British intellectuals and Stalin: a response: Paul Flewers

British intellectuals and Stalin: a response

Dear Comrades

I am pleased with the alacrity with which Permanent Revolution reviewed my book The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union 1929-1941. Unfortunately, Bill Jefferies’ enthusiasm to carry out this assignment has led him to make some assumptions with which I must take issue.

Bill writes “There is a bewildering assortment of views and counter-views, which leave the reader wondering what the hell was really going on and what any of these various opinions have to do with it in the first place?” This implication of incoherence is unwarranted. I did, as can be assumed, compile a vast array of material on the subject, taking in a wide scope of differing outlooks and opinions; indeed, so contradictory were some descriptions of the same phenomenon that one could almost think that the authors were looking at different things.

What I then attempted to do was to deduce from this mass the various schools of thought about the Soviet Union. A swift glance at my book might leave a reader with an impression of a bewildering agglomeration of rival viewpoints; however, at the risk of sounding arrogant, a more in-depth perusal will show that I have succeeded in giving a reasonably accurate portrayal of these various schools of thought.

Bill correctly states that alongside the pro-Soviet and the anti-communist schools, I investigate what I call the “centre ground of opinion”, which, he adds, is “an odd description for Trotsky, Orwell, EH Carr and Victor Serge”.

Indeed it would be, but a more careful look at my book would show that I was writing about totally different people.

What I refer to as the centre ground was a range of commentators. This stretched from moderate conservatives through liberals to right wing social democrats, who, in the light of the contrast between the deep slump in the west following the Wall Street Crash and the growth of the Soviet economy under the five year plans, and without forgoing their rejection of Stalinist coercion and terror, looked at the latter to see whether the capitalist world could learn anything from it.

I devoted quite a lot of space to the centre ground for two reasons: firstly, because it has been very much overlooked in standard scholarship; secondly, because this period was most unusual in that a sizeable sector of mainstream politics in Britain felt that the west could learn something positive from the Soviet Union in the economic and social fields, and that the Soviet Union was actually capable of playing a moderating role on the international stage.

This was in sharp contrast to the usual portrayal of the Soviet Union in mainstream politics, and particularly during the Cold War, as a totalitarian threat to western civilisation.
Trotsky and Serge were, as I pointed out, dissident communists. Orwell was unusual for a left winger as he pretty much dismissed the entire Soviet experience. Carr differed from the typical centre-ground figures in that he opposed, on the basis of realpolitik, an Anglo-Franco-Soviet alliance against Germany. Carr did to some degree reflect the views of the centre ground of the 1930s, but not until the latter part of the Second World War, which was beyond the scope of my book.

I am taken severely to task when it comes to Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, I stand by my contention that The Revolution Betrayed was — as I wrote — a “brutally incisive work” that was also “at times contradictory”. Why did I consider that it started off with “fulsome praise” to Soviet industrialisation? I cited from it “Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not in the pages of Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the earth’s surface – not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity.” How else can that be described other than fulsome?

As Bill noted, I did write that the Soviet statistics “looked impressive”; indeed they did. But, apart from the various points that were raised by critical observers at the time, which I described at some length, concerning the reliability of the statistics and such key factors as the quality of Soviet produce, did such a quantitative increase of production merit the words “socialism has demonstrated its right to victory . . .”?

One would certainly expect them from a Stalinist, eager to show the superiority of his “new civilisation”, or from a naive left wing social democrat, unaware of the real nature of Stalinism, but not from a revolutionary Marxist. These words stood in contrast to the complex analysis of the Stalinist socio-economic formation in that book.

I am then accused of misinterpreting Trotsky, in that I confuse his definition of the bourgeois method of distribution with the market, when according to Bill Jefferies, he was actually meaning that “the bureaucracy plundered the output of the economy, siphoning off large parts of it to line its own nest, thus entrenching major social inequalities”. Whereas I state that “the means of production were in the hands of the state, and were thus socialised and planned, whereas, because of the relative backwardness of the society, the distribution of everyday goods was carried out through the market”.

Trotsky referred to the relationship of state planning and the market several times in The Revolution Betrayed. He noted that the Soviet regime had twice attempted to implement a non-market form of distribution only to revert to the market within a few years, in 1921 and again in 1935, when “the system of planned distribution again gave way to trade”. (p113) He then goes on to refer to the prevalence of market relations in the distribution of everyday goods. Trotsky was well aware of the dangers represented by the market:

“An abundance and variety of speculators coming to the surface at the least sign of administrative weakness like a rash in a fever, testifies to the continual pressure of petit bourgeois tendencies.” (p122) Trotsky recognised that the revival of market relations was a serious matter in the agrarian sector, in particular the renting of land and the official encouragement of the peasants’ private plots.

We can conclude from all this that Trotsky recognised that whilst the market, which was largely tied in with the production and distribution of everyday goods, was an unavoidable factor as a result of the overall backwardness of the Soviet economy and could not be eradicated by way of bureaucratic methods, it nevertheless posed a direct danger to the planned production and distribution of everyday goods through the state. It also posed a less direct, but ultimately no less serious, danger to the entire planned economy.

Hence there was in Trotsky’s analysis a contradiction between plan and market, unavoidable under the conditions of the time, but nonetheless one of a fundamental nature. I accept that my conspectus of

Trotsky’s view of the contradictions within Stalinism might have been better expressed. Nevertheless, Trotsky did recognise the seriousness and centrality of the contradiction between market and plan within the Soviet socio-economic system. Trotsky’s definition of the bourgeois method of distribution did not exclude a recognition of this contradiction, but actually incorporated it.

Fraternally

Paul Flewers

Mon 09, March 2009 @ 18:10