The most zealous of Byzantine iconoclasts would find the journal Permanent Revolution’s aversion to images a bit extreme but it’s always an interesting read. In the current issue there’s a long article by Mark Hoskisson tracing the line between events in the Bolshevik Party in the 1920s and “the competing sects who… have leaderships that will do almost anything to secure their control of a campaign or movement regardless of the negative impact of their actions on the the wider class struggle.” The article won’t be online for a while since the comrades feel that putting too much content up too soon adversely affects sales. The sort of person who is able to read thirteen densely argued pages online is a rare bird but their money is always welcome.
I have no patience with the sort of idiotic, apolitical retort to Mark’s argument which goes along the lines of “how many members does Permanent Revolution have?” A Liberal Democrat, a Mormon elder or the person who runs Lady Gaga’s Facebook could ask the same question of any far left organisation in Europe and feel pretty smug. It’s the ideas that matter.
Mark’s thesis is straightforward. He says of Lenin that (p.42) “he is stained with political culpability for creating the conditions that allowed Stalin’s rise in the first place.” This is qualified with the statement that “he emerges with an element of personal honour intact for his belated attempt to oust Stalin.”
The article assumes a fair degree of familiarity with the history of the Russian Revolution and the couple of decades that followed and tries to shift the date of Thermidor back from 1924 to 1921. Mark argues (p.38) that “it was led by Lenin, supported by Trotsky and executed by Stalin.” It was constituted by banning party factions, suppressing the Kronstadt rising and the unconvincing justifications for that action, the ceding of absolute control on party matters to a large bureaucratic apparatus and the destruction of all dissident voices inside the party. These decisions allowed Stalin to claim that his internal regime had been approved by Lenin when he was still alive which, in addition to the material factors, greatly enhanced its authority.
Although he accepts that both Lenin and Trotsky reassessed their opinions Mark is hard on them. That’s not the same as saying that he is rejecting the Bolshevik tradition. His fire is directed at the Trotskyist left’s widespread failure to accept that “its fundamental notion of party organisation incorporates the Thermidorian inheritance of 1921”. He’s right. As he points out for most of the life of the Bolshevik Party anyone had the freedom to stand up and say “Lenin is talking rubbish, let’s organise a faction against him” and not get expelled.
It would be possible to have a week of seminars around the themes that the article addresses. When did Thermidor begin? What was the internal life of the Bolsheviks really like? How indebted is contemporary Trotskyism to Stalinist organisational methods? The aspect I’d like to briefly explore is that, even if we agree with all Mark’s assertions, the events he describes happened almost ninety years ago. You would think that nine decades might be sufficient for those who assert a claim on the anti-Stalinist tradition of Marxism to have looked at what there is to retain and reject from the Bolsheviks.
Only those who have not seen the British far left and its satellites at work or the seriously delusional can disagree with the judgement that its principal measure of success is the extent of its control, the number of papers sold or meetings stitched up. Democracy is not even an optional extra it’s just an inconvenience. Dissenting views are not something you defeat politically. You do it by packing the meeting. When you watch it happening it’s the politics of an unconfident bureaucracy carried out in real time. Anyone in thrall to Stalin in 1927 would feel comfortable with it.
Now there is a personal bias here. For my money the most coherent and persuasive rejection of this Stalinist baggage saw the light of day in 1985. The Dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist democracy was an attempt to explore the differing conceptions of socialist democracy and see how it could be applied in the post Stalinist workers’ movement.
Let’s pick a few quotes:
Political freedom under socialist democracy therefore also implies freedom of organisation and action for independent women’s liberation, national liberation, and youth movements, i.e. movements broader than the working class in the scientific sense of the word.
The revolutionary party will be able to win political leadership in these movements and to ideologically defeat various reactionary ideological currents not through administrative or repressive measures but, on the contrary, only by promoting the broadest possible mass democracy and by uncompromisingly upholding the right of all tendencies to defend their opinions and platforms before society as a whole.
The point about that one is that it’s hard to conceive of a revolutionary party conceding to the entire working class a freedom of expression and organisation that it is not willing to grant to its own members. In fact if it feels that it has to control every Mickey Mouse campaign in which it’s involved in a decidedly non-revolutionary period how is it to be expected to unlearn decades of bad habits as soon as the masses occupy the factories and erect the barricades? In practice what you get is a variation on the Stalinist idea that every class is represented by a single party. The element of farce is the fact that it’s a few hundred strong and some distance from its own Thermidor.
Here’s another one:
As the class struggle sharpens, the workers will increasingly challenge the authority and prerogatives of the ruling class on all levels. The workers themselves, through their own organisations – from union and factory committees and organs for workers’ control, to workers’ councils (soviets) – will begin to assert more and more economic and political decision-making authority, and thereby they will gain confidence in their power to overthrow the bourgeois state.
Explicit in this is the idea that campaigns, parties, committees are allowed to make their own mistakes and to learn for themselves. A class without vast numbers of experienced, confident militants able to think and act for themselves is not one which it going to overthrow its rulers. An understanding of this seems as rare on the Trotskyist left as a funny Jim Davidson joke.
How about this? Excuse the use of “toiling masses”. All these texts are products of their time:
Without full freedom to organise political groups, tendencies, and parties, no full flowering of democratic rights and freedoms for the toiling masses is possible under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is another way of making Mark’s point that for most of the life of the Bolshevik Party anyone could get up and say Lenin was talking nonsense and that anyone who identifies as part of that tradition should defend the rights of dissenters. But let’s stick up for Trotsky who was obliged to rethink some of his choices. His definitive comment on the Thermidor and the steps leading up to it inform the spirit of the 1985 text:
“Banning opposition parties leads to banning factions; banning factions leads to a ban on thinking otherwise than the infallible leader. The police-like monolithism of the party was followed by bureaucratic impunity which in turn because the source of all kinds of demoralisation and corruption.”
Even if one disagrees with Mark’s assessment of the moment at which the Russian Thermidor began or does not have much sympathy with the politics of his current he has addressed the single worst characteristic of the Trotskyist left and tried to find a political explanation for it. While reserving a verdict on the details of Bolshevik history I think that his central point is absolutely correct. However there has been an extant alternative which embraces and critiques the Bolshevik legacy around for several decades.
Liam redux 
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