Key works
1897 Critique of Historical Materialism
1920 The Reform of Education
1928 The Philosophy of Fascism
See also: Georg Hegel • Karl Marx • Friedrich Nietzsche • Vladimir Lenin • Joseph Stalin • Benito Mussolini
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
State socialism
FOCUS
Collectivization
BEFORE
1566 In Russia, Ivan the Terrible’s efforts to create a centralized state result in peasants fleeing and a drop in food production.
1793–94 The Jacobins institute the Reign of Terror in France.
AFTER
1956 Nikita Krushchev reveals that Stalin executed thousands of loyal communists during the purges.
1962 Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, telling of life in a Russian labour camp, becomes a worldwide bestseller.
1989 Mikhail Gorbachev introduces glasnost (openness), saying “I detest lies”.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks set about creating a new socialist system through nationalization, taking privately held assets or enterprises into government ownership. Lenin’s successor as leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, accelerated this process from 1929, and over five years the economy was rapidly industrialized and collectivized by edict from the centre. In the name of modernizing the Soviet Union’s agricultural system, Stalin amalgamated farms under state control as “socialist state property”. The class of relatively wealthy farmers known as kulaks were compelled to give up their land and join collective farms. Stalin’s police confiscated food and took it to the towns, and the peasants retaliated by burning their crops and killing their animals. A disastrous famine ensued, and in the area of Ukraine known as the “breadbasket” because of its rich farmland, five million people starved, or were shot or deported. By 1934, seven million kulaks had been “eliminated”. Those who survived were now living on state farms run by government officials.
Revolution from above
Stalin reasoned that collectivization was an essential form of class war, forming part of a “revolution from above”. This simple conflation gave him the justification he needed to move away from Lenin’s policy of using persuasion to organize the peasants into cooperatives. Stalin began by “restricting the tendencies of the kulaks”, then moved on to “ousting” them from the countryside, and finally “eliminating” them as an entire class. Lenin had warned that as long as the Soviet Union remained surrounded by capitalist countries, the class struggle would need to continue. Stalin quoted this often as collectivization advanced. He complained that the individual peasant economy “generated capitalism”, and that as long as it did, capitalism would remain a feature of the Soviet economy.
Stalin framed the mass-murder of millions of individuals as the “liquidation” of a class, to be carried out by “depriving them of the productive sources of existence”. However, when the destruction of private farming was complete, he sustained the terror, claiming that the old “kulak mentality” was lingering, and continued to threaten the communist state.
As the terror of Stalin’s regime spread, it was not only the kulaks who would suffer persecution. Opponents of Stalin’s rule, real and imagined, were killed, including every single surviving member of Lenin’s politburo. Lenin’s revolution was transformed into Stalin’s dictatorship, and the Bolshevik party, which Lenin had seen as a “vanguard party” inspiring the masses, became a hulking, institutionalized state party that performed the role of the instrument of terror in Stalin’s regime. Stalin had begun his persecution with the kulaks, but by the middle of the 1930s, few were safe from the state terror machine.
During the collectivization of farming, propaganda posters urged farmers to till every available hectare. However, the forced collectivization led to a disastrous drop in production.
JOSEPH STALIN
Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in the village of Gori, Georgia. He was educated at the local church school, and later expelled from Tiflis Theological Seminary, where he had become a Marxist. As a young man, he was a noted poet.
Stalin’s political career took off in 1907 when he attended the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London with Lenin. Active in the political underground, he was exiled to Siberia several times, and in 1913, he adopted the name Stalin from the Russian word stal (“steel”). By the revolution of 1917, he had become a leading figure in the Bolshevik party. Stalin’s ruthless actions in the subsequent civil war were an early warning of the terrors that would come when he succeeded Lenin as the leader of the Soviet Union. He had a troubled private life, and both his first son and second wife committed suicide.
Key works
1924 The Principles of Leninism
1938 Dialectical and Historical Materialism
See also: Karl Marx • Vladimir Lenin • Leon Trotsky
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Communism
FOCUS
Permanent revolution
BEFORE
360 BCE Plato describes an ideal state in the Republic.
1794 French writer Francois Noel Babeuf proposes a communistic society with no private property and a guaranteed livelihood for all.
AFTER
1932 President Roosevelt promises the American people a New Deal, initiating an era of government intervention and regulation of the economy.
2007 Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez declares himself to be a Trotskyist.
2012 Russian punk band Pussy Riot denounce Vladimir Putin’s “totalitarian system”.
Throughout his career, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky always sought to promote what he saw as a truly Marxist position. He worked closely with Vladimir Lenin to translate Karl Marx’s theories into practice as the two men led the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. According to Marx’s theory, the revolution was to be followed by a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as workers took control of the means of production. However, following Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin’s absolutist bureaucracy soon crushed any hope of such a mass movement, imposing a dictatorship of one man instead. Trotsky had hoped to safeguard the advances he believed had been made in the revolution through a strategy of “permanent revolution”, which would be guaranteed by the ongoing support of an international working class. Marx had warned that socialism in one place could not hope to succeed in isolation from the global proletariat, stating that revolution must continue “until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions… not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world”. Lenin had insisted that the socialist revolution in Russia could triumph only if supported by workers’ movements in one or several other economically advanced countries. Trotsky’s followers have since argued that this failure to achieve a critical mass of support internationally was the reason that the Soviet Union fell into Stalin’s hands.
Communism under Stalin
Within four years of Lenin’s death, the inner party democracy and the soviet democratic system – the cornerstone of Bolshevism – had been dismantled within communist parties across the world. Within the Soviet Union itself, Stalin’s doctrine of “Socialism in One Country” removed the wider aspiration for an international workers’ revolution.
Dissidents were vilified as Trotskyists and expelled from party ranks. When his Left Opposition faction against Stalin failed, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and exiled from the Soviet Union. By 1937, Stalin had jailed or killed all of the so-called Trotskyists of the Left Opposition, and Trotsky himself was in Mexico, hiding from assassins.
Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky were all leading figures in the Bolshevik Revolution. After Lenin died, Stalin took power and Trotsky was a marked man.
Against morality
Many on the left reacted to Stalin’s excesses by moving to the right and
rejecting revolutionary Marxism, taking up what Trotsky described as “moralistic” positions that emphasized universal values. The suggestion was that Bolshevism – the centralist system of Lenin and Trotsky – had allowed the crimes of Stalin.
In Their Morals and Ours, Trotsky describes this claim as a reactionary spasm of class conflict disguised as morality. One of the main criticisms levelled at Bolshevism was that Lenin’s belief that “the end justifies the means” had led directly to the “amorality” of treachery, brutality, and mass murder. To these critics, morality protected against such atrocities. Trotsky considered that, whether intended or not, this was simply a defence of capitalism, as he believed that capitalism could not exist “through force alone. It needs the cement of morality.” For Trotsky, there is no such thing as morality if it is conceived as a set of eternal values that are not derived from sensory or material evidence. Hence, any behaviour that is not motivated by the existing social conditions or class conflict is illegitimate and inauthentic. Abstract moral concepts that are not based on empirical evidence are simply tools used by ruling-class institutions to suppress the class struggle. The ruling class imposes “moral” obligations on society that its members do not observe themselves and which serve to perpetuate their power.
"Root out the counter-revolutionaries without mercy, lock up suspicious characters in concentration camps. Shirkers will be shot, regardless of past service."
Leon Trotsky
Trotsky gives the morality of war as an example: “The most ‘humane’ governments, which in peaceful times ‘detest’ war, proclaim during war that the highest duty of their armies is the extermination of the greatest possible number of people.” The insistence on the prescribed behavioural norms of religion and philosophy was also a tool of class deception. For Trotsky, to expose this deceit was the revolutionary’s first duty.
The Allies’ fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, in World War II illustrated Trotsky’s contention that liberal capitalist governments will break their own rules of morality during wartime.
The new aristocracy
Trotsky was keen to show that the centralizing tendencies of Bolshevism were not the “means” whose “end” was Stalinism. Such centralization was necessary to defeat the Bolsheviks’ enemies, but its end was always intended to be a decentralized dictatorship of the proletariat, ruling through the system of soviets. For Trotsky, Stalinism was an “immense bureaucratic reaction” against what he saw as the advances of the 1917 revolution. Stalinism reinstated the worst of absolutist entitlements, “regenerating the fetishism of power” beyond the dreams even of the tsars; it had created a “new aristocracy”. Trotsky saw the crimes of Stalin as the consequence of the most brutal class struggle of all – that of “the new aristocracy against the masses that raised it to power”. He was scathing of self-declared Marxists who linked Bolshevism with Stalinism by stressing the immorality of both. In Trotsky’s eyes, he and his followers had opposed Stalin from the beginning, while his critics had only arrived at their position after Stalin’s atrocities had come to light.
"We must rid ourselves once and for all of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life."
Leon Trotsky
Critics of Marxism often claim that the idea that “the end justifies the means” is used to justify acts of murder and barbarism, as well as the deception of the masses, purportedly for their own benefit. Trotsky insisted that this was a misunderstanding, stating that “the end justifies the means” simply signifies that there is an acceptable way to do a right thing. For example, if it is permissible to eat fish then it is right to kill and cook them. The moral justification of any action must be linked to its “end” in this way. Killing a mad dog that is threatening a child is a virtue, but killing a dog gratuitously, or perversely for no “end”, is a crime.
The ultimate end
So what is the answer to the question “what may we, and what may we not do”? What end justifies the means needed to achieve it? For Trotsky, the end is justified if it “leads to the increasing power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man”. In other words, the end can itself be seen as a means to this ultimate end. But did Trotsky mean that the liberation of the working classes was an end for which any destructiveness was permissible? He will only consider this question in relation to the class struggle, thinking it a meaningless abstraction to do otherwise. Thus, the only meaningful good is that which unites the revolutionary proletariat, strengthening it as a class for the ongoing struggle.
Trotsky’s reasoning has been seen by some notable Marxists as dangerous, counter-revolutionary, and false. Harry Haywood, an African-American Marxist-Leninist who was in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 30s, believed that “Trotsky was doomed to defeat because his ideas were incorrect and failed to conform to objective conditions, as well as the needs and interests of the Soviet people.” During the Russian Civil War of 1917–22, Trotsky had centralized command structures in what was known as “War Communism”. This centralizing tendency has been criticized by disillusioned former followers as closed to critical reflection, convinced of the absolute rightness of its own analysis, and brooking no dissent. In addition, such structures necessarily restrict power to a small group of leaders, as they are too demanding of workers’ time and effort for a wide-based system of mass participation to develop. Writing in the 1940s, US Marxist Paul Mattick asserted that the Russian Revolution had itself been as totalitarian as Stalinism, and that the legacy of Bolshevism, Leninism, and Trotskyism served “as a mere ideology to justify the rise of modified capitalist (state-capitalist) systems… controlled by way of an authoritarian state.”
Slaughter on a grand scale was perpetrated by Trotsky’s Red Army in the Russian Civil War, leading critics to compare Bolshevism to Stalin’s purges.
LEON TROTSKY
Lev Davidovich Bronshtein was born in 1879 in the small village of Yanovka in what is now Ukraine. Schooled in cosmopolitan Odessa, he was involved in revolutionary activities and took up Marxism after initially opposing it. He was arrested, imprisoned, and exiled to Siberia by the time he was just 18.
In Siberia, he took his prison guard’s name, Trotsky, and escaped to London where he met and worked with Lenin on the revolutionary journal Iskra. In 1905, he returned to Russia to support the revolution. Arrested and sent back to Siberia, his bravery earned him popularity. He escaped from Siberia again, joining Lenin in the successful revolution of 1917. He led the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and held other key posts, but after Lenin’s death, he was forced out of power by Stalin and into exile. He was assassinated on Stalin’s orders by Ramón Mercader in Mexico City in 1940.
Key works
1937 The Stalin School of Falsification
1938 Their Morals and Ours
See also: Karl Marx • Vladimir Lenin • Joseph Stalin • Mao Zedong
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Anarchy
FOCUS
Land reform
BEFORE
1876 Porfirio Díaz takes power in Mexico, reinforcing inequalities in social status and land ownership.
1878 In Russia, a revolutionary party adopts the name “Land and Liberty” – the same slogan will be used by the Zapatistas in the 1990s.
AFTER
1920 A degree of land reform is granted in the south of Mexico as the revolution comes to an end.
1994 The Zapatista Army of National Liberation begins an armed uprising in the southern state of Chiapas, in protest against the Mexican government’s mistreatment of indigenous people.
The struggle for land and social rights lay at the core of the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920. A peasant by birth, Emiliano Zapata was a key figure in the revolutionary movement, leading forces in the south. He aimed to resolve the conflict through a mixture of rights, guarantees, and armed struggle.
Zapata’s ideas chimed with much of the Mexican anarchist tradition and its core principle of
communal land ownership, which was based on indigenous traditions. To ensure Mexico’s political and economic development, Zapata wanted to break the monopoly of the hacendados, or plantation owners, and unite the country – peasants and businessmen alike – behind an agenda of government reform. Harnessing the nation’s resources of labour and production would also secure its independence on the international stage.
Zapata’s vision was crystallized in his 1911 Plan of Ayala. This blueprint for reform demanded free elections, an end to the dominance of the hacendados, and the transfer of property rights to towns and individual citizens.
Like most of the leaders in the revolution, Zapata was killed before the end of the conflict. Although land reform was enacted in the 1920s, huge inequalities persisted. Yet Zapata’s ideas left an enduring legacy in Mexico, and inspired the recent Zapatista movement among indigenous peasants in Chiapas, which has created a quasi-autonomous state in the south.
The troops who fought for Zapata in the Mexican Revolution were mostly indigenous peasants, and included all-female divisions.
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