Michel Pablo (Raptis), June 1951 Discussion document — International Secretariat of the Fourth International
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What I wrote in my article on "The Class Nature of Yugoslavia" and then in the article "Where Are We Going?" concerning the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, its probable duration and its character, has given rise to a series of comments and various reactions within our movement. This obliges me to explain myself further on this question, whose interest — from a theoretical, and also a practical, point of view — is, it seems to me, considerable.
Indeed, I wrote that this transition period will probably occupy several centuries, and I insisted on this fact. The comrades who find this probable duration excessive have perhaps not paid sufficient attention to this precise point: that we are speaking of the period in which the transition from capitalism to socialism will be completed.
The seizure of power is not yet socialism, in the economic and social sense of that term in Marxist vocabulary. I use the term socialism in its classical sense, defined first of all by Marx himself, namely the regime in which the productive forces will have attained such a level of development that it will allow the effective, progressive abolition of classes, of the State, of the distinction between manual and cultural labour, and between town and country.
The completed socialist society is the direct antechamber of communist society, in which the formula "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" will actually be applied, and in which the various "birthmarks of the old society", as Marx put it, will have disappeared — birthmarks still borne, "in every respect, economic, moral, intellectual", by the society issuing from capitalism after the seizure of power by the proletariat. This period of the transformation of capitalism into socialism — the latter term being taken in its economic and social sense and not simply its political sense (the seizure of power by the proletariat) — is evidently an entire historical period extending over several centuries.
It seems to me that the classics of Marxism envisaged the question in this general sense, independently of the nuances we may distinguish between one and another. Marx, in his letter to Bracke on the Gotha Programme of 5 May 1875, speaks of the "period of revolutionary transformation of capitalist society into communist society", a period to which there corresponds "a period of political transition in which the state can be nothing other than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat".
We find an idea of the probable duration Marx assigned to this period in the essential passage of the Critique of the Gotha Programme, where Marx gives an economic and social analysis of future society. Let us recall the essential points of this passage, which will also help us better understand the concrete character of this transition period.
Marx insists on the fact that the society issuing from capitalism after the seizure of power cannot immediately be a "communist society (...) as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary as it emerges from capitalist society; a society which, therefore, in every respect — economic, moral, intellectual — still bears the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges".
On the economic and social plane, this society is still governed by a bourgeois right which, while constantly improving in relation to full bourgeois right, "still remains encumbered by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producer is proportional to the labour he has supplied; the inequality here lies in the use of labour as the common measure". However, since individuals' needs are not equal, "given equal labour, and hence an equal share in the social fund of consumption, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, etc."
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society, Marx adds, "as it emerges from capitalist society after long and painful birth-pangs [emphasis ours]". All this will disappear, according to Marx, once the socialist phase of post-capitalist society has been completed and the higher, communist phase begins — that is, when "the enslaving subordination of individuals to the division of labour, and with it the antithesis between mental and physical labour, will have vanished; when labour will have become not merely a means of life but life's prime want; when, with the all-round development of individuals, the productive forces too will have grown, and all the springs of common wealth will flow more abundantly [emphasis ours]".
On the basis of these passages, it is in my view clear that Marx, while holding — as he says in his aforementioned letter to Bracke — that "the [party] programme need not concern itself for the present, either with this latter [the transition period] or with the future state in communist society", nevertheless envisaged an entire historical period between capitalist society and its transformation into a completed socialist society (in the economic and social sense of the term, let us repeat).
Let us now turn to Lenin. He was, both compelled and impelled by the conditions of his time, to speak far more concretely about this transition period and its character, especially after the seizure of power in Russia. All Trotskyists know the puerile manner in which Stalin and his school sought to sponsor their theory of "socialism in one country" under Lenin's name, by means of quotations falsified both in spirit and even in letter. The essence of their operation consisted in taking the term "socialism", which Lenin does indeed use in several of his articles in the sense of "the seizure of political power" — possible in a single country — and giving it the sense of the completion of the economic and social content of socialism, the completion of socialist society being possible, including in a single country. In reality, both the spirit and the letter of Lenin's innumerable writings on this question envisage the possibility of a completed socialist society only on a world scale.
And within what time-frame? Here are some characteristic quotations: "It is scarcely conceivable that our next generation, which will be far more developed, will be able to accomplish a complete transition to socialism." (Report of 29 April 1918 to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviet government). Here is how Trotsky comments on this admission by Lenin: "Lenin envisaged the accomplishment of this goal [the completion of socialist society] as the successive work of two or three generations, moreover in indissoluble connection with the development of the international revolution." ("The Fourth International and the USSR", 1 October 1933)
On 3 December 1919, at the Congress of Communes and Cartels, Lenin declared: "We know that we cannot establish a socialist order now. It will be good [emphasis ours] if our children, and perhaps our grandchildren, establish it." (Works, vol. 16) This estimate of Lenin's takes on its full importance when we add that Lenin is here envisaging the time required for the accomplishment not of socialism in Russia alone, backward and isolated, but of socialism on a far larger scale, through the victory of the revolution which he was counting on above all in Europe, and in Germany first of all.
But naturally it is again Trotsky who has had to, and been able to, express himself most concretely thus far on the probable duration and the character of the transition period from capitalism to socialism. In order to combat the confusion and falsifications into which the Stalinist school has dragged so fundamental a Marxist notion as the political, economic and social meaning to be given to the term "socialism", Trotsky was obliged to insist above all on the material conditions that characterize a truly socialist regime. "Socialist society, Trotsky holds, can be built only upon the most advanced productive forces, upon the application of electricity and chemistry to the process of production, including agriculture; by combining, generalizing and carrying to their maximum development the most advanced elements of modern technique. (...) Socialism must not merely inherit from capitalism the highest productive forces, but must immediately advance them further, raise them to a higher level and give them a development unknown under capitalism [emphasis ours]." [2]
"Real socialist development" [3] Trotsky held to depend on a high level of development of the productive forces, carried well beyond the levels attained by the most advanced capitalist countries, and which would begin only after the victory of the proletariat "in at least a few advanced countries" [4]. Trotsky spoke in this connection of the "epoch of genuine socialist construction" which would then, and only then, open. [5] But it is above all in The Revolution Betrayed that Trotsky was best able to express himself on all these questions, the purpose of the analysis given in that work being to grasp the real course of the revolution in our epoch, starting from the concrete experience of the USSR. What, in this connection, are the fundamental conclusions of that work?
a) The seizure of power, which is on the agenda for every country in our epoch and is consequently possible in each country separately, does not immediately establish a socialist regime, in the economic and social sense of that term, but a transitional regime, "between capitalism and socialism, or preparatory to socialism". This regime will apply "socialist methods to pre-socialist tasks".
b) The epoch of "real socialist development" will begin with the victory of the revolution on an international scale, that is, embracing at least several advanced countries, on the basis of a level of productive forces which, from the outset, is at least equal to that "which the most advanced capitalism has approached".
c) Contrary to what Marx, and Lenin too, believed — "proceeding solely from the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat" [6] — one cannot abolish "bureaucratic deformations" immediately after the seizure of power and before a certain level of productive forces, well above the level of the most advanced capitalism, has been reached; nor can they any longer be combated by "purely political" measures (eligibility and recall at any moment of all delegates, abolition of material privileges, active mass control). "The socialist state, even in America, on the basis of the most advanced capitalism, would be unable to give everyone all that they need, and would consequently be obliged to spur everyone on to produce as much as possible." (The Revolution Betrayed, p. 68)
d) Bureaucratic tendencies and deformations are not peculiar solely to the development of a backward and isolated USSR. "The bureaucratic tendencies which stifle the workers' movement will also have to manifest themselves everywhere after the proletarian revolution [emphasis ours]." (ibid., p. 71) "But it is quite evident that the poorer the society born of the revolution, the more severely and bluntly this 'law' must manifest itself, and the more brutal the forms bureaucratism must assume — and the more dangerous it can become for the development of socialism [emphasis ours]." (ibid., p. 71)
e) "The development of the productive forces is practically the first absolutely necessary condition [for communism], for this further reason: that without it, want is merely made general, and with want the struggle for necessities would begin again, and that means that all the old crap must revive [emphasis ours]." (Marx, quoted by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed, p. 71)
It follows that, in the spirit of Trotsky's writings (if not in their very letter), the transformation of capitalism into socialism will indeed occupy an entire historical epoch, filled with bureaucratically deformed transitional regimes, and that these inevitable bureaucratic deformations (which have above all economic causes) will disappear only as the revolution wins the advanced countries and as their level of productive forces reaches and surpasses that of the most advanced capitalism. Hence, naturally, the paramount importance of the revolution in the advanced countries and of the international victory of the revolution, in order to accelerate socialist reconstruction and attain, as rapidly as possible, the real economic and social content of socialism.
I believe that what I wrote in my two articles on the probable duration and the characteristics of the transition period is entirely in keeping with these real views of Trotsky's on these questions.
As regards the duration of the transition period, I added in "Where Are We Going?" the remark that we must not forget that we are already in the second century since the appearance of the Communist Manifesto, which put the socialist revolution on the agenda, and more than fifty years since the beginning of "imperialism, the last stage of capitalism".
Does anyone seriously believe that everything else — that is, the effective transformation of capitalism into socialism — is a matter of a few decades, of a few years only? Even were the revolution to win the United States in the near future — that essential mass, by far the most important part of the capitalist system, in which is concentrated the highest degree of development of the productive forces that capitalism has ever known — the completion of a world socialist society would remain a work of long duration (if only to raise the level of the productive forces and of economic progress in the rest of the world to that of the USA).
Moreover, in the case — now more than probable — where the victory of the world proletarian revolution must still pass through the ordeal of a third war, with all the destruction that this will cause (this time including the USA itself), we must naturally reckon with still longer delays and additional difficulties.
These views have nothing "pessimistic" about them. What would rather be illogical, childish, mechanical would be, in our view, a conception according to which the most formidable transformation of society (emerging from its millennial barbarism) — in every respect, economic, moral, intellectual — could be accomplished miraculously, along a short and straight line of development.
What practical importance is there in insisting so strongly on the probable duration and the character of the transition period? It seems to us considerable. It is a matter, first of all, of arming the communist cadres of our movement with a historical perspective and with clear notions of the goals to be attained, so that they may master the conjunctural, activist impatience, and impressionism. It is also a matter of making them capable of grasping the development of the revolution in our epoch in its real and concrete aspect, apart from all formalism of thought.
The developments that have taken place during and after the last war — the formation of the European "buffer zone", the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions, the other colonial revolutions now under way in Asia — have provoked divergent reactions within the revolutionary vanguard. A number of elements have interpreted these events as the expression of a "progressive" historical role for Stalinism, and have arrived at "conciliation" with it, at its "idealization", or at pure and simple capitulation before it, more especially in the countries where its pressure remains strong.
Other elements are subject to the opposite class pressure, which grows ever greater as we approach the crucial moment of the test; refusing any distinction between the social character of regimes and movements and their temporarily Stalinist or Stalinizing leadership, they reject both alike, wholesale.
These elements have an "ideal" conception of the real and concrete revolutionary process in our epoch, and admit it only in its pure forms, the norms described by Marx and Lenin. [7] They regard the bureaucratic deformation of proletarian power that marked the Russian Revolution — and, through its degeneration, a large part of the revolutionary process of our time — as the pure and simple negation of any difference from capitalism in class content, even though this content was won only by the struggle against capitalism and the destruction of its foundations, that is, of the relations of production and property peculiar to it.
Caught between these two tendencies, we have been obliged to reaffirm and defend the fundamental criteria of Marxist theory and the master ideas provided by the Trotskyist analysis of the USSR and of Stalinism. We have patiently explained under what exceptional concrete conditions the Soviet bureaucracy was led to expropriate the bourgeoisie, economically and politically, in the countries of the European "buffer zone", and under what exceptional conditions the Yugoslav Communist Party and the Chinese Communist Party were driven to power by the powerful mass movement. We have analysed and demonstrated, in the light more particularly of the Yugoslav experience and of the crisis of Stalinism in the other countries of the "buffer zone", the elements of crisis and differentiation that exist within the expansion of Stalinism.
We have above all insisted on this fundamental idea in our theoretical arsenal: that the bureaucratic deformation of proletarian power, and more especially the monstrous form it has taken with the Soviet bureaucracy in the USSR, will be eliminated only by the triumph of the revolution on an international scale embracing the advanced countries.
But revolution means, above all, the destruction of capitalism, the destruction of its relations of production and property, and the establishment of new relations. This is the decisive fact. The Stalinist form of the bureaucratic deformation of proletarian power arose only in the case of a backward, semi-barbarous country which remained for a long time isolated from any further major advances of the world revolution.
The political expropriation of the proletariat and the formation of such an omnipotent and uncontrollable bureaucracy as exists in the USSR is excluded in the case of an international triumph of the revolution embracing the advanced countries, and particularly in the case of a victory in the United States.
We have never written, nor given to understand, that the political expropriation of the proletariat after the seizure of power on an international scale can be envisaged as possible, still less that it could extend over centuries. Such an assertion would theoretically amount to accepting the theory of "bureaucratic collectivism", that is, the possibility of a historical regime intermediate between capitalism and socialism. On the contrary, we wrote, word for word, the following: "Proletarian power will inevitably and rapidly become bureaucratized and will risk ending in the complete political expropriation of the proletariat, if the revolution remains isolated in a single country encircled by imperialism [emphasis now added]." [8]
"The modifications to the norm of proletarian power", we wrote further on, "will diminish only as the basis of proletarian power spreads beyond the framework of a single country and increasingly embraces a portion of the world economy [emphasis now added]." [9]
Even for the USSR, we have not admitted that the development of the bureaucracy, favoured by powerful economic causes, had necessarily and fatally to transform "the Bolshevik Party, and through it the entire Communist International, into organs of the bureaucracy". [10]
We situate the fall of Stalinism within the unfolding of the struggle already engaged between imperialism and revolution in all its forms: the USSR, the "people's democracies", Yugoslavia, China, the colonial revolutions under way, the international revolutionary movement. This struggle will not last centuries but a much shorter period. It will bring about, as we have repeated many times in all our writings, through the destruction of capitalism and imperialism, the fall also of Stalin's Bonapartist power and of Stalinism. This is the basis of our optimism and of our revolutionary perspectives.
Internal Bulletin of the IS, no. 8, July 1951.
Notes
1. Internal Bulletin of the IS, October 1949 and January 1951. 2. The Communist International after Lenin [known in English as The Third International After Lenin], English edition, pp. 52-53. 3. Ibid., p. 38. 4. Ibid., p. 54. 5. Ibid., p. 54. 6. "Lenin was unable, either in his major work on the question (The State and Revolution) or in the party programme, to draw all the conclusions imposed by the country's backwardness and isolation." (The Revolution Betrayed, p. 73) 7. In his writings prior to the Russian Revolution. 8. "On the Class Nature of Yugoslavia", Internal Bulletin of the IS, October 1949. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid.