Did Trotsky point the way to socialism - debate with Hillel Ticktin

Here is a debate with Hillel Ticktin on Did Trotsky point the way to socialism
https://archive.org/details/DidTrots...WayToSocialism

Yes – Hillel Ticktin, Editor of Critique

I do agree that Trotsky did point the way towards socialism and I think that is putting it mildly. Now obviously there is a series of points of series of overall aspects which one has to deal with in that regard.
Firstly in regard to his life, he was a dedicated socialist and remained such until he was murdered by Stalin. Not many people spend their whole lives in that way. Many people, as we know, begin as revolutionaries and end up as something quite else. Trotsky was dedicated, remained right through his life, even though it actually cost him his life and the life of his family.
He was, as an intellectual, as a socialist intellectual, tolerant of differences, unlike certain socialists, unlike certain Bolsheviks. When you read what he wrote in various periods of his life he remained true to that as well. Even in exile when his fellow exile Otto Ruhle made a critical comment of Freud, he supported Freud. As I was saying, if you read what he wrote or what he said at the time was something like one cannot criticise science in that way. He was tolerant at all times of different points of view effectively. His theoretical understanding of Marxism to a considerable degree was unsurpassed although he never went for more than a few months to a higher educational institution. His understanding of dialectics was deep and showed in the way he wrote quite apart from his actual exposition of dialectics. His understanding of political economy, again, he made very considerable contribution which I still maintain. And his more general understanding of social relations within society make him one of the great Marxists.
Let, looking at it overall, now if one looks at his life again, his action, he is really the hero’s hero in organising the victory of the Red Army. He did not try and maintain or keep some morale up in the period, he fought. He fought and maintained the structure of the Red Army. To a considerable extent the victory of the Bolsheviks was owed to him. He was of course the tragic hero killed by the other side effectively by Stalinists and Stalinism. I don’t regard Stalin or Stalinism as part of the left, I think it is its own formation, it is not part of the left, it should never have been regarded as part of the left, it isn’t part of the left.
He was of course, one of the leaders in 1917, one of the major leaders, if not the major leader, one of the two. And he was the leader, the deputy head of the Soviet in 1905 and in fact the real leader of 1905.
But when somebody looks at his life in these terms it is very [inaudible]. You could say he made many mistakes, all great leaders make mistakes, it is important to learn from them, of course he made mistakes. One can discuss what his mistakes were. Nonetheless he did fulfil this particular role, this very important role, in the development of socialism.
Well, then, I think one has to look at a number of aspects which I presume will be very [inaudible].
Firstly the question of the party, as we know in 1904 he actually opposed Lenin very very strongly. I am sure everybody will know that in great detail. The question which I presume will be part of the debate is exactly what attitude he took to the party. Well I don’t think that is very clear. In 1904 he took a very critical attitude towards Lenin’s conception of the party for being undemocratic, for demanding factory discipline over the members of the party. He explicitly and in detail opposed it.
He remained outside the Bolshevik party until July 1917 and then joined afterwards. Lenin said there was no better Bolshevik. However the Bolsheviks never trusted him as again was made very clear later. It is also very clear if you read his writings, particularly his last unfinished book called Stalin, that he never really abandoned his suspicion of the Bolshevik party. He remained all throughout, critical of it but he did not actually expound that in the period from 1917 to 1924/5. And in fact he made various statements which appear to be contrary to that. And it is very clear again, particularly if you read in Russian that because of the overall political atmosphere of the time and later, he avoided being critical of Lenin. That doesn’t mean to say that he wasn’t critical of Lenin, I’ve written this. But when I spoke to one of Trotsky’s major secretary van Heijenoort, I asked him more or less this question. He gave me the example of a conversation that he had with Fritz Sternberg when he was present in which Fritz Sternberg was critical of Lenin. Trotsky said well you can say that but I cannot.
It is actually not very difficult to see and I am not an historian, but at least one person who has worked on his stuff, so it is not difficult to see that Trotsky deliberately plays down his differences.
But it is not surprising if you are going to conduct a revolution seven twenty four that you will not then launch a major debate with your fellow leader as it were as to exactly how things should be run.
Anyway the point I am making is his perception of the party was not identical to that of Lenin and he played down exactly what it was, he did not actually formulate it fully. Insofar as he did formulate it later in exile, in my view it was very limited and I personally would not really know how one would go further with that.
That of course links up with the question of his particular role in supporting the revolution in 1917 and then later in his struggle against socialism in one country. Now obviously any Marxist must take the view that socialism in one country is a nonsense which is one of the reasons why a Stalinist cannot be a Marxist. However the question is exactly whether the party can take power in a manner which is not democratic or wholly undemocratic which is of course what happened in 1917.
People have defended taking power in November 1917 or February 1917 by saying it was in some sense a democratic takeover. Well it clearly was not. The majority of the country were peasants and the majority of the peasantry did not support it. If that was clear, it became even clearer when the constitutional assembly met in January 1918 when the Bolsheviks only had forty per cent of the delegates and they then dissolved it. That is absolutely true.
Among the workers, again Lenin actually wanted to take power ignoring the soviet, Trotsky did not. Trotsky refused to go along with it and they waited until the soviet met and they got a majority in it and then took power.
Now the question is how one looks at this whole process because at no point can you actually say there was a fully or wholly or even A democratic process going on. It was very hard to argue that. Point I’ve already said, but it goes further than that because people have argued that Trotsky and Lenin were wrong, argue that they should have remained wholly within the soviets and waited to see what the soviets would actually do. And then of course after having taken power the soviets were gradually ignored and effectively put at one side. Workers committees were ignored or not used and did not have that much influence, that is absolutely true but then obviously what did happen.
The question is how one looks at that. The first instance, it is not quite so simple in kind to say workers committees were democratic. Well they weren’t in fact. They weren’t kind of elections that we have today. That doesn’t mean to say they have no importance but in the conditions of the time, it was very hard to conduct the kind of election we have today. In other words, they were influenced by a series of different factors and people could be elected on god knows what grounds. I’m not arguing they should have been ignored, I am simply pointing out if one is looking at it in purely democratic terms you could not say that they were necessarily representative of the working class as a whole.
The second point which goes along with that and I will make the [inaudible] to the question of taking power is that in the conditions of the time the question is exactly what one would have wanted to do? It is of course an axiom of Marxism that one is talking of the self emancipation of the proletariat, well, how? How does the proletariat take power? Does it simply take power without any understanding beyond that? That to me is a mystical concept. There has to be a form by which it takes power and there has to be a party which as with all parties, that would be one point, the parties which are actually needed, if that does not happen it will not happen at all. If there is no party leading it, nothing will happen.
And we know that is the case, because you can just look at the last hundred years, how many times has the proletariat not risen and been defeated? Or disintegrated? How many times have there not been soviets of different kinds, workers councils which went nowhere? And you can think of a few recent examples, South America, in Albania we virtually had soviets and nothing happened when Russia just came in and took it over. There has to be a leadership, there has to be a party leadership, in principle I mean, talking today, it has to be wholly democratic.
At the time, that kind of democracy would have been very unlikely. Partly because of the disintegration, the whole disintegration process, the difficulties of organisation at the time and partly because that kind of democracy did not exist anywhere at any point. Remember in Britain the form of democracy we have today only comes into begin in 1928 when all females get the vote and when the revolution took place in 1917, the majority of people in Britain did not have the vote. In Germany the parliament was still subordinated to the Kaiser, in the United States, actually women did not have the vote. So you are talking of a situation where the kind of democratic forms that now exist did not exist there.
You are also talking of a situation of war, when millions were being killed if you remember, well everybody does remember. I think it was that context. Trotsky explicitly in his book Terrorism and Communism raises that issue, this issue we are just talking about and says well if we had the time we would have let the constituent assembly go on but of course they dissolved it. We would have let it go on, we would let it govern and it would then have exposed itself and we could have gone from there but we did not have the time.
He is partly speaking of war and the need to end the war and he is partly talking of the fact the Russian Empire was in dissolution, the bourgeoisie itself was greatly weakened, it was possible to take power and therefore they thought that they ought to take power which raises the more general question. If the proletariat is going to take power, will the bourgeoisie go to the moon or will it not try and maintain itself? Obviously it will try and maintain itself, you cannot take power when the bourgeoisie is itself strong unless you have an equal strength on the other side. So in other words at that point you are talking about needing to take advantage of the weakness of the bourgeoisie and your own strength. I think that it was in that kind of context that you are talking of taking power in this particular way which as I say obviously was not a democratic form. Having done so and then having won the war they in fact had lost internationally and there was no hope of them there unless there was a revolution.
The final point is Trotsky of course then refused to take power by himself which he could easily have done as the head of the red army and of course with the amount of respect that he had and effectively was exiled and killed. But he remained the pole of attraction in the world as the person and the grouping which was able to say that socialism in one country is impossible, a new social group has taken power there, what exists there is not socialism. His conception of workers state in my view was flawed or internally contradictory and unlike the SPGB I don’t regard as state capitalist. In a certain sense, I regard, in both a moral and real sense it is far worse than that, it was not socialist and it was not capitalist. I have spent a lot of time, in fact my whole life, trying to work out the way it actually works but it does appear to be in that respect Trotsky was only beginning this process and though when he says the nature of the soviet union is undetermined, that is the way we should actually see it. But he remained a beacon of hope, one of the few beacons of hope standing for socialism. Thank you.
No - Adam Buick, The Socialist Party of Great Britain

Right, did Trotsky point the way to socialism? I want to reply on behalf of the Socialist Party. No he didn’t. What he pointed the way towards was state capitalism. But first of all, if we are going to have a debate on whether somebody points the way to socialism or not, we need to define our terms. Of course, the key term to define here is socialism. So what is socialism? I think one good way to understand what socialism is, is to see it as the opposite of capitalism, the society we have got today. Now capitalism is for a start is a class society, it class-based, it is divided into classes were a tiny minority of the population own and control the means of wealth production, either direct individuals or through companies and corporations or through the state. That is the basis of capitalism and this tiny minority is in a privileged position with regard to controlling the means of production but also in regard to consumption.
Now socialism by contrast will be a classless society. In socialism, everybody will stand in the same relationship with regard to the control of the means of production. Everybody will have equal say in the way in which society is run, that’s a basic feature of socialism as compared with capitalism Capitalism is based on class ownership, socialism is based on common ownership and democratic control.
Now another feature of capitalism which everybody accepts even those that support the capitalist system is that it is a system of production for profit. In other words, if you like, an alternative name for capitalism is the profit system. The basic economic law of capitalism is no profit, no production.
Now this has all sorts of consequences, first of all it means that production stops at the point at which it ceases to be profitable so capitalism is a system of artificial scarcity. It also results in waste of those capitalist institutions and in a distortion. The people who have got money can have their whims satisfied while people who are in desperate need of something don’t get them satisfied.
Now socialism on the other hand will be a system of production for use. In other words, in a socialist system of society, we will grow food to eat, we will build houses for people to live in, we will construct railways and roads for people to get from A to B. That is what socialism is, it is a system of production geared to satisfying people’s needs and not a system of production for the market with a view to profit. Now the other feature of socialism or capitalism which is linked up with the last one is that in order to survive in capitalism you have to get money. Well basically there are about three or four ways of getting money. The easiest and the best way is to inherit it, but if you are not in that position, then you have either got to beg for money or you have got to steal it or you have got to go out onto the labour market and try to sell your ability to work for a wage or a salary. That is what most people have to do. But of course the amount of goods and services you have to consume is restricted by the size of your wage packet or by the size of your salary check, it is a system of rationing.
Now the basic rule of capitalism is cannot pay, cannot have. Now by contrast, socialism is a system of production to satisfy people’s needs were people have free access according to the principle from each according to their ability to each according to their needs and everything would be free; free transport, free housing, free electricity, that is what socialism means as compared with capitalism. Of course it means there is no money, no wages and there is no market. But there is one thing which both capitalism and socialism have in common and that is capitalism is already a worldwide system of society. So that socialism which is going to take over from capitalism and is going to build on what capitalism has built up has to be a worldwide system of society. I entirely agree that the idea of socialism in one country is preposterous.
So that is what socialism is. It is a system of common ownership and democratic control with production to satisfy people’s needs. It is a worldwide system, moneyless, wageless and classless. Now did Trotsky stand for that system of society?
I have been reading through some of the articles which Hillel wrote for a magazine or paper called the Weekly Worker and I was surprised to see that he agrees with this definition of socialism and he calls it socialism. He does not call it communism, in fact what’s even more surprising is that he says there is no distinction between socialism and communism. Now this is surprising for me anyway because the rejection of any distinction between socialism and communism has been the one thing which has distinguished the SPGB from all Leninist groups not just Trotskyist but Maoist, Castroist, followers of Che Guevara who all make this distinction between socialism and communism.
And I think that Trotsky did too, and this distinction was introduced by Lenin who just before the Bolshevik party took power, people said to him you are mad. You want to establish socialism in Russia, it is impossible. It is a backward country, we cannot have production directly for use, we cannot abolish money, we cannot abolish the state and Lenin said no, no, no you have got it wrong, that is communism, what we want to establish is socialism. And he redefined socialism to mean, this is in The State and Revolution, it is a society where all the means of production are owned by the state, where everybody becomes an employee of the state and where everybody is paid an equal wage.
Now that was the position, the same position that Trotsky accepted. He agreed with Lenin that society cannot pass directly from capitalism to socialism or socialism communism. It had to pass through this transitional society which in fact if you analyse it is some sort of utopian state capitalism. So if in fact Hillel accepts that you can pass straight from capitalism to socialism communism then he has already rejected one of the ways which Trotsky pointed to try and get to socialism with or without inverted commas which had to pass through state capitalism.
Anyway, what is the way which we say in which socialism, what is the way to socialism according to us? Well we say that socialism can only be established through the democratic political action of the working class. Once again we need to define what we mean by the terms. The first term of course is working class. Now as far as we are concerned the working class is composed of all those who don’t own and control the means of wealth production and were therefore forced by economic necessity to go out and try and find an employer to try and sell their ability to work for a wage or a salary.
Now in a country like Britain or a part of the world like Britain, this is the vast majority of the population, over ninety per cent of the population. So as far as we are concerned the agent of social change is nearly everybody. Political action, well this is action aimed at winning control of political power, the winning of control over the state machine, over the machine of government. That must be the way forward. Of course that implies the workers once they become socialist should organise into a socialist political party.
The democratic political action, we mean by democratic in both senses of the term. First of all that it has to be the will of the majority, it has to be what the majority of what the people want and understand. We also use it in the second sense of the methods employed to get to socialism must also be democratic and this means that the Socialist political party must be organised open democratic party, this is disagreement which will probably come out in the debate, without a leader and without a leadership group, it must be a democratic party under the control of the members. So also of course we use the word democratic in the sense that we use democratic methods to gain control over the state machine, to gain control of political power which you can use the institutions of political democracy which have grown up partly through the struggles of workers in the past, in other words, the ballot box, elections and parliament. So we say once the majority of people want socialism, the balance of forces between the working-class and the minority capitalist class has changed and they can use these institutions or we can use these institutions to gain control of political power and that is the way, that we are advocating, to socialism. Democratic political action by the working-class based on socialist understanding.
Trotsky

Well what about Trotsky? Well if I can change the words of a song they used to sing in the Labour Party youth movement, ‘Trotsky was a bolshie’. He wasn’t from the start as has been pointed out. When Lenin in his notorious pamphlet ‘What is to be Done’ put forward this outrageous view that the working-class is only capable of reaching a trade union consciousness and that socialist ideas have to be brought to the workers by a vanguard elite of intellectuals, Trotsky joined the chorus of those who said this is not socialism, this is not Marxism, it is Blanquism, it is Jacobism and Trotsky as has been pointed out only joined the Bolshevik party in 1917. You can make what you will of this, he only joined it when he saw it had a prospect of winning control of winning political power. Trotsky as has been said played a leading role in the Bolshevik coup d’etat of November 1917 and for six or seven years after that he was a leading member of the Bolshevik government.
Now I could or we could go into the details of his record as a member of the Bolshevik government during that period but it is a question of the Kronstadt uprising, of the militarisation of trade unions and various other anti working class measures which the Bolshevik government took. But I am not going to do that. I am not going to argue that Trotsky thought that the way to socialism in Britain or in an advanced country like Britain was the same as it was in Russia in 1917. I am going to take what Trotsky himself said. In 1925 he wrote a pamphlet called ‘Where is Britain going’ and in here he says first of all that Britain is a country that has been ripe for socialism for many times. His political judgment incidentally was not all that good because he thought he said that Britain is heading rapidly towards a period of civil war and revolutionary upheaval. But the way he sees socialism coming about in here is through the election of what he calls a real Labour government. What does he mean by a real Labour government? He means one based on the trade unions but led by a political group. Now he studied what political group controlled the labour party at that time and it was the Independent Labour Party. Most of the members of parliament including Ramsay Macdonald himself, most of the members of the National Executive Committee of the labour party were members of the Independent Labour Party. Now Trotsky’s solution was if only this Independent Labour party was replaced by the Communist party then that would be alright, that would be the way in which socialism would come about and that has been the policy of Trotskyist groups ever since. Try to build up a Labour party and try to get a leading position within it, now we say that is not the way in which socialism will come through or come about. It will not come about through a party based on trade unions led by a vanguard party.
Hillel Ticktin

Now I have got some idea of what the point is there. Well I as is clear, I do not disagree on the conception of socialism except that I would add to it that Marx says a socialist society is a society in which labour becomes mankind’s prime want. I said I do not disagree with the conception of socialism and Adam has said he was surprised that I regarded communism and socialism as the same thing. Well if you read Marx that is very clear, no doubt that is what he referring to. Now why I disagree with him is that distinction was actually specifically made by Lenin and adopted by Trotsky or made by Trotsky and they specifically saw a separate state capitalist theory.
Well I cannot remember ‘State and Revolution’ itself so I cannot argue about the text but I have read what Lenin and Trotsky were writing in the period of 1917 to 1923 and I have read quite a bit of it in Russian. Quite a bit of what I have read, not everything that has appeared which is far too much anyway. One thing that is clear is when they use socialism there in applying it to the Soviet Union, when I have read it they, no doubt there are other cases when they did not put it in, there are inverted commas. Sometimes they make it clear that it is not socialism. That the word they have been using is not really meant to mean socialism as it has been historically understood by Marx or Marx and they don’t really mean it as socialism. Now that is actually very clear if you read through it.
Secondly if you look at how Lenin defines, Trotsky is not very different, how does Lenin define what existed by 1920 / 1921? He says it is state capitalist, exactly apparently what your program is, he calls it state capitalist. He is very firm that it is not socialism. Specifically the party congresses calls it state capitalism. And for him that was because particularly after 1921 you have more extent of private enterprise. You have the one hand the state apparatus held by the Communist party on the other hand you have a capitalist framework and that is what he says.
It is different I think from SPGB and other viewpoints of state capitalism which fuse the two and argue the state itself is capitalist or operating as capitalism. He is saying he is seeing them as separate. The communist party actually holds the state and therefore the possibility therefore of the communist party being able to go from there to a society in transition to a socialist society. But Lenin and Trotsky never thought they could build socialism in one country or socialism in Russia at that time. They were absolutely explicit at the time. I have read a hundred and one times saying why did Lenin go into Poland, not in order to conquer Poland, it is not that he did or didn’t care about Poland, you might as well say he did not care tuppence about Poland. He was trying to get to Germany. Why was he trying to get to Germany? In order to assist the revolution in Germany. It was an absolutely desperate act, he makes it clear it was desperate, Trotsky was opposed to it, but that was why. They knew they could not succeed. They were absolutely clear a hundred and one per cent they could not succeed in Russia by itself. They were not trying to construct socialism. They knew that.
Now I know the argument of various Stalinists like my former colleagues in the Institute of what was the Institute of Soviet Studies would be trying to argue that Lenin was a Stalinist but that is just nonsense and even trying to adapt Trotsky. That is a hundred per cent nonsense. Neither Lenin nor Trotsky ever thought they could build very much in socialist terms. That did not stop them trying to build up the country or introduce aspects that were better than might have existed under capitalism which sometimes could be called socialist with quotation marks. The militarisation of labour which was introduced with the support of Lenin not just Trotsky and Lenin then changed his mind was not anything to do with socialism or non-socialism. The population was starving for god’s sake. Industry was not working, it was down to thirty per cent of what it was. The Labour government proposed exactly the same thing in 1947. What he was talking about was running factories under control in this case it was in control of the trade unions and discipline so they could get things going as a temporary measure.
That is nothing to do with socialism or non socialism. Under conditions were people are starving, conditions of the war was unfinished and so on, that is all it meant. An attempt to maintain the economy going and there was no other way to actually do it successfully except by direction. It certainly was not socialist but they did not claim it to be socialist. They were not saying we are socialists doing this. They are saying we are trying to survive in order that we can act as a point of attraction so that for socialism so that we can not in terms of the site itself which could not be a point of attraction but as a means so that we can support a revolution in Germany. That is basically what they were saying. They were holding on in order to assist the revolution throughout the world. They were absolutely clear about that. They were not regarded as socialists.
Now the final point is I think begs the question of what is state capitalism. In my view the soviet union after Stalinism took over was in no sense capitalist, certainly not state capitalist. It never operated according to the definitions you used. It never operated on the basis of profit. Profit was one of many indicators and most times there was no profit. It was purely formal, it never operated on the basis of profit. There was a term for profit but so what? The crucial thing was whether they fulfilled the plan.
The plan itself was itself dubious. That is to say if you look at where the whole thing went it was not planned either. The idea that it was capitalist planning was nonsense. It was not capitalism it was not planning you just go through it and read what the economists later on came to say, they did not say it at the time, later on came to say. Did they sell their labour power? No! They could not sell their labour power. You had an atomised society controlled from above. The secret police were absolutely crucial to that atomised society. And if they did not work, they were hauled into court as parasites. The parasite law wasn’t just a law which was not used. Even if the last years of Gorbachev, seven hundred thousand people were taken to court for not working. There was no choice you had to work and you were under control. There was a series of controls on movement and on what they did. I won’t go into all the different forms but if you want to I could.
So to call that a society in which labour power could not be sold, where in fact the standard of living was low and in reality, the rate of exploitation was very high, where the workers could not organise in any sense, to call that capitalist is actually to say it was much better than it actually was. For any worker it was far worse to be in the Soviet Union than even some of the worst capitalist societies given the way it was.
To call it capitalist is to misunderstand what actually existed there. It was not in fact a socio economic system like capitalism, socialism, feudalism, Asian mode of production, it was an abortive form existing in the vacuum of history and for that reason it will always threaten to disintegrate until it finally did disintegrate. People who regard it as capitalist cannot understand its process of movement, why it had to come to an end, it could not have lasted. As people know I was writing that twenty years before it came to an end, it was obvious that was its nature. To call it capitalist is to misunderstand it and misunderstand how it was developing and what it actually was. There is no problem condemning it, anybody who lived in that society condemned it anyway. It is just you know unfortunate people living outside it somehow Stalinists decided to support it. You can only call them unfortunate in every respect.
Anyway it was not state capitalist, that does not actually give you an understanding of what it actually was. As I have just said it what follows from that one would be as critical as one possibly could as socialists of what existed in the Soviet Union. To call it capitalist is to miss that criticism actually, the deep criticism which should actually have been there and often was not there. It is not just an abstract thing and it was not just brought into being by Lenin or Trotsky. The point I made earlier was that a new social group had actually taken power under Stalin. It was not Stalin bring them into being, they came into being and they used Stalin. The reason for its vicious nature had to do with the fact that it could not become a system. The reason for the purges too are very much part of it. It was an inherently not contradictory but conflictual system with laws opposing each other. In a desperate search for some way to get the thing going in my view Stalin went for the purges.
I think you can if you do not adopt the state capitalist viewpoint try and understand what was really happening come to understand what was really happening there. Why it reached such depths and why it came to an end. Take a capitalist viewpoint you do not really understand anything at all including the very obvious fact that it did not base itself on profit. It desperately wanted to but it could not do it.
Okay so what I said is that the ideals of Lenin and Trotsky were in fact the same as that of Marx. The conception of permanent revolution of Trotsky comes directly from Marx, it is in fact a minor adaptation to it and in the particular conditions. He is saying that the working class has to take power in the case of Russia or anywhere else and from there it must take the next step towards socialism. Marx was of course talking in 1848, he isn’t saying anything very very different. So the ideals of socialism or the program of socialism is that of communism and in their mind and in their actions I think they saw it as that. But they were constricted within the operations of the bourgeoisie, the Civil war, the wars and so on. Thank you.
Adam Buick

Well if I was a Trotskyist, if I was a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party if it still exists or the Spartacus league, I would not regard Hillel as a Trotskyist. I would think he was a revisionist and a revisor of Trotsky’s views because not only has he rejected the distinction, the false distinction between socialism and communism that was made by Lenin and Trotsky but he has also admitted the point which you know we have always made that Russia after 1917 to start with was state capitalist. Now I have not read Trotsky in Russian but I have never found any mention in any Trotsky’s writings which have been translated where he did describe Russia after 1917 as state capitalist. Now it is quite true that neither Lenin nor Trotsky regarded Russia in that period as being socialist but they certainly believed that what Russia was doing was building socialism. But if you read this book, Trotsky’s book ‘The Revolution Betrayed’ which came out in the 1936 you will see references there and these are quotes I can give the page number to the socialist state in Russia, socialist industries in Russia, to socialist industrialisation in Russia and to socialist accumulation in Russia. And it is quite clear that although he did not think it was socialism, he did think it was on the way to socialism.
But it all follows, as a I say from this false distinction which Lenin made between socialism and communism and I quote here how Lenin describes this is in 1917 before the Bolshevik party took power. He says that what they are going to establish is not communism because that is impossible according to him, what they are going to establish is a state where ‘all citizens are transformed into hired employers of the state which is consists of the armed workers. All citizens become employers and workers of a single nationalised syndicate and all that is required is that work equally do their proper share of work and get equally paid.’
That is quite clear that in this society which they call socialism there is going to be the state and there is going to be money. In ‘the Revolution Betrayed’ Trotsky said yes of course there is going to be the state and of course there is going to be money. He says that ‘these two problems state and money have a number of traits in common. They both reduce themselves in the last analysis to the problem of problems, productivity of labour. State compulsion like money compulsion is an inheritance from class society which is incapable of defining the relations of man by man accepting the form of fetishes churchly or secular after a point in to defend the most alarming the more fetish the state.’
And then he goes on to say ‘such characteristically anarchist demands such as the abolition of money, abolition of wages and liquidation of the state and family interest merely as models of mechanical thinking.’ He says in fact you have to have the state to force people to work and you have to have money to as an incentive for people to work. As a matter of fact he argues that the money in Russia, socialist money, has to be based on gold. So you know this is the argument that what did Trotsky see as socialism. The point of the debate is Did Trotsky point the way to socialism? I say that Trotsky did not point the way to socialism, he pointed the way to state capitalism.
Now personally I am not concerned what you call Russia as long as you do not call it socialist. I mean I think in fact it happens to be state capitalist because it was based on wage labour. The same situation existed as here. A tiny minority of the population owned and controlled the means of production you know the nomenklatura, the top people in the communist party and so on and the rest of the population were excluded and had to work for a wage or a salary. So I think in fact Russia was, certainly a class society, and I think it was a state capitalist society but that was not Trotsky’s view.
I mean Trotsky held the view that Russia was some sort of workers state. He says ‘it is the nationalisation of the land, the means of industrial production, transport and exchange together with the monopoly of foreign trade constitute the basis of the soviet socialist structure. Through these relations established by the proletarian revolution the nature of the Soviet Union as a proletarian state is basically defined.’
Well of course to describe Russia in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s as a workers state is just absurd. How can it be a workers state where the workers don’t even have the vote, where the workers are excluded from any decision making and where they have to work for a wage or a salary?
So once again, we come back to the thing, what is the way to socialism? I mean the way to socialism is not through state capitalism. It is not through armed insurrection. It is not as I was saying at the end of my first contribution it is not through electing a party based on trade unions and led by some sort of leaders. As I was saying before the way to socialism first of all is people have got to understand what socialism is. It is a system as I said of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of the production where there is no money, there is no markets, there is no working for wages and where the principle of from each according to his ability to each according to their needs is in it. People must want and understand it, the overwhelming majority of people must want and understand that type of society. Once you have got that you are more than halfway there because you know from that point on it is a technical matter of how you get there.
In countries like Britain and most of North America and Western Europe and other parts of the world as well the means are there. It is the ballot box. People, instead of electing and sending to parliament Labour, Tory, Liberal and other capitalist politicians, they send socialist delegates there to take over the state. Then they declare all private property rights, all title deeds, these are all null and void, from now on all the means of production belong in common to the whole of society. From that point on it is a question of organisation, democratic organisation to produce things purely and simply for use, that is the way to socialism.
It is not through leadership. It is not through some sort of minority action it is through democratic conscious majority action and that is the way to socialism. And Trotsky never accepted that, Trotsky in fact specifically rejected that on a number of occasions and in fact Hillel is a Trotskyist to that extent because he has explained every failure to establish socialism up til now by the failure of having leadership. I mean Trotsky wrote something about the Paris Commune. Why did the Paris Commune fail? Because there was not a vanguard party. That has been kept up by Trotskyists ever since.
You mention Albania, you mention Germany, you mention Hungary all these, the Trotskyist explanation is all these failed because there was not a leadership. In fact they failed because the majority of workers did not want and understand socialism. They were deeply discontented, wanted to overthrow the regime in place, but they did not want to establish socialism, that is the reason why these things failed. I will repeat in summing up, the way to socialism is through democratic political action on the part of the working class.