Midnight of the century

Posted item #15 'The Moscow Trials'

The 1930s were turbulent times and witnessed the historic defeat of the working class in two hugely important ways: the rise of fascism and the entrenchment of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. The triumph of Hitler's Nazis in 1933 represented a crushing defeat for the powerful German working class, while the consolidation of Stalin's power crushed the hopes of 1917 and nearly extinguished the authentic marxist tradition.

Trotsky, more than anyone, carried the torch of genuine revolutionary socialism forwards. He did this in extraordinarily harsh and brutal conditions, for himself personally and for his supporters.

Many of Trotsky's 1930s writing exemplify the best in the marxist tradition - for example his analysis of the events in Germany - and he strove to continue revolutionary organisation, despite awful repression in the Soviet Union (from where he was exiled in 1929) and being so marginalised everywhere.

The Moscow Trials of 1935-37 symbolise how far Stalin's counter-revolution had gone, how utterly removed from the revolutionary aspirations of the post-1917 period his regime had become. Many of the Bolsheviks' Central Committee from 1917 were killed, following grotesque and absurd show trials in which the accused were forced to confess to crimes they had never committed. They were tarred with the terrible accusation of being in league with Trotsky, who was in turn supposedly a fascist agent (ludicrous on several levels, not least because he was Jewish).

One of the strengths of Cliff's account of the trials is his explanation of their material basis. They weren't simply the excesses of a crazed dictator, but had important political motives and served the Stalinist bureaucracy's need, as the head of a state capitalist society, for the eradication of any threats to its own economic and political power. Cliff also looks at the degradation of the revolution and the rising power of the bureacracy to account for how once-heroic revolutionaries could abase themselves so pitifully before Stalinist power.

Cliff's account of the Moscow trials, which I'm posting here, is a chapter from the fourth and final volume of his epic Trotsky biography. This volume covers the years from Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist party in 1927 until his assassination by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940.

This volume can seem bleak - these years were truly the midnight of the century, his personal suffering was immense, Trotskyism became a tiny and marginal political force - but Cliff offers a wealth of historical insight and teases out the important theoretical insights found in Trotsky's immense corpus of writing from this time.

Cliff on revolution, democracy and socialism

Posted item #5 Democratic revolution or socialist revolution?

As I noted in an earlier post, the key principle of Marxism for Cliff was always: the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class itself. Socialism and human liberation cannot be legislated by well-meaning reformers, fought for by guerilla revolutionaries, or imposed by the gun or the bomb. Cliff rejected the notion that the Soviet Union was socialist - he saw that it was state capitalist, with a different form of capitalism to the Western variants but capitalist nonetheless: driven by economic and military competition (primarily with the US), divided into classes, and reliant upon exploitation of workers. It can't have been a workers' state because the workers clearly had no control over their own economy or society.

Similarly, the Communist states established in Eastern Europe after 1945 were top-down regimes, in which democracy was absent. It made a mockery of socialist principles to suggest they had anything in common with genuine socialism. They had been achieved without any grassroots workers' struggles, without revolution. Where, then, was the self-emancipation of the working class?

He analysed Mao's regime in China from the same point of view and - controversially on the left - rejected the idea that Castro's Cuba could be regarded as socialist. Democracy was and is the heart of the revolutionary socialist tradition.

By emphasising this fundamental principle, and testing the claims of states to 'socialism' against this criterion, Cliff recovered the thread of 'socialism from below' - the lineage of Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky - from the travesty of Stalinism. He played a key role in renewing the classical Marxist tradition - in theory and in practice - for new generations.

The chapter from Marxism at the Millennium - a short book published shortly before Cliff's death - I'm posting here is a re-statement of Cliff's ideas about the relationship between democracy and socialism. It recognises the severe limits placed on democracy by capitalist society. For him, the thwarted democracy we have in modern capitalist societies is a poor deal - real democracy is radically different, and depends upon economic control by the working class.

From this perspective the question of what a revolution's aims are becomes hugely important. A revolutionary movement that aims only for political democracy and power is doomed to perpetuate the injustices and miseries of capitalism. The alternative is the kind of radical economic democracy associated with the early period of Russian revolutionary government after October 1917. Though revolution tends to seem distant for us, this issue has in fact recurred, in many parts of the world, ever since the Russian Revolution.

In a world as unstable, violent and crisis-ridden as ours, there are sure to be more revolutionary upheavals and democratic upsurges. Learning the lessons of history is essential in determining what it means - in practice - to be a revolutionary in the 21st century.