible remoteness from
the day-to-day experience of the working class--could only distort the
theory and practice of what came to be known as 'Trotskyism '.

The Trotskyist movement paid dearly for its isolation. It became in most
countries little more than a debating society for intellectuals who had
no experience of working class struggle. Trotsky denounced the 'closed
circles', the 'literary arrogance' and the 'conceit and grand airs' of
intellectuals who felt capable of pronouncing on the general strategy
and tactics of revolution in any corner of the world although they had
failed to gain a toehold in the workers' movement of their own country.
Yet, for all his criticisms, Trotsky could not supply the only real
corrective to such a hot-house atmosphere: involvement and education in
the class struggle.

These defects in the Trotskyist movement were compounded by a very
serious analytical error committed by Trotsky during this period. As
Stalin's counter-revolution intensified--as communist militants were
executed, peasants slaughtered, the last vestiges of democracy
eliminated--the question arose as to the nature of the society that was
taking shape in Russia. Throughout the 1930s, Trotsky consistently
argued that Stalin's Russia remained a workers' state, albeit of a
degenerated kind. Trotsky acknowledged that the soviets had been
destroyed, that union democracy had disappeared, that the Bolshevik
party had been stripped of its revolutionary character. Indeed, at times
he compared the political regime in Russia to that of fascist Germany.
Still, he insisted that Russia was a workers' state. And he did so on
the basis of one criterion alone: that property remained nationalised,
in state hands. This Trotsky believed was evidence of a lasting gain
brought about by the 1917 revolution. Private property had not been
restored by Stalin. Therefore, the economy remained collectivised and
capable of planning.

Descriptively, what Trotsky said was clearly true. Stalin betrayed no
intention of restoring private capitalism in Russia. But this was hardly
enough for Stalin's Russia to qualify as a workers' state. A workers'
state, according to Marx and Lenin, is a state based upon workers'
control of society. It depends upon the existence of democratic
organisation that can control society from below. A workers' state
presupposes that workers are running the state. To talk of a workers'
state is necessarily to talk of workers' power and workers' democracy.
The particular form of property ownership is certainly of interest, but
it tells us nothing about the essential nature of society and of the
state. To understand these, as Marx argued consistently, we must look at
the social relations that characterise the society. That is to say, we
must look at who controls the structure of economic production and at
who controls the apparatus of state power.

It was certainly true that nationalised property and attempts planning
the economy characterised Russia--and it remains the case today. But the
relevant questions are these: Who controls the nationalised property?
Who is doing the planning and on what basis? It is not enough to answer
that the state controls property. For the obvious question then becomes:
who controls the state? It is not the working class, then who is it? If
we answer, as Trotsky did, that a privileged bureaucracy controls this
state, then we must look deeper. For, if this bureaucracy uses its
control of the state (and thus of the economy and the labour force) in
order to direct production and accumulation in the interests not of
human emancipation, but of industrial and military competition with
other capitalist power then we can hardly be said to be talking about a
workers' state. Rather, we are dealing with a system of bureaucratic
state capitalism in which capital is collectively controlled by the
privileged bureaucracy that controls the state.

By making the nature of property ownership the criterion of workers'
state, Trotsky committed an error that was seriously to disorient the
Trotskyist movement in later years. For, unwittingly, Trotsky had broken
from the most basic precepts of socialism from below.

This was not readily apparent during Trotsky's lifetime. But the end of
the Second World War, these problems burst into the open. At that time,
Stalin's troops rolled into most of East Europe, creating loyal puppet
regimes in countries such as Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and so forth.
Initially, the Trotskyist forces insisted that these countries remained
capitalist regimes. After all, workers' revolutions had taken place.
Slowly, however, another realisation took hold of them. Under Russian
orders, these puppet governments had created internal structures
modelled on those Russia: industry and finance were nationalised; a
bureaucratic or party state was created; attempts to plan the economy
were introduced. According to Trotsky's criterion, these new Eastern
European regimes would have to be workers' states. And this was the
conclusion arrived at by the Trotskyist movement. In so doing they
claimed what for revolutionary socialists should have been the
inadmissible: that workers' states could be created without the active
intervention of the working class. Workers' states without workers'
revolutions was a glaring violation of the principles of Marx and Lenin.
Even more grotesque, Stalin's army was now being painted as an
instrument of human liberation, creating workers' states at the end of
its bayonets.

>From this point onwards, the movement Trotsky had created fell victim to
the ideology of socialism from above. No longer, for them, was socialism
dependent upon the self-emancipation of the working class. Now any
collection of guerrillas, technocrats or petty dictators who undertook
to turn backward countries into modern empires by nationalising the
means of wealth appeared as progressive movements. In China, Cuba,
Algeria and dozens of other countries, such movements came to power. In
no case were these regimes based on structures of workers' power and
workers' democracy. Yet, more often than not, the Trotskyist movement
greeted these brutally undemocratic state capitalist tyrannies as
workers' states.

Thus, by a peculiar irony of history, the movement founded by the great
revolutionary socialist who had spearheaded the communist opposition to
Stalinism fell victim to the ideology of socialism from above. Trotsky
himself made a lasting contribution to international socialism which
remains indispensable to socialists today. But recognition of that
contribution should not blind us to the fatal error he committed--an
error that, by violating the principles of socialism from below, has
distorted irreparably the movement that takes his name.

8:SOCIALISM FROM BELOW

TODAY IN THE PERIOD after World War II, revolutionary socialism was
everywhere in retreat. What passed itself off as 'socialism' was
generally an elitist and authoritarian doctrine strongly resembling the
anti-democratic visions of socialism from above. There were, of course,
major national liberation struggles, such as those in China and Cuba,
which freed colonial nations from the oppressive grip of a major world
power. As victories against imperialism, these movements were justly
deserving of support. But the claims of the Chinese and Cuban regimes to
be 'socialist' have stained the image of genuine socialism everywhere.

The national liberation movement in China was led by a guerrilla army
that had no base among the organised working class. When Mao's army
rolled into China's major cities, workers were told to stay at work and
obey the orders of their managers. At most, some owners and managers
were replaced by officials of the new government. In no sense was there
a working class reshaping of society from below. In Cuba, a small band
of guerrillas were fortunate enough to confront a regime so weak and
corrupt that it fell under the first assault. Again, workers played no
serious role in the Cuban revolution of 1959. By no stretch of the
imagination can either the Chinese or Cuban revolutions be said to
represent working class movements for self-emancipation.

What's more, in both China and Cuba, the new regime modelled themselves
on the totalitarian state capitalist structure of Russia. A one-party
state was created in which all elections were a meaningless ritual.
Opposition parties -- workers' parties included--were outlawed. Trade
unions were put under rigorous state control. Strict press censorship
was introduced. Left-wing critics were thrown in jail. All of industry
and finance was put into state hands. No organs of democratic social
control were encouraged or tolerated. The fact that these state
capitalist dictatorships passed themselves off as 'socialist' was an
enormous blight against the most democratic and revolutionary movement
ever created.

Fortunately, workers soon began to put the lie to the socialist
pretensions of the Stalinist regimes. Beginning in East Germany in 1953,
continuing through Hungary and Poland in 1956, China in 1967,
Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland again in 1970, 1976 and 1980, the
spectre of workers' power has returned to haunt the ghost of Stalin.
What's more, young dissidents have come increasingly to recognise the
true nature of the state capitalist regimes in which they live--and to
affirm the perspective of socialism from below.

Such an approach was presented most clearly in the open letter to the
Polish Communist Party written in 1964 by two young rebels Jacek Kuron
and Karol Modzelewski. Kuron and Modzelewski argued persuasively that
the Polish working class is exploited by 'central political bureaucracy'
that controls the economy in the interests of state competition:

'... all means of production and maintenance have become or centralised
national 'capital'. The material power of the bureaucracy, the scope of
its authority over production, its international position (very
important for a class organised as a group identifying itself with the
state) all this depends on the size of the national capital.
Consequently, the bureaucracy wants to increase capital, to enlarge the
producing apparatus, to accumulate.'

And Kuron and Modzelewski knew that, if this situation was to be changed
and genuine socialism created, the conclusion was inescapable:

'The revolution that will overthrow the bureaucratic system will be a
proletarian revolution.'

In Eastern Europe, then, working class action has exposed the lies and
hypocrisy of the 'socialist' states. At the same time, western
capitalism has exposed its violent, militaristic, inhuman face. Military
madness has re-emerged on a terrifying scale. The world is now spending
$1.3 million per minute on the means of destroying human life. The
United States is in the midst of the biggest peacetime arms build-up in
history--and Russia is scrambling frantically to catch up. With each
such escalation in the arms race, the threat of war--global nuclear war-
-looms larger.

At the same time, the world capitalist system is sliding once more into
depression. In the major capitalist countries, this economic crisis
means massive unemployment, particularly for young people; it means a
life of poverty and despair for millions. In the underdeveloped nations,
the crisis means death--on a horrifying scale. According to the World
Bank, some 800 million people now live in a state of 'absolute poverty'.
Every day hunger and hunger-related diseases kill 41,000 human beings.
That's 28 victims of hunger per minute--two-thirds of them children--
while more than a million dollars per minute is spent on armaments.

So none of this has to be. The means exist to banish forever hunger,
poverty and starvation. The wealth devoted annually to producing weapons
of destruction could easily solve the problem of food production. The
problem is not a material one, it is social in nature; it is a result of
the barbaric priorities of a system founded on economic and military
competition.

The same goes for the multitude of other problems that threaten lives,
that distort and mutilate human existence. Whether it is the alarming
rise in industrial accidents and diseases, the terrifying spread of
nuclear power, or the near-catastrophic destruction of our natural
environment, the cause--the capitalist organisation of world society--
remains the same.

The solution also remains the same. The democratic and socialist
restructuring of society remains, as it was in Marx's day, the most
pressing task confronting humanity. And such a reordering of society can
only take place on the basis of the principles of socialism from below.
Now more than ever, the liberation of humanity depends upon the self-
emancipation of the world working class. And the transition to a new
society of freedom and abundance depends upon the construction of a
world federation of workers' states, each based on the principles of
workers' democracy.

The vital task confronting all those who desire the creation of such a
new society is to raise up the banner of socialism from below, to
establish once again in the popular consciousness the inextricable
connection between socialism and democracy. The challenge is to restore
to socialism its democratic essence, its passionate concern with human
freedom.

And the socialism with which we meet the battles of the future must not
only build upon the heroic struggles of the past. It must also
incorporate the fresh initiatives of contemporary struggle to break the
chains of oppression. Socialist emancipation in the modern world must
also be women's liberation. It must embrace struggle of women to free
themselves from a second-class existence, from the ties that bind them
to the endless drudgery of housework, from the images and ideology that
try to reduce them to mindless sex-objects. Socialist emancipation must
be black liberation. It must centrally involve the battles of black
people against institutionalised discrimination and injustice; against
racial harassment and ghetto existence. Socialist emancipation must also
be gay liberation. It must include the struggles of gay men a women to
live their lives free to love those whom they choose, free from the fear
of harassment and victimisation.

Once again there are signs that the international working class is
flexing its muscles and making its power felt. Perhaps on a small scale
but whether it be Solidarity in Poland, a general strike against the
military in Chile, miners' strikes in South Africa or Britain, workers
testing their strength in North America or Australia, the workers of the
world are again moving towards the centre of stage of world history. In
the crisis-ridden decade of the 1980s, are confronted once again with
the choice presented over sixty years ago by Rosa Luxemburg: socialism
or barbarism.

Last time humanity entered a similar period of crisis, during the 1930s,
the result was fascism in Europe and the immeasurable suffering and
barbarism of a world war that saw the explosion the first nuclear bomb.
Yet there is an alternative. WorkersS democracy, an end to poverty and
oppression--these are the prospects held out by an advance towards
international socialism.

That vision, that dream of a new world of freedom is more the just an
idle daydream. As William Morris wrote a century ago

'Ours is no dream. Men and women have died for it, not in ancient days,
but in our own time; they lie in prisons for it, work in mines, are
exiled, are ruined for it; believe me when such things; suffered for
dreams, the dreams come true at last.'

We are international socialists, and, linked with revolutionary
socialist groups in other parts of the world, we are dedicated bringing
that dream into being, to realising the principles socialism from below.
We are as yet small. But our vision is big. We have the opportunity of
building a movement that can change the world. Won't you join us? After
all, we have a world to win.

FURTHER READING

I have not produced references to prove my every statement in this
pamphlet. For those interested in pursuing some of the issues discussed
above, however, I have provided below a guide to the main works that
have influenced the views presented here.

Origins of Socialism--For the history of the period, see Eric Hobsbawn,
The Age of Revolution. Albert Soboul's The French Reuolutlon 178 7-1799
is the leading treatment in English of the popular struggles that made
up the French Revolution. George Lichtheim's two books, A Short History
of Socialism and The Origins of Socialism are the most reliable guides
to early socialist thought.

Marxism--The best single introduction to Marx's political work and
thought is Alex Callinicos' The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx. Hal
Draper's brilliant work, Karl Marx's Theory of Reuolution, is an
invaluable but sometimes difficult source. I should also record here a
debt of inspriation of a now-out-of-print pamphlet by Draper, The Two
Souls of Socialism. Of course there is no substitute for reading the
works of Marx and Engels themselves.

The Russian Revolution--John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World
remains the best introduction. Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian
Revolution is a superb and penetrating account. Victor Serge's Year One
of the Russian Reuolution is excellent. On the building of the Bolshevik
party and the years of struggle that led up to the revolution, read
Steve Wright's pamphlet, Russia: The Making of the Revolution. On the
decline of the revolution see Alan Gibbons, How the Russian Revolution
uJas Lost.

Lenin--The most important single work by Lenin is his pamphlet State and
Revolution which is widely available in various editions. Tony Cliff's
four volume biography, Lenin, is invaluable. Alfred Rosmer's work Moscow
Under Lenin, also known as Lenin's Moscow, is insightful. For Lenin's
opposition to Stalin see Moshe Lewin, Lenin's Last Struggle.

Stalinism--There are now many studies of the horrors of Stalinism.
Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed is still an important treatment, as is
Victor Serge's From Lenin to Stalin. The best theoretical treatment of
Stalinist Russia is Tony Cliff's classic, State Capitalism in Russia.
Chris Harman's Class Struggles in Eastern Europe develops the state
capitalist analysis for the eastern European states. Kuron and
Modzelewski's open letter, also reprinted as Solidarnosc: The Missing
Link ? is invaluable. Nigel Harris' The Mandate of Heaven: Marx and Mao
in Modern China is a masterful treatment of state capitalism in China.
The best short introduction to the theory of state capitalism is Abbie
Bakan's The Great Lie.

Trotsky--In addition to The History of the Russian Revolution and The
Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky's most important writings include Results
and Prospects and The Permanent Revolution. Duncan Hallas' Trotsky s
Marxism is the best overall treatment of the strengths and weaknesses of
Trotsky's thought.

A Further Note--The role of women in the working class and socialist
movement is still largely ignored in most writings on these periods.
Tony Cliff's Class Struggle and Women's Liberation represents an attempt
to fill this gap.Most of these books are still in print and are
available through our bookservice by mail order--see inside back cover.

These and many more publications are available from local branches of
the organisations listed inside the front cover of this pamphlet, or by
post from BOOKMARKS LONDON: 265 Seven Sisters Road, London N4 2DE,
England. BOOKMARKS CHICAGO: PO Box 16085, Chicago, Illinois 60616, USA
BOOKMARKS MELBOURNE: GPO Box 1473N, Melbourne 3001, Australia.

Write for an up-to-date booklist.

<from inside front cover> Published September 1984. Second printing
September 1986. International Socialist Organization, PO Box 16085,
Chicago, Illinois 60616. First published December 1980 by the
International Socialists, Canada. Printed by East End Offset (TU all
depts), London E3. Design by Roger Huddle.

The Socialist Workers Party is one of an international grouping of
socialist organisations:
AUSTRALIA: International Socialists, GRO Box 1473N, Melbourne 3001.
BELGIUM: Socialisme International, 9 rue Marexhe, 4400 Herstal, Liege.
BRITAIN: Socialist Workers Party, PO Box 82, London E3.
CANADA: International Socialists, PO Box 339, Station E, Toronto,
Ontario.
DENMARK: Internationale Socialister, Morten Borupsgade 18, kld, 8000
Arhus C.
FRANCE: Socialisme International (correspondence to Yves Coleman, BP
407, Paris Cedex 05).
IRELAND: Socialist Workers Movement, PO Box 1648, Dublin 8.
NORWAY: Internasjonale Sosialister, Postboks 5370, Majorstua, 0304 Oslo
3.
UNITED STATES: International Socialist Organization, PO Box 16085,
Chicago, Illinois, 60616.
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