This chapter is best dealt with as a whole, as it contains a basically unitary theme concerned with Stalin’s new Constitution of the USSR, which approved in June 1936, having been announced at the beginning of the year. It signified how the Stalin regime was both distorting reality, and communist politics in order to miseducate and mislead the working class of the USSR, and the international labour movement. The Mis-education is there from the very beginning of the Constitution, with the definition of ‘socialism’ itself, which it sums up as being:
““In the Soviet Union, the principle of socialism is realized: From each according to his abilities to each according to his work.”
Trotsky attacks that as a “nonsensical formula”. As he says, it signifies a major lowering of the theoretical level, and is simply a lie, which imbues the new constitution. Marx employed the formula “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Trotsky maintains that the two halves of that formula are inseparable. In the communist sense, work becomes a prime need of human existence, “Society has no need for any compulsion.” No one will refuse to work except those who are unwell, as work with be something enjoyable and fulfilling. Work “according to their abilities” will be work with the highest technique to provide a generous standard of living for all. – “according to their needs” – “without humiliating control”. Whereas the Soviet state when this slogan/motto was propagated was “far closer to a backward capitalism than to communism” and therefore the communist formula was unthinkable.
It cannot permit its citizens to work “according to their abilities”. Instead, it instituted such systems as piecework, under the watchword “Get out of everybody as much as you can, and give him in exchange as little as possible.” True, it cannot make people work in absolute, physical and psychical terms beyond their abilities. But that is also true of capitalism. It cannot go beyond limits set by nature. But:
“Wage labour does not cease even under the Soviet regime to wear the humiliating label of slavery. Payment ‘according to work’ – in reality, payment to the advantage of ‘intellectual’ at the expense of physical, and especially unskilled, work – is a source of injustice, oppression and compulsions for the majority, privileges and a ‘happy life’ for the few.”
He summarises this:
“Instead of frankly acknowledging that bourgeois norms of labour and distribution still prevail in the Soviet Union, the authors of the constitution have cut this integral Communist principle in two halves, postponed the second half to an indefinite future, declared the first half already realized, mechanically hitched on to it the capitalist norm of piecework payment, named the whole thing ‘principle of Socialism,’ and upon this falsification erected the structure of their constitution!”
In this regard, Trotsky talks about the significance of Article 10, which guarantees the personal property of citizens from arbitrary invasion (by the bureaucracy). Of course, under a genuinely socialist regime, the personal/consumer goods property of all citizens would be guaranteed likewise, but Trotsky doubt whether under ‘high culture,’ people would “burden themselves with a rubbish of luxuries”. However, “the first task of communism is to guarantee the comforts of life to all”
But this constitutional clause recognises reality, that as Trotsky says:
“The personal property of the peasants and the not well-off city people is the target of outrageous arbitrary acts on the part of the bureaucracy, which on its lower steps frequently assures by such means its own relative comfort.”
The bureaucracy being driven by an acquisitive petty-bourgeois, not socialist, ethos.
But this has potentially unpredictable social consequences, which this clause is aimed to avoid, and which need to be limited so that “personal accumulations” can become “a stimulus to increase the productivity of labour”. So its upshot is that:
“a protection by law of the hut, cow and home-furnishings of the peasant, worker or clerical worker, also legalizes the town house of the bureaucrat, his summer home, his automobile and all the other ‘objects of personal consumption and comfort,’ appropriated by him on the basis of the ‘socialist’ principle: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his work.’ The bureaucrat’s automobile will certainly be protected by the new fundamental law more effectively than the peasant’s wagon.”
Part two talks about the ideological regression in the 1936 constitution:
“…from the Soviet system of election according to class and industrial groups, to the system of bourgeois democracy based upon the so-called ‘universal, equal and direct’ vote of an atomized population”
And he concluded that this amounts to “..juridically liquidating the dictatorship of the proletariat”
It is based on myth making and mystification, the argument being that: “In expropriating the capitalists, the proletariat did actually enter upon its own liquidation as a class.” But “from liquidation in principle to actual dissolution in society is a road more prolonged, the longer the new state is compelled to carry out the rudimentary work of capitalism.” In reality:
“The Soviet proletariat still exists as a class deeply distinct from the peasantry, the technical intelligentsia and the bureaucracy – and moreover as the sole class interested right up to the end in the victory of socialism.”
So therefore
“The new constitution wants to dissolve this class in ‘the nation’ politically, long before it is economically dissolved in society.”
Somewhat inconsistently, the regime continues to call the state “Soviet”, but that is at odds with what the constitution is trying to do. This is terminological dishonesty. The various local bodies, which are supposed to be elected, are “municipalities, dumas, zemstvos,”, but they are not Soviets. Soviets are specifically organisations of the working class as a class, separate from other classes. Trotsky notes that it could be the case that if the proletariat were sufficiently strong socially, this change could be simply formal. But in that case, the state ought to be in the process of withering away:
“Of itself, an equalization of the political rights of workers and peasants might not destroy the social nature of the state, if the influence of the proletariat upon the country were sufficiently guaranteed by the general state of economy and culture. The development of socialism certainly ought to proceed in that direction. But if the proletariat, while remaining a minority of the population, is really ceasing to need political ascendancy in order to guarantee a socialist course of social life, that means that the very need of state compulsion is reducing itself to nothing, giving place to cultural discipline.”
But in fact, the opposite was the case. He notes that the constitution contains guarantees of freedom of speech, of the press, and of ‘street processions. But in reality:
“Freedom of the press means a continuation of the fierce advance-censorship whose chains are held by the Secretariat of a Central Committee whom nobody has elected. Freedom of Byzantine flattery is thus, of course, fully ‘guaranteed’. Meanwhile, the innumerable articles, speeches, and letters of Lenin, ending in his ‘testament’, will continue under the new constitution to be locked up merely because they rub the new leaders the wrong way. That being the case with Lenin, it is unnecessary to speak about other authors. … ‘Freedom of assemblage’ will mean, as formerly, the obligation of certain groups of the population to appear at meetings summoned by the authorities for the adoption of resolutions prepared in advance.”
So, the character of the regime changes:
“It is no longer to be a class but a ‘people’s’ dictatorship. But when the bearer of dictatorship becomes the people, freed from class contradictions, that can only mean the dissolution of the dictatorship in a socialist society – and, above all, the liquidation of the bureaucracy. Thus teaches the Marxian doctrine.”
As Lenin’s party programme said
“… Deprivation of political rights, and all other limitations of freedom whatsoever, are necessary exclusively in the form of temporary measures … In proportion as the objective possibility of the exploitation of man by man disappears, the necessity of these temporary measures will also disappear.”
Thus:
“The arrival at a socialist society is characterized not only by the fact that the peasants are put on an equality with the workers, and that political rights are restored to the small percentage of citizens of bourgeois origin, but above all by the fact that real freedom is established for the whole 100 per cent of the population. With the liquidation of classes, not only the bureaucracy dies away, and not only the dictatorship, but the state itself.”
But, as everyone knows, that is completely at odd with what was happening in the USSR at that time:
“Let some imprudent person, however, try to utter even a hint in this direction: the GPU will find adequate grounds in the new constitution to send him to one of the innumerable concentration camps. Classes are abolished. Of Soviets there remains only the name. But the bureaucracy is still there. The equality of the rights of workers and peasants means, in reality, an equal lack of rights before the bureaucracy.”
Then there is the secret ballot. Under the Soviet system proper, there was no need for this:
“The old Soviet constitution saw in open voting, as in the limitation of elective rights, a weapon of the revolutionary class against bourgeois and petty bourgeois enemies.”
But the new constitution introduced the secret ballot. The question then arises:
“…who is feared by a socialist people which has recently thrown off a tzar, a nobility and a bourgeoisie?”
And Trotsky answers this question thus:
“In a capitalist society, the secret ballot is meant to defend the exploited from the terror of the exploiters. If the bourgeoisie finally adopted such a reform, obviously under pressure from the masses, it was only because it became interested in protecting its state at least partially from the demoralization introduced by itself. But in a socialist society there can be, it would seem, no terror of the exploiters. From whom is it necessary to defend the Soviet citizens? The answer is clear: from the bureaucracy.”
And Stalin admits this, when he says, in answer to the question “Why are secret elections necessary?”, he said
“Because we intend to give the Soviet people full freedom to vote for those whom they want to elect.”
Which begs the question: “Who, exactly, is this ‘we’ who can give or not give the people a free ballot?“ Which Trotsky answers succinctly:
“It is that same bureaucracy in whose name Stalin speaks and acts. This exposure of his applies to the ruling party exactly as it does to the state, for Stalin himself occupies the post of General Secretary of the Party with the help of a system which does not permit the members to elect those whom they want… in this incautious phrase lies the actual constitution of the Soviet Union as it has been drawn up, not upon paper, but in the struggle of living forces.”
Part three deals more extensively with the reality. Trotsky noted that, from the beginning of the Soviet state, the party exercised a monopoly of power:
“…during the first period of the Soviet era the Bolshevik party also exercised a monopoly. But to identify these two phenomena would be to take appearance for reality. The prohibition of opposition parties was a temporary measure dictated by conditions of civil war, blockade, intervention and famine. The ruling party, representing in that period a genuine organization of the proletarian vanguard, was living a full-blooded inner life. A struggle of groups and factions to a certain degree replaced the struggle of parties.”
Whereas by 1936:
“At present, when socialism has conquered “finally and irrevocably,” the formation of factions is punished with concentration camp or firing squad. The prohibition of other parties, from being a temporary evil, has been erected into a principle. The right to occupy themselves with political questions has even been withdrawn from the Communist Youth, and that at the very moment of publication of the new constitution. …. Politics is thus once for all declared the monopoly of an uncontrolled bureaucracy.”
Stalin justified this by saying:
“Where there are not several classes, there cannot be several parties, for a party is part of a class.”
And Trotsky notes from this that Stalin is saying that “classes are homogeneous”, and remarks that
“The Marxist teaching of the class nature of the party is thus turned into a caricature…. In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by inner antagonisms, and arrive at the solution of common problems not otherwise than through an inner struggle of tendencies, groups and parties. It is possible, with certain qualifications, to concede that ‘a party is part of a class.’ But since a class has many ‘parts’ – some look forward and some back – one and the same class may create several parties. For the same reason one party may rest upon parts of different classes. An example of only one party corresponding to one class is not to be found in the whole course of political history – provided, of course, you do not take the police appearance for the reality.”
Examples are many:
“In its social structure, the proletariat is the least heterogeneous class of capitalist society. Nevertheless, the presence of such ‘little strata’ as the workers’ aristocracy and the workers’ bureaucracy is sufficient to give rise to opportunistic parties, which are converted by the course of things into one of the weapons of bourgeois domination.… It is from this difference that the necessity arose in its time for breaking with the Social Democracy and creating the Third International.”
But Stalin insisted that there could be only one party, because “there are no classes” in the USSR. Trotsky retorted that:
“…it follows not only that there can be no different parties in the Soviet Union, but that there cannot even be one party. For where there are no classes, there is in general no place for politics.”
But nevertheless, Stalin’s conclusion was to defend the monopoly of the single party of which he was General Secretary.
Bukharin, conversely, argued that under socialism “partisans of the hostile liquidated classes organized in parties cannot be permitted.” But as Trotsky pointed out:
“…in a country of triumphant socialism, partisans of capitalism would be merely ludicrous Don Quixotes incapable of creating a party”
Whereas the real question, were there a healthy regime, was
“How go toward socialism, with what tempo, etc. The choice of the road is no less important than the choice of the goal. Who is going to choose the road? If the nourishing soil for political parties has really disappeared, then there is no reason to forbid them. On the contrary, it is time, in accordance with the party program, to abolish “all limitations of freedom whatsoever.”
A French journalist asked about the role of factions within the ruling party:
“But if there is not to be a struggle of parties, perhaps the different factions within the one party can reveal themselves at these democratic elections?”
To which Molotov simply responded that the party was a “unit”. And Trotsky remarked that “This is proven best of all by the continuous purgation and the concentration camps. After the commentary of Molotov, the mechanics of democracy are completely clear.
He then goes on note that questions of the mutual relations of classes and parties had been dragged in “by the hair”, and that:
“It is not a question of sociology, but of material interests. The ruling party which enjoys a monopoly in the Soviet Union is the political machine of the bureaucracy….”
Trotsky concludes by talking about the purpose of the new constitution:
“In abolishing the soviets, the new constitution dissolves the workers in the general mass of the population. Politically the soviets, to be sure, long ago lost their significance. But with the growth of new social antagonisms and the awakening of a new generation, they might again come to life. Most of all, of course, are to be feared the city soviets with the increasing participation of fresh and demanding communist youth. In the cities the contrast between luxury and want is too clear to the eyes. The first concern of the Soviet aristocracy is to get rid of worker and Red Army soviets. With the discontent of the scattered rural population it is much easier to deal. The collectivized peasants can even with some success be used against the city workers. This is not the first time that a bureaucratic reaction has relied upon the country in its struggle against the city.”
He notes its domestic purpose echoes that of the politics of the bureaucracy on the world arena:
“Representing, as it does, an immense step back from socialist to bourgeois principles, the new constitution, cut and sewed to the measure of the ruling group, follows the same historic course as the abandonment of world revolution in favor of the League of Nations, the restoration of the bourgeois family, the substitution of the standing army for the militia, the resurrection of ranks and decorations, and the growth of inequality. By juridically reinforcing the absolutism of an “extra-class” bureaucracy, the new constitution creates the political premises for the birth of a new possessing class.”
The latter took decades to take root, such was the power of the revolution itself. It did not really surface for another half a century. But this anticipated what later happened to the USSR.
