FROM THE
PICKAX T0 THE PEN -- or, PROGRESS OF THE "NEW CRITICISM"
By L. Couturier
II.
_ Continued from last issue. ]
In the first part of this article, we brought up certain typically Stalinist methods which Mr. Hincker used in his article "Lenin and Trotsky," published in the Nouvelle Critique of April 1966. We showed how he completely falsified Trotsky's positions on the peasantry and demonstrated a total misappreciation of the facts regarding the Brest-Litovsk period.
Let us now analyze the following statement:
"In 1920, Trotsky Eproposed] the abandonment of war communism, at a moment when it was still necessary, and leriticized] the N.E.P. as soon as it was adopted." .-
And further on:
"The N.E.P. was therefore indispensable. Trotsky was critical of it; he accused its technical bodies of sinking into academism and the party of * forgetting the revolutionary education.of the masses. ;
Offhand it is hard to visualize the head of the Red Army as an opponent of "war communism" at a moment when it was still necessary!
"War communism" describes the functioning of the Soviet economy between 1919 and 1921. Everything had to be subordinated to the military struggle against the Whites. Given the extreme scarcity of food and raw materials, the deplorable level of industrial production and the paralysis of transportation, the Bolsheviks could react in only one way. -~ by transforming Russia into a besieged fortress and placing the entire economy under the control of the workers state. At a feverish tempo, industry was nationalized, private trade banned, worker commandos fell upon the countryside to requisition supplies for the urban centers, and wages were in part paid in kind.
It can be said that if “war communism" had not been instituted, the Soviet power would not have lasted beyond 1920. . ;
But by the end of 1919, the peasant was no longer working save to feed his family and chose to slaughter his livestock rather than surrender it to the commandos; the starved worker began to look back to the countryside which, as was often the case, he had left only a short time previously, and an exodus -to the village ‘set in; finally, the black market was wreaking its havoc. : a
‘The main problem was to get the peasant to agree to feed the cities. In order to make him work more and better, two alternative methods were possible:
-- Authorize him to sell his output (after payment of a tax) and thus interest him in expanding it to a maximun. ; ;
-- Or subject him to increased coercion by compelling him to work and then eee the fruits of his labor (with all the political consequences that this implied
After having spent the winter of 1919-1920 in the Urals directing work on the — economy, Trotsky came back with the conviction that "war communism" had exhausted its potential and had to be terminated, and that individual incentive had to be reintroduced into production. During February 1920, he presented a decument to the Central Committee calling for the replacement of compulsory food controls by a tax on food grains and the legalization of commerical transactions: "The food resources are threatened with exhaustion, a contingency that no amount of improvement in the methods of requisition can prevent.
Lenin .fought against this proposal and it was rejected by the Central Committee 11 votes against 4.
* Trotsky, My Life, p. 464.
One year later, on March 15, 19el, while the battle was raging in Kronstadt -where mutineers of peasant origin were in rebellion against the soviets -- the Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik party adopted the NEP (New Economic Policy) with virtually no debate. It authorized the peasantry and city bourgeoisie to engage in trade and restored some measure of a market economy.
It took the Bolshevik party a year to catch up with Trotsky's idea. Hincker therefore demonstrates a considerable amount of "brass" when he says that Trotsky was critical of the NEP from its inception. Moreover, it was Trotsky who was the reporter on the NEP to the Third and Fourth congresses of the Communist International in 1921 and 1922.
But in connection with the NEP a debate broke out in which Lenin and Trotsky were in disagreement. This could not escape the trained eye of our ragpicker, who . conscientiously mixes up problems, adds some bile and servesSup the whole concoction with an enormous, but convenient lie:
"The entire year of 1922 was marked by opposition between Lenin and Trotsky in the Political Bureau, attenuated only when the two found themselves together in applying the brakes against a too liberal application of the N.E.P., which had been extended to the point of a relaxation of the monopoly of foreign trade. Immediately afterwards, Lenin completely lost the use of his faculties."
We are. going to show that at the end of the year 1922, Lenin acknowledged that it was Trotsky who was right on most of their points of disagreement, and that before he "completely lost the use of his faculties," Lenin had time enough to dictate certain letters, in the publication of which Nouvelle Critique did not exactly scoop us.
Shortly before the end of "war communism," on February 22, 1921, the Soviet government decided to set up a planning commission (Gosplan).
In effect, the Gosplan remained on paper and the energy of the Bolsheviks, after the NEP was promulgated, was directed more toward reviving the market economy than to planning production. From the beginning, Trotsky reacted against this failure insisting that the return to private trade required strengthening planning and state control of the market. On May 4, 1921, he wrote Lenin:
"Unfortunately, our work continues to be carried out planlessly and without any understanding of the need for a plan. The State Planning Commission represents a more or less planned negation of the necessity to work out a practical and business-like economic plan for the immediate future. "*
No one supported Trotsky in the Politbureau. Lenin considered it premature to hope to plan an economy which was in ruins and contained more than 20,000,000 small dispersed enterprises. However, toward the end of 1922, his intransigence began to weaken. During November 1922, while he was convalescing in the country, and while Trotsky, too, was away from Moscow, the Central Committee unanimously adopted a resolution striking a serious blow against the monopoly of foreign trade.
On December 14, Lenin wrote Trotsky:
"T urgent”y request that you undertake, at the next session [of the Central Committee], to defend our common position on the imperative need to safeguard and strengthen the monopoly of foreign trade."
Trotsky accepted, but again pointed out that the anarchistic forces of the market economy had to be subjected to greater control by the central power, and he called for vesting extensive powers in the Gosplan.
Shortly afterwards, the Central Committee just as unanimously reversed its decision, and on December 21, 1922, Lenin wrote:
"Comrade Trotsky, it seems that we have managed to capture the position without a‘single shot, by a mere maneuver. I suggest that we do not stop but press the attack. "**
This incident led Lenin to a fundamental review of the debate he had conducted with Trotsky over the Gosplan, and several days later, on December 27, he wrote a letter
* See Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, p. 42.
**My Life, p. 481.
to the Politbureau, which has now been published in volume 36 of his complete works (Editions sociales, p. 611): "Allocation of legislative powers to: the Gosplan."
"I believe this idea was advanced a long time ago by Comrade Trotsky. I took a position against it because I felt it would create a fundamental conflict-in our system of legislative institutions. But after careful examination, I see that the idea is basically correct... I think it is necessary at this time to start enlarging the authority of the State Planning Commission... _n this connection, you can, and I think should, accede to Comrade Trotsky's wishes... :
This text of Lenin's was not published by the Politbureau: and it was necessary to wait until the Twentieth Congress for it to be incorporated in his complete works (but not into the theoretical baggage of Mr. Hincker). It is true that so far as the editor of the “Review of Militant Marxism" is concerned, Lenin "completely lost the use of his _ faculties" after his’ intervention on the issue of the monopoly of foreign trade, that is to say, in mid-December, 1922. We must therefore assume that it was a Lenin deprived of intellectuat faculties who drafted the letter of December 27. We might add, however, that the same volume 26 places two other letters in close association with the one we have quoted, letters written on December 30 and 31, which vehemently criticized ‘the chauvinistic and Great Russian policy of Stalin, Dzerzinski and Ordjonikidze on Georgia. Lenin's observations, it seems to us, testify to great mastery of the processes of thought.-
Each paragraph in the libel by the Nouvelle Critique is studded with lies or with consciously falsified interpretations of Trotsky's position. We have given several examples of this and could point out a score of others.
We have seen the methods Mr. Hincker uses to falsify a whole set of Trotsky's positions -- onthe role of the peasantry, Brest~-Litovsk, the NEP, planning. We will now, finish with this new neo-Stalinist version of a criticism of Trotskyism by examining Hincker's truthfulness and knowledge of his subject as he tackles the question of permanent revolution.
"This was the time [after 1923] when the debate on permanent revolution really © broke out, together with its corollary, the debate on socialism in a single country.... Trotsky believed that the final victory of the proletarian revolution would only be assured after it had purged itself of its compromises with the bourgeois and peasant revolutions, and subsequently, became victorious all over the world. As a result, every pause, the NEP, the assertion that socialism could be victorious in a single country, | appeared to. him as counterrevolutionary crimes."
The lies drip from the very first line. There was no reason for “debate" on the permanent revolution to "really break out" in 1923. It so happens that nobody was thinking about it. Furthermore, there had been no real criticism of the theses on permanent revolution by a Bolshevik leader since 1906. The Balance and Prospects, in. which Trotsky first developed his idea, was seized and confiscated by the police in 1906, as soon as it appeared. The work was not available to readers. until 1919, when it appeared in a Soviet edition.
The idea that in countries with a belated bourgeois development, only a dictatorship of the proletariat is capable of carrying out the bourgeois democratic revolution, brilliantly met the test of practice in. the Russian and Chinese revolutions. While Lenin was alive, no Communist would have dreamed of expressing any doubt about it.
The second thesis of the permanent revolution, which postulates that with the seizure of power by the proletariat, the bourgeois revolution is inevitably transformed into a socialist one, was also verified in Russia (and we may add, in China and Cuba).
As for the third thesis, which asserts that the socialist revolution cannot be completed within a national framework, it was part of every Bolshevik's baggage, and also Stalin's up to December 1924, at which time the leading bureaucratic faction was searching for a theoretical cover in its work of destroying the party. In the autumn of 1924, the newspapers and periodicals were flooded with articles and exercises, without | any apparent rhyme or reason, all dedicated to presenting a garbled version of the _ permanent revolution. They raked up old forgotten texts and out-dated polemics, then crowned the lot by introducing the hitherto unknown thesis on the possibility of building socialism in a single country.
To convince oneself of this, all that is necessary is to compare two texts by Stalin, one written before and the other after the anti-Trotskyist campaign began.
In April, 1924, in Foundations of Leninism, Stalin. was. still unaware that nine
months later he would give birth to a profoundly “antipermanent" but also anti-Leninist theory. Please read, Mr. Hincker:
"But overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie and establishing the power of the proletariat in a: single country does not guarantee the complete victory of Socialism.... That would require victory for the revolution in at least several countries. It is therefore the essential task of the victorious revolution in one country to develop and support the revolution in others.... Lenin has tersely expressed this thought by saying that the task of the victorious revolutionconsists in doing the ‘utmost attainable in one country for the development, support and. stirring up of the revolution in all countries. '"* a
In December 1924, Stalin made the turn that would permit him a year later to. brag about socialism in a single country. In The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists, he drew a fine distinction between the final victory of socialism (secure from foreign intervention), in which assistance from the workers in other countries is involved, and the possibility of actually building a complete socialist society in Russia alone.
Finally, during January 1926, in Problems of Leninism, he repudiated his’ formulation of April 1924, declaring that it had become "obviously inadequate, and therefore inexact." Quoting from his own speech of May 1925, he writes:
"We can build socialism,. and we will. build it, together with the peasantry, under the leadership of the working class...."
History has also had its say. Despite the failure of the revolution to. break out in Europe, imperialism was unable to overthrow the Soviet regime, but because of this failure, Soviet society experienced a monstrous bureaucratic deformation, which makes it impossible to consider it a socialist society.
We will cut our comments short at this point. It is somewhat repugnant to catch the editor of a magazine, which calls itself "militant Marxist," red-handed in wholesale falsifications, some thirteen years after the death of the greatest of all historical forgers. ;
Hincker evidently wrote on order. He can probably write anything on any subject so long as someone supplies him with a few general ideas and some second-hand quotations. But the combination of ignorance and lack. of talent is occasionally of real interest to alerted readers, in the sense that it blissfully blurts out things that the more informed leaders only dare to say by innuendo.
In the May 1966 issue, Hincker tells us flatly that in France » during 1936, it
was necessary to establish a different state in order to breach the "wall of money," but this state would have been unacceptable to the petty-bourgeois masses and Leon Blum wisely resisted the temptation. In 1966, however, this is no longer a problem because "the state of the monopolies is no longer solely a means of exercising economic power, which can be abandoned when the time comes for another means; it is, in an important and perhaps fundamental aspect, a system of economic gears which a new manipulator -~ a democratic government -- can put to immediate use.'
Waldeck Rochet never put it so crudely -- there stands the machinery of state in complete readiness, and the bourgeoisie haven't worn it out in utilizing it for their own ends... A theoretician has long been awaited who would demolish the Marxist theory of the state, and now he has arrived. It. is easy to understand why he cannot stand "Trotsky's very great theoretical weakness."
let us, however, be grateful to him for stating that "Trotsky is a revolutionary figure, belonging to the period of physical battles, a spellbinder in front of a crowd..."
For decades it seemed he was a counterrevolutionary figure, whose skull was smashed by the pickax of a Stalinist agent. Hincker's pen is less effective; its mediocrity succeeds only in enhancing the power of the ideas which it so laboriously tries to combat. .
End. ]
* Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, p. 43.
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