PDF of Stalin's 'Socialism in One Country'

[Savage]

For some bizarre reason I can't find a pdf on the net for it, I don't want to begin any discussion, I'd just appreciate a link.

[Ismail]

I don't recall Stalin writing a book or article with that title. You might be thinking of Problems of Leninism, which does discuss SIOC.

PDF: http://library.du.ac.in/dspace/bitstream/1/4529/1/Problems%20of%20leninism.pdf

[Savage]

thankyou, I always thought there was a specific piece he wrote entitled 'socialism in one country'.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Make sure you also check the first edition, where Stalin admits that socialism in one country is non-viable.

Here's the relevant passage:


"The overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of a proletarian government in one country does not yet guarantee the complete victory of socialism. The main task of socialism - the organisation of socialist production -- remains ahead. Can this task be accomplished, can the final victory of socialism in one country be attained, without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries? No, this is impossible. To overthrow the bourgeoisie the efforts of one country are sufficient -- the history of our revolution bears this out. For the final victory of Socialism, for the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of such a peasant country as Russia, are insufficient. For this the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are necessary.

"Such, on the whole, are the characteristic features of the Leninist theory of the proletarian revolution." [The Foundation of Leninism -- first edition. Bold emphasis added.]

Here's the explanation for the change -- the numbers in brackets refer to footnotes in the original article; see link at the end:


"By far the most important such amendment was the theory of socialism in one country, first promulgated by Stalin in autumn 1924. The introduction of this theory needs to be considered from a number of angles: how it was done, why it was done, the social interests it served, and its consequences.

"First Stalin's method. 'Socialism in one country' marked a dramatic break with the internationalist position formulated by Marx and Engels as early as 1845 and 1847, (94) and tirelessly repeated by Lenin in relation to the Russian Revolution. (95) It also contradicted what Stalin himself had written in The Foundation of Leninism as late as April 1924:


'The main task of socialism -- the organisation of socialist production -- still remains ahead. Can this task be accomplished, can the final victory of socialism in one country be attained without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries? No, this is impossible.' (96)

"Stalin 'solved' this contradiction by rewriting this passage to read the opposite ('After consolidating its power and leading the peasantry in its wake the proletariat of the victorious country can and must build a socialist society' (97)) and having the first edition withdrawn from circulation. There was no new analysis, simply the assertion of a new orthodoxy (retrospectively grafted on to Lenin). Indeed, apart from this one passage the rest of the text was left unchanged, including passages which clearly reflected the earlier perspective. (98) Only later were 'analyses' concocted to justify the new line.

"This procedure was not an isolated example, rather it was typical. When Social Democracy (according to Stalin) changed from an ally (1925-27) to 'the main enemy' (1928-33) and then back to an ally again (1934-39), the change of line was not based on any new analysis of Social Democracy. It was simply a fiat to which analysis had to accommodate itself afterwards. The 'secret' of this method is not that Stalin had no analysis but that the analysis he had could not be spoken publicly, because its real criteria, and real purposes, had ceased to be those of the theory whose language it retained.

"What then was Stalin's reason for introducing socialism in one country in 1924? Clearly it was a response (a defeatist response) to the failure of the German Revolution in 1923 and the relative stabilisation of capitalism that followed. Stalin had never been much interested in world revolution (he was by far the most insular of the leading Bolsheviks) and now he wrote it off entirely, but this alone does not explain why he didn't simply continue to pay lip service to the old internationalism. The answer is that socialism in one country fitted exactly the needs and aspirations of the bureaucrats now dominating the country. They longed for business as usual, uncomplicated by international revolutionary adventures. At the same time, they needed a banner around which to group themselves, a slogan defining their goal. As Trotsky put it, socialism in one country 'expressed unmistakeably the mood of the bureaucracy. When speaking of the victory of socialism, they meant their own victory.' (99) It was to the bureaucracy what 'All power to the soviets' was to the working class in 1917.

"As we have seen, Stalin introduced his new theory with the minimum of fuss (precisely to disguise its newness) yet in reality it marked a decisive shift in orientation which had the most far-reaching consequences. The Soviet Union was isolated in the face of a hostile capitalist world -- a world which had already demonstrated its eagerness to strangle the Revolution by its intervention in the Civil War, and which, as Lenin emphasised, remained economically and militarily stronger than the young workers' state. The strategy of the early years of the Revolution -- the strategy of Lenin and Trotsky -- included, of course, the most determined military defence but ultimately it relied on stimulating international revolution to overthrow capitalism from within. The policy of socialism in one country changed this emphasis. It replaced reliance on the international class struggle with reliance on the power of the Soviet Union as a nation state, and this decision had its own implacable logic.

"The defence of the Soviet state demanded armed forces equal to those of its enemies and in the modern world that meant an equivalent industry and an equivalent surplus. Engels had already grasped this crucial fact of 20th century economics and politics in 1892:


'From the moment warfare became part of the grande industrie (iron clad ships, rifled artillery, quickfiring and repeating cannons, repeating rifles, steel covered bullets, smokeless powder etc.) la grande industrie, without which all these things cannot be made, became a political necessity. All these things cannot be had without a highly developed metal manufacture. And that manufacture cannot be had without a corresponding development in all other branches of manufacture, especially textiles.' (100)

"Stalin's grasp on this reality was no less firm:


'No comrades...the pace must not be slackened! On the contrary, we must quicken it as much as is within our powers and possibilities.

'To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind; and those who lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten. No, we don't want to. The history of old...Russia...she was ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness.... For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for political backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness....

'We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.' (101)

"But Russia was poor, compared with its rivals desperately so, and its productivity of labour was low. To industrialise it required massive investment and without international aid there was only one possible source for this investment, the labour of its workers and peasants. A massive surplus had to be extracted and ploughed back into industrial growth. But with the majority of the population living not much above subsistence level there was no way such a surplus could be extracted and set aside voluntarily by collective decision of the associated producers. It could be done only through forcible exploitation and that in turn required an agency to apply this force -- a social class freed from the burdens, but reaping the benefits, of the process of capital accumulation -- a class playing the same historical role as the bourgeoisie had done in western Europe. Thus the consequence, in practice, of socialism in one country was its direct opposite, state capitalism in one country.

"Socialism in one country also had theoretical consequences. It could not be confined, much as Stalin may have wished it, to a minor amendment to the orthodoxy. In Russia the overwhelming majority of the population were not workers but peasants. Marx and Lenin, although they recognised the possibility of a revolutionary alliance between workers and peasants to overthrow the capitalists and landlords, always insisted that the peasantry was not a socialist class. 'The peasant movement...is not a struggle against the foundations of capitalism but a struggle to cleanse them of all survivals of serfdom.' [102] But if Russia, by itself, was to accomplish the transition to socialism, then this attitude to the peasantry had to be revised. So for a period Stalin (and his ally Bukharin) advanced the notion of the peasantry 'growing into' socialism. In practice of course the peasantry was crushed by the forced collectivisation of 1929-33, for it constituted an obstacle not only to socialism but also to state capitalism, but not before the blurring of the distinction between the working class and the peasantry had passed into Stalinist ideology....

"Finally the logic of socialism in one country played havoc with the Marxist theory of the state. By 1934 Stalin was claiming that socialism had been established in Russia. This was on the basis that with the transformation of the peasantry into state employees, classes no longer existed -- the bureaucracy of course was not a class for Stalin. According to Marxism, the state, as an instrument of class rule, was destined to wither away under socialism, but Stalin's state had not the slightest intention of withering away, and this was a fact that no amount of propaganda could hide.

"Stalin fielded this particular contradiction by asserting that Marx and Engels had expected the state to wither away because they viewed socialism as an international phenomenon, whereas when socialism existed only in one country the state had to be strengthened. [104] It was the kind of circular argument that works well when anyone who points out the circularity is a candidate for the firing squad.

"But if this argument justified the existence of the state it still left unsolved the problem of the class nature of this state. It could not be a specifically workers' state if Russia was a classless society -- and precisely this was involved in the claim that Russia was socialist. The only solution was the notion that the Soviet state had become a state of 'the whole people', a thoroughly bourgeois view of the state vigorously attacked by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme and by Lenin in The State and Revolution. Moreover it was a view of the state adopted by the Stalinist bureaucracy for exactly the same reason that the bourgeoisie has always viewed their state as a state of the whole people, namely its refusal to acknowledge its own existence as a ruling class." [Molyneux (1983) (http://www.marxisme.dk/arkiv/molyneux/realmarx/index.htm), pp.30-33.]

[Black Sheep]

Rosa,use spoilers or i will murder you.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Rosa,use spoilers or i will murder you.
though i dont endorse murder, i do endorse the use of spoilers.

it really helps to clean up threads.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BS:


Rosa,use spoilers or i will murder you.

I prefer death to spoilers...

But I'll comply just to save you having a heart attack.:)

The only thing is I do not know how to use them.:confused:

[Black Sheep]

The icons labeled "spoiler" in advanced reply,next to youtube buttons.
spoil ... /spoil in brackets

avoid murder

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Ok, thanks!

[Ismail]

Actually as late as 1938 Stalin still said that the final victory of socialism was impossible at that point: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/01/18.htm

Can we regard the victory of Socialism in our country as final, i.e., as being free from the dangers of military attack and of attempts to restore capitalism, assuming that Socialism is victorious only in one country and that the capitalist encirclement continues to exist?

Such are the problems that are connected with the second side of the question of the victory of Socialism in our country.

Leninism answers these problems in the negative.

Leninism teaches that "the final victory of Socialism, in the sense of full guarantee against the restoration of bourgeois relations, is possible only on an international scale" (c.f. resolution of the Fourteenth Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union).

This means that the serious assistance of the international proletariat is a force without which the problem of the final victory of Socialism in one country cannot be solved.

This, of course, does not mean that we must sit with folded arms and wait for assistance from outside.It wasn't until after World War II and the victory of the CCP in China that Stalin and Co. began to discuss the theoretical basis for the "construction of communism" in the USSR, which never really got anywhere.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

^^^Except, he said this in the passage i quoted earluier:


"The overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of a proletarian government in one country does not yet guarantee the complete victory of socialism. The main task of socialism - the organisation of socialist production -- remains ahead. Can this task be accomplished, can the final victory of socialism in one country be attained, without the joint efforts of the proletariat of several advanced countries? No, this is impossible. To overthrow the bourgeoisie the efforts of one country are sufficient -- the history of our revolution bears this out. For the final victory of Socialism, for the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of such a peasant country as Russia, are insufficient. For this the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are necessary.

"Such, on the whole, are the characteristic features of the Leninist theory of the proletarian revolution." [The Foundation of Leninism -- first edition. Bold emphasis added.]

And yet, he was claiming socialism had been achieved in the fSU in the 1930s.

As John Molyneux points out, the change of emphasis made the international revolution secondary to the survival of the fSU, which logic ultimately led to the systematic oppression and explotation of the people of the fSU, the failure of the Chinese and the Spanish revolutions, the red carpet laid out for the Nazis (because of the crazy 'social fascist' doctrine), and then finally to that pact with Hilter.

[Ismail]

"The facts show that we have already laid the foundations of a socialist society in the U.S.S.R., and it only remains for us to erect the superstructures -- a task which undoubtedly is much easier than that of laying the foundations of a socialist society."
"b) The final victory, on the basis of this advance, of the socialist system of economy over the capitalist system both in industry and in agriculture; the socialist system has become the sole system in the whole of the national economy, and the capitalist elements have been ousted from all spheres of the national economy."
"The experience of our country has shown that it is fully possible for socialism to achieve victory in one country taken separately. What arguments can be advanced against this fact?"

This (http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/SPC34.html) was at the 1934 "Congress of Victors," but at the same time Stalin said at this same Congress that:

"Take, for example, the question of building a classless socialist society. The Seventeenth Party Conference declared that we are advancing towards the formation of a classless socialist society. Naturally, a classless society cannot come of its own accord, as it were. It has to be achieved and built by the efforts of all the working people, by strengthening the organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat, by intensifying the class struggle, by abolishing classes, by eliminating the remnants of the capitalist classes, and in battles with enemies, both internal and external."

"The workers in the West say that the working class of the U.S.S.R. is the shock brigade of the world proletariat. That is very good. It means that the world proletariat is prepared to continue rendering all the support it can to the working class of the U.S.S.R. But it imposes serious duties upon us. It means that we must prove by our work that we deserve the honourable title of shock brigade of the proletarians of all countries. It imposes upon us the duty of working better and fighting better for the final victory of socialism in our country, for the victory of socialism in all countries."

Furthermore, a footnote to the speech by the editors of Stalin's Works speaks of the Seventeenth Congress of the Party and notes that, "The conference noted that the decisions of the Party congresses on the building and completion of the foundations of a socialist economy and on securing economic independence for the U.S.S.R. had been carried out with immense success."

Stalin in 1941 pointed out (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv4n2/5convers.htm) that, "The transition from socialism to communism is a terribly complicated matter. Socialism has yet not entered our flesh and blood, we still have to organise things properly in socialism, we still have to properly set up distribution according to work."

Your quote, Rosa, spoke of the final victory of socialism. It seems quote obvious that Stalin was not saying in 1934 that the "final victory of socialism" had been achieved.

For what it's worth, Enver Hoxha in 1980 stated (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/euroco/env2-1.htm) his view that that, "When Khrushchev began to advocate these theses [on the completion of socialist construction], the construction of communism in the Soviet Union not only had not begun, but moreover, the construction of socialism was not yet completed. True, the exploiting classes had been eliminated as classes, but there were many remnants of them still existing physically, let alone ideologically. The Second World War had hindered the broad emancipation of relations of production, while the productive forces, which constitute the necessary and indispensable basis for this, had been gravely impaired. The Marxist-Leninist ideology was predominant, but this does not mean that the old ideologies had been completely eradicated from the consciousness of the masses."

[Robocommie]

i dont endorse murder

A bold stance