The Theory of Structural Assimilation

 

The Theory of 

Structural Assimilation 

by Tim Wohlforth

AUTHOR'S PREFACE 

The development of this theoretical project on Stalinism has been rather intimately entwined with political struggles within the Trotskyist movement. Ideally it is best, of course, to begin one's battles with a rounded theoretical understanding of the issues one is battling over. But political life is rarely ideal and most people learn what they are battling over in the course of being banged over the head (theoretically, of course.) The important thing is to develop during the course of struggle, no matter how confused one may be in the beginning. Those who do not develop are either destroyed or worthless as far as building a revolutionary movement is concerned. 

It all began at the January 1961 National Committee Plenum of the Socialist Workers Party. The overwhelming majority of the SWP leadership had come to the conclusion that Cuba was a workers' state and were in the process of adopting wholesale the method and theoretical outlook of Michel Pablo, whom they had fought less than a decade earlier. A small minority was formed in opposition to this tum, of which I am afraid I was the sole representative on the National Committee at that time. 

We did our best to resist the stampede back to Pablo which was the major feature of the pre-convention discussion which followed the Plenum and of the SWP Convention which was held in July of 1961. Our resistance was essentially of an "orthodox" character - we knew that the current line of the SWP leadership bore no relationship whatsoever to Trotsky's teachings and we devoted our efforts to saying so. However, we were also becoming aware that we had another responsibility - the development of an alternative analysis of the events of the post-war world to the Pabloism taken up by the SWP leadership. It was really only after the 1961 convention that we were able to devote much attention to this problem. 

In the summer of 1961 I wrote a preliminary draft document on the nature of the Cuban state and the theoretical implications flowing therefrom. The first discussions of this document immediately convinced me that I was utterly and totally on the wrong track. Like the SWP leadership itself I was simply throwing together scraps of theory to "explain" an impression of reality in Cuba and to justify a political conclusion - one of course far more critical of the Cuban leadership than that of the SWP majority. If I was to get to first base in understanding Cuba it became clear that I had to fit Cuba into a general theoretical understanding of postwar developments as a whole. Thus first I had to wrestle with the theoretical problems raised by East Europe, Yugoslavia and China before I could expect to get anywhere on more current developments. Ironically, the more I reached an understanding of these events the less I found them related to Cuba. So a document, which started out as an analysis of Cuba, does not even deal directly with that question. We are issuing an analysis of Cuba separately. 

Particular credit must go to Shane Mage who at the time was in our political tendency for his merciless critique of my theoretical hodge-podge on Cuba and for his general suggestion as to the direction one should look for a solution to the theoretical problems vexing the movement. It was Shane Mage who first suggested the conception of structural assimilation may be the clue not only to any understanding of East Europe but also of Yugoslavia and China as well. 

In the Fall of 1961 I did the basic research on East European developments and began to search through the old discussions in the early postwar years of the Fourth International. By early 1962 a basic draft of the section on Eastern Europe was completed. Then work was interrupted in order to produce some material for the June 1962 National Committee Plenum of the SWP. In late 1962 I once again found time to work on the project and wrote the section on Yugoslavia and some of the material on the theoretical controversy within the Fourth International. This work was again interrupted by the pressures of the SWP discussion preparing for the 1963 Convention. In August and September of 1963 I completed the theoretical section of the document, added the Chinese section and the concluding section, and did a basic editing job on the whole project. The document was then submitted to our political tendency for discussion. The document as it appears now is essentially as it was when I completed it in September 1963. Only some minor editing has been done since that time. 

As the work on this document progressed our tendency became more and more aware of the extreme importance of an understanding of the Marxist method for the theoretical development of the movement. We also deepened in our conviction that without theoretical development a movement cannot survive. This, in essence, was the lesson we have learned from the sad story of the destruction of the SWP as a revolutionary instrument. We did not come to a realization of this all by ourselves. Our close collaborators, the comrades of the Socialist Labour League of Great Britain, are primarily responsible for helping us learn this. We are extremely indebted to them for this. It is our hope that what we have learned of the Marxist method permeates every section of this document. 

The three years since the basic conceptions in the document were worked out have offered ample evidence of the correctness of our analysis. In 1961 every empirical sign seemed to point to the almost total seizure of Cuba by the Stalinists. Everywhere in the country the Stalinists seemed on the ascendance while Cuba and the USSR developed ever closer relations. But soon came the Escalante Affair and the reassertion of control of the Cuban state by the petty bourgeois group around Fidel Castro. This was followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis during which the USSR backed down recognizing US hegemony over the Caribbean and showing how far Cuba really was from meaningful incorporation into the Soviet Camp and how little it could rely on the Kremlin for protection. 

In 1961 Guinea was seen by many in the SWP as the next Cuba thus proving that this new deformed revolutionary process was spreading across the globe. By 1962 Guinea had made its peace with imperialism but this time Algeria was the latest example of the "Cuban Way" in action. The Algerians soon outlawed the Communist Party and became ever more deeply entangled in imperialist relations with France and the US, showing how distant they were from being a "workers' state" of any kind. Early this year some utter fools thought Zanzibar would be the latest Cuba but that particular bubble burst almost simultaneous with its appearance. It is now far easier to see that it was in 1961 that the limits of the expansion of Stalinism were essentially reached with the victory of the Chinese Revolution, that this expansion was essentially defensive in nature not going beyond buffer areas on the USSR's Eastern and Western frontiers, and that these buffers themselves were becoming less and less of an effective defense mechanism for the USSR. Today almost every day the newspapers give us further evidence of the correctness of Trotsky's thesis that the degenerated workers state is essentially a retreat back towards capitalism and that, within this state, capitalist restorationist forces will grow ever stronger and more powerful unless the current bureaucracy is replaced by a genuine workers' regime. Capitalist competitive measures are being introduced into industry throughout eastern Europe and the USSR. Great concessions are being made to the peasantry in all these countries. Trade relations between these countries and the capitalist world are on the increase. The East European countries are developing an independence from the Kremlin but only in order to become more dependent on the capitalists. The West European Communist Parties are going over wholesale to their own bourgeoisies, most especially the Italian and French parties. How absurd it looks today to see Stalinism as representing a viable "new class" seeking to conquer the world or a new "distorted" revolutionary force pushing everywhere for social overturns.

Underlying all this, of course, is the growing crisis of capitalism which our impressionists have always failed to see. This crisis is not only reflected in the deepening problems of the major capitalist countries - increased competition, unemployment, labor unrest, etc - but also in the growing crisis in the Soviet Camp which, far from remaining apart from the capitalists, is ever more deeply entwined with them and thus deeply infected by their crisis. 

This crisis is, in turn, producing an awakening proletariat and the potentiality to once again build a serious revolutionary working class movement. But a revolutionary movement cannot be built as long as revolutionaries do not understand the very world they live in - as long as 3 The Theory of Structural Assimilation they dream of deformed revolutions being thrown up by non-working class forces. 

Those who wish now to build a new revolutionary movement here in the United States and in the rest of the world must begin by understanding this whole post-war world. They must see the expansion of Stalinism as part and parcel of the re-stabilization of capitalism and not as something contradictory to it. They must understand that today as the stability of capitalism is eroded from within, the whole Soviet camp itself is thrown into a deep crisis. Today is a period of great possibilities and of great dangers. The whole agonizing process of the creation of a great buffer to the East and the West which we describe in detail in this document, has not led to any real security for the USSR. The USSR is more in danger today than in any other period of its existence as the Soviet bloc breaks every which way and the capitalists penetrate into the USSR itself. Today more than ever before the defense of the great conquests of October depend on the struggle of the world proletariat, the one force the Stalinists refuse to look to. The world revolutionary movement can only be built upon a firm proletarian outlook. This document is a theoretical contribution to the development of such an outlook.

T.W., December 9, 1964. 

"Marxist thought is dialectical; it considers all phenomena in their development, in their transition from one state to another. The thought of the conservative petty bourgeois is metaphysical; its conceptions are fixed and immovable, and between phenomena it supposes that there are unbridgeable gaps." Leon Trotsky, Whither France?

PART 1: INTRODUCTION 

The Russian question has always held a central place in the theoretical work of the revolutionary movement. Most major disputes have at least touched upon this question. To the philistines our preoccupation with this question is but a reflection of our sectarianism, our "sect-like character," our purported lack of roots in the struggles of our own country, etc., etc. 

Such philistines will never understand the attention we give this question for they do not view the world as we do. Our essential reason for existence is to lead the working class to power in our own country and internationally. Therefore, the most critical questions to us are precisely those related to the revolutionary process, the way in which the working class can come to power. This is essentially what the Russian question is all about. Anything which touches this question touches at the very heart of our movement. We are not dealing here with an abstract sociological discussion which allows us to flX labels to states. We are dealing with the very process by which the working class achieves its dominance over society and begins to reshape the history of mankind. 

The degeneration of the Russian Revolution is one of the most complex social processes in the history of man. The extension of the social system existent in the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe and large parts of Asia in the post-war period has been an even more complicated and contradictory development. Our epoch of the decay of the capitalist system and the preliminary beginnings of the birth of a new society is dominated precisely by transitional and contradictory social processes that can only be understood by a method of thought which can grasp transition, development - that is by dialectics. 

Every serious dispute over the Russian question in our movement has been caused by a petty bourgeois trend which has been unable to grasp in a dialectical fashion this question. This theoretical failure has led, in time, in every case to a political failure - to an essential desertion from the revolutionary struggle. 

Stalinism was to Trotsky a degenerative process within a progressive social system, the world's first workers' state. Stalinism represented a partial retrogression in a capitalist direction expressed in the development of a privileged ruling caste internally and the going over to the side of the bourgeoisie in international politics. Deep as this retrogressive process was, it had not yet reached the point of completely negating the original conquests of October. What was new and different in Soviet society was a result of its origins in a proletarian revolution - primarily its new property forms and all that flowed from these. What was old and rotten in Soviet society was the result of the retreat of the workers' state in a bourgeois direction - the bureaucracy with its bourgeois way of living and its international policy of defense of the status quo. 

This essential Trotskyist way of seeing Stalinism within the total process of the social revolution in our epoch may seem so simple, so commonplace in our movement that we are wasting our effort repeating it here. But it is precisely these fundamentals that have been under fIre almost from the moment Trotsky formulated them. If anything, these fundamentals are less secure in our movement today than at any time in our past history. 

The Shachtmanites were the first in our movement to really seriously challenge Trotsky's approach. The Shachtmanites evolved a view of Stalinism which was actually the exact opposite of Trotsky's. What Trotsky considered old, essentially bourgeois in character - the privileged bureaucracy - Shachtman considered to be new, to be a new social class. Stalinism thus rather than being a retrogressive trend within a progressive social system became historical progress in its own right (even though reactionary in Shachtman's view.) What Trotsky viewed as a short, transitional episode in the total revolutionary struggle became with Shachtman a new world order which more and more began to dominate mankind's future. 

That Shachtman rejected this new "social class," refused to defend the Soviet Union, and finally ended up in the camp of the bourgeoisie is, of course, of extreme political importance. However, from a methodological point of view, the most essential feature of Shachtmanism was its failure to see Stalinism as a retrogressive, transitional development. Stalinism was rather given a revolutionary (even though Shachtman inconsistently rejected this revolution) expansionist character. The logic of Shachtman's theoretical position was for the Stalinist bureaucracy to replace the working class as the revolutionary factor in modern history, as the social formation which would create the society that replaces decaying capitalism. The theoretical history of the Shachtmanite movement is essentially a history of a progressively more and more feeble attempt to resist the logic of their own theoretical position and maintain - if only in words - some role for the working class. 

Shachtman's long journey away from Trotskyism began with an abandonment of the dialectical method. It was for this reason that in the 1940 fight Trotsky insisted on making a discussion of dialectics central. Shachtman abandoned any attempt to understand Stalinism as a process, to see it within the framework of the total development of social phenomena in the epoch of imperialist decay. Rather Shachtman reacted to Stalinism as it appeared at the moment. He then projected this momentary view into the indefinite future. To the petty bourgeois metaphysician, the current trend, the surface movement is all that can be comprehended. The Stalinists in the late 1930s had physically destroyed the old revolutionists during the Moscow trials. They followed this up by invading Finland and dividing up Poland with the Nazis. Surely it appeared as if a new class had consolidated itself in the USSR and now was reaching out to conquer new territories. 

Post war developments, at first, gave a big boost to the impressionists. Stalinism expanded its rule throughout Eastern Europe and Stalinist-led movements conquered in China and in North Vietnam. Had not Burnham's wildest theorizing come to life? Was not a new bureaucratic ruling class reaching out to remake the world along the lines of Orwell's 1984? Certainly Trotsky's assessment of Stalinism as retrogressive, conservative, counter-revolutionary seemed unreal, maybe even quaint. A brilliant man, yes, but he has been outdated by the "New World Reality." Many Trotskyists followed Shachtman's path out of the movement with this sort of outlook in the late forties. But the method of Shachtman was to cut even deeper into our movement in another guise - in a theoretical view which on the surface appeared to be the very opposite of Shachtmanism - Pabloism. 

Pablo also saw in Stalinism an expanding revolutionary force which would dominate mankind's future for "centuries." Like Shachtman that aspect of Trotsky's analysis which emphasized the retrogressive bourgeois character of Stalinism was rejected, cut off, and the current surface dominance of the Stalinists over a third of the earth was seen as proof enough of the potentialities of Stalinism as an expanding, progressive revolutionary force. 

Of course Pablo differed politically with Shachtman in that he identified with Stalinism while Shachtman rejected it and thus was forced in time to identify with capitalism. But both viewed the world in the same essential way and neither saw any real role for the working class in the revolutionary process. Both Shachtmanism and Pabloism represent metaphysical, non-dialectical, petty bourgeois trends that have developed within our movement. Starting with an alien method, both lead to an alienation from the working class itself, both lead away from Trotskyism. 

There has been a third theoretical trend in our movement in the postwar period. This trend has sought, many times in only a weak and partial way, to apply to the post-war world the outlook and the method of Trotsky, of Marxism. This trend has sought to maintain, under the difficult conditions of the postwar period, that Stalinism remains counter revolutionary, that the only really revolutionary force in the modern epoch is still the proletariat, that only our world party is really capable of leading the proletariat to power. 

This present project bases itself upon this Trotskyist trend. It is our firm conviction that Trotsky's fundamental outlook has been vindicated by the events of the postwar world - if only one really understands those events. There is no need for "new theories," which close examination will reveal to be nothing more than rehashes of the "pioneer" work of Bruno R., Burnham and Shachtman. There is, however, a deep need to return to Trotsky and to Trotsky's essential theoretical outlook not as a dogma but as a living, developing theoretical system. 

We are absolutely convinced that Stalinism represents a retrogressive bourgeois trend within a progressive social system 7 that its politics are completely counter-revolutionary internally and internationally, that it has no future whatsoever. We are just as convinced that the working class will come to power only through proletarian revolution under the leadership of a Marxist vanguard party and that we are indispensable to the creation of such a party. 

We are not only convinced of this but we feel that such a view can be consistently supported theoretically even though this has not been done in a thorough way in the whole postwar period. This project is an attempt to do so. We feel, whatever may be its weaknesses, its essential thrust will be proved by events to be basically correct.

* * * * * 

The development of theory, which is essentially an expression of reality, must follow the pattern of events as they occur. To violate this methodological principle leads to total confusion. And this is precisely what has happened to the theoretical work of our movement on the postwar expansion of Stalinism. Before the theoretical problems created by developments in the East European Buffer were fully resolved, the movement turned its attention to the Yugoslav events. Learning nothing from the rude way objective events repudiated our Yugoslav analysis, the same essential approach was applied to China. Today, with this phenomenal potpourri of confused and totally contradictory theories as a base, the movement tries to reach some sort of a theoretical understanding of the Cuban events - not with much success. 

There is only one way to make even modest progress under such conditions. We must go back to the beginning and begin patiently piece by piece to properly develop a total theoretical understanding of the role of Stalinism in the postwar world. We must, in condensed fashion, do the job which should have been done systematically during the past fIfteen years. So we return to the events in the Buffer and to the discussion around those events held in the Fourth International between the Second and Third World Congresses. 

Once the structural assimilation of the East European buffer is basically understood, and this theoretical analysis consistently embodied in our general theoretical outlook, then we will find it much, much easier to understand the Yugoslav Revolution. The Chinese Revolution, important as it is politically in and of itself, offers little new in the way of a theoretical challenge once the Yugoslav Revolution is understood. With a proper understanding of the structural assimilation of the East European buffer, the Yugoslav Revolution and the Chinese Revolution, we will finally be in a position to properly understand the role of Stalinism in the world today, including its role in Cuba. All this has a very direct and immediate bearing on the theoretical defense of the role of the proletariat as a revolutionary force in its own right and our role in the creation of a new leadership for the class. 

It is for these reasons that such a large part of this project is devoted to an explanation of the events of the Buffer. It is necessary to go into these events in a little detail because we are afraid our empirical worshippers of the "facts'' always seem to have such a superficial, distorted conception of what the facts actually are. This entire task is made immeasurably easier for us by the passage of close to 15 years since these events took place. It is much, much easier today than it was at the time, to sort out the significant event from the insignificant, to see how the various theoretical outlooks have stood up under the test of events.

PART II - SOVIET POLICY IN THE EAST EUROPEAN BUFFER 

Phase One - The Reconstruction of the Bourgeois State Structure 1944-1947 

The Strategy of the Kremlin

The events which were to take place in Eastern Europe can only be comprehended if one first understands the situation the Soviet Union faced with the ending of World War II and the fundamental way in which the Soviet bureaucracy sought to preserve itself under these new conditions. 

The USSR emerged from World War II as a respected world power with a powerful army which had proven itself. However, the burdens of war, increased tremendously by the policies of the bureaucracy, had severely weakened the entire economic structure of the USSR close to the breaking point. It would be difficult to exaggerate the gravity of the internal situation Stalin faced in this period. In addition the external situation had much that frightened the bureaucrats. Having succeeded in defeating one imperialist power in alliance with another imperialist power the USSR now faced a united, though temporarily weakened, imperialist opponent which even during the war had exhibited on many occasions its deep hostility to the USSR. Also all over the world the masses were in motion - revolutionary possibilities existed everywhere. To revolutionists this would be a cause. for hope, a point of support for the defense of the USSR. To the Kremlin bureaucrats, who had already been forced to loosen slightly their bureaucratic grip on the Soviet people to facilitate the defense of the country, these revolutionary situations were a cause of fear, of worry that they would get "out of control." 

Stalin was, above all else, a "practical" man in the very narrowest empirical sense of the term. In this respect he was a fitting leader of the petty bourgeois bureaucratic stratum which rules the USSR. Ideology was to him always a practical tool, a tool with which he did not feel at home. Stalin's policies in this (or any) period did not flow, in our opinion, from a false assessment of the "peace loving" nature of the imperialists he had been collaborating with during the war. Nor was Stalin's policy shaped by any long term considerations of any kind. Stalin was not a man to think in such terms nor was the bureaucracy he represented interested in such a perspective either. Stalin's policies in this period were empirically determined to solve the immediate problems facing the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union at the moment. 

There is not the slightest indication that the USSR had any real offensive or expansionist aims in this or any other period. Stalin was seeking rather, in a period in which there was tremendous potential for expanding the revolutionary struggle, simply to defend the bureaucracy which ruled the USSR. For all the talk of "everlasting peace" and the United Nations, Stalin actually relied on a series of very short term deals which he hoped would give himself time to rebuild the USSR into a more defensible position.

 

The Soviet Union's fundamental policy was thus to assist the imperialists in restabilising capitalism through most of the world so long as the imperialists in turn would give the USSR time to rebuild the country, to restabilize itself. It is extremely important to note the extent to which the USSR carried through its part of the bargain. The Soviet Union, wherever it had influence, consciously subordinated the working class movement to the restabilization of capitalism. In countries like Greece and French Indochina the local Stalinists were encouraged to allow the imperialists to re-enter their countries after they had been totally liberated by partisan forces. In Italy and France, where an armed and class conscious proletariat existed, the Stalinists channeled this movement behind "all-class patriotic fronts" of one sort or another. 

In fact in the early period in Italy the Stalinists tried to foist a monarch on the Italian people. The whole shape of the postwar world was determined - not so much by the transformations in the Buffer - but rather by a restabilization and growth of capitalism over two-thirds of the world's surface, something that could not have been achieved without the Kremlin's active co-operation. 

The Soviet Union did not rely simply on the promises of the imperialists that it would be left in peace. The bureaucracy would not rely upon the world working class and its revolutionary struggle for its defense nor could it trust the imperialists. It could only rely upon its own military strength - this and nothing else did it trust. Thus was born its policy of the strategic buffer. The Soviet Union was to maintain into the the immediate postwar period its military and political hegemony over a large East European Buffer as a barrier between the USSR and capitalist Western Europe. Considering the prostration of the bourgeoisie after the war - its preoccupation with its restabilization over a greater portion of the Earth's surface - the imperialists were in no position to do anything but go along with whatever the Kremlin wished to do in this region. In this sense the imperialists never gave anything that they really had to give. 

However, Stalin did his best to maintain the capitalist structure of Eastern Europe while at the same time ensuring the area remained friendly to the USSR. The maintenance of capitalist property relations in Eastern Europe served at least four main functions for the Kremlin: 

First, by fulfilling his side of the bargain with the imperialists, he could hope that they would give him the time he needed to rebuild the USSR. Secondly, by saving his cake to eat later so to speak, he had possession of something of value with which to bargain with the imperialists. Thus, he would be able to say that if you prepare a war against the USSR, we will snatch this area from your domain forever by structurally transforming it. 

Thirdly, Stalin faced a revolutionary situation in Eastern Europe. To in any way encourage this development was playing with fire right on the borders of the USSR. A successful proletarian revolution on the borders of the USSR would certainly basically shake up the ruling bureaucracy of the USSR which Stalin represented. To allow a genuine, spontaneous revolutionary movement to carry through the socialist revolution and then cynically, openly impose a bureaucracy upon it would be difficult even with Soviet troops and also terribly hurt the prestige of the USSR. However, by insisting that the present stage of the revolutionary movement requires a bloc with the national bourgeoisie allowed the Kremlin to compromise and hold back the revolution until such time as the revolutionary fervor died down and dissipated itself. Thus this policy allowed the Stalinists to bloc with the national bourgeoisie in these countries in order to cooperate with them in preventing a revolution which in the long run would spell the doom of the Russian bureaucracy itself. 

Fourthly, Stalin wished to subordinate the whole region to the needs of rebuilding the USSR. He proceeded to do this through direct removal of whole factories and industrial equipment and through joint stock companies which exploited the resources of even "allied" countries to the advantage of the USSR. Since such is not considered the proper way to treat brother socialist countries he was able to rationalize such a policy easier as long as the countries remained within the capitalist orbit. 

Thus, in essence, Soviet policy in the period of 1944-5 to 1947 was aimed at securing this region as a strategic buffer friendly to the USSR but at the same time maintaining capitalist structures within these countries. These two, in the long run contradictory, goals meshed well enough together for the bureaucracy in the early period. However it must be kept in mind that the Soviet bureaucracy sought to maintain capitalism in these areas not because it was a capitalist force which favored a capitalist social system but rather as a particular bureaucratic way of defending the USSR without risking a genuine proletarian revolution. Therefore, to the extent that maintenance of capitalism began to threaten the defense of the USSR, to that extent the USSR began to move against it. This element, too, was present in Soviet policy from the very beginning though it was not the dominant element. As a result developments during this period seem more confused and contradictory the more intimately one gets to know the events that occurred in each individual country. 

Enter the Red Army

As the Red Army advanced through Eastern Europe during 1944 and 1945 it faced little serious resistance. The Nazi occupiers were demoralised and collapsed almost of their own weight. The masses themselves were in open rebellion against the Nazis and in fact succeeded in liberating whole areas and whole countries on their own. The native bourgeoisie played little or no role in these events and did not represent a real organized force. In the former "axis" countries the bourgeoisie was compromised by its collaboration with the Germans who essentially functioned as occupiers in relation to their lesser allies. In the occupied "allied" countries the German occupation itself had done much to undermine the native bourgeoisie as it sought to gear the economy of the occupied country to the military interests of the Germans.

So, with individual variation from country to country, it can be said that the Red Army entered countries in which large sections of the capitalist class had either been destroyed or were in flight; in which the state administrative structure was either almost non-existent or severely weakened and undermined; and which as a general phenomenon in "allied" as well as "axis" countries, the capitalist class as a social force was weak and discredited. The arrival of the Red Army was greeted everywhere with revolutionary action of the masses who on their own initiative seized large sections of the land and factories. Ernest Germain, the major authority on Soviet developments in the postwar Fourth International described the situation as follows: 

"In Czechoslovakia the approach of the Red Army launched a general revolutionary upsurge: occupation of the factories, establishment of plant committees to run the factories, creation of Councils (a kind of Soviet) which gathered into their hands all political authority, concentration of all arms in the hands of the workers' militia ... In Yugoslavia and Albania the civil war (the struggle between the Chetniks and Partisans) raged from 1942 on. From its very beginning the civil war gave birth to committees of workers and peasants as organisations of power, and to a workers' and peasants' militia ..... In Poland, the approach of the Red Army was marked by a succession of clearly revolutionary movements on the part of the working class, while the peasantry, sharply differentiated, maintained a waiting attitude. The workers began by seizing the factories, setting up Councils, introducing workers control, and here or there running the plant themselves ....... In Rumania and Bulgaria the approach of the Red Army started a real revolutionary upsurge. August 23 1944 in Rumania and September 9, 1944 in Bulgaria, were marked by gigantic demonstrations of workers followed by an uninterrupted succession of strikes, mass demonstrations, etc., until the Red Army arrived in Bucharest and Sofia ..... Finally, in Germany and Austria, the approach of the Red Army unloosed revolutionary movements wherever there was a concentrated proletariat. In Saxony, in the regions of Halle and Magdebourg, in Vienna and even in certain sectors of Berlin, the first reaction of the workers was to occupy the factories, set up plant committees and establish workers control. Red flags were hoisted over most of the factories and in working class housing districts."(1)  

Thus capitalism as a social system was seriously eroded in these areas and a deeply revolutionary situation existed. Everywhere a large part of the real power in the country, especially just prior to the entrance of Soviet troops, was in the hands of committees of one sort or another (National Liberation Front, Fatherland Front, etc..) Within these committees, despite the non-working class line imposed on them, the predominant weight of the working class and peasantry was felt. If the Red Army had only protected the area from imperialist interference (they were really too weak to seriously interfere anyway) and tolerated a revolution, one would have occurred. The result would have been to establish genuine democratic workers' states throughout Eastern Europe - and in fact throughout all of Europe. Had this happened modern history would have taken a fundamentally different course - the scales would have really tipped in favor of revolution and the Soviet bureaucracy itself would not have lasted more than a short while. 

This did not happen and for this reason today we face the danger of total annihilation through a nuclear war. The sole responsibility for this state of affairs lies with the Kremlin and its counter-revolutionary policies. This is the most fundamental lesson that the working class movement must learn, re-Iearn and re-Iearn again from post-war European history. 

Cohabitation with the Bourgeoisie 

Reconstructing a capitalist structure which had pretty well disintegrated and dissipating a revolutionary movement of considerable proportions (both factors varied from country to country) were not easy things to achieve. To make it even more difficult, the USSR sought to do both on the basis of indigenous social forces and to rely on direct intervention of the Soviet Army as little as possible. To do otherwise would have been extremely costly both in the numbers of troops involved and in the social and political cost to the Soviet bureaucracy and its domestic agents. Even bourgeois professors (2) have admitted that direct Russian interference through the Red Army and in other ways (GPU) was much less in this early period than during the second stage of structural assimilation. 

Key to the whole process politically as well as socially was the formation in every country of coalition governments with legitimate representatives of bourgeois parties (usually peasant parties) as the political leadership of what was called the "Peoples' Democracies." This was no simple task for in many countries it required the recreation of bourgeois parties which had ceased to exist during the war. In fact in some countries the Communist Party itself had to be created anew (especially in Poland.) But the domestic agents of the Kremlin actually helped to organize these parties which were to become organizational centers for capitalist forces in the respective country. In fact Hugh Seton-Watson reports on Hungary: "In the first months it is a curious paradox that the reconstitution of these parties was largely the work of teams of communist agitators who traveled around in Red Army vehicles." (3) We are speaking here not of some sort of phony political entities as were created in some of the countries at a later date but actual bourgeois parties - in this case led by such bourgeois politicians as Ferenc Nagy and Bela Kovacs! This shows so clearly the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism. In Yugoslavia, where civil war had generally wiped out the domestic bourgeoisie, capitalist politicians were imported from exile in the United States to serve in the coalition government. 

This was no mere episode or accidental excess on the part of the Stalinists. It was a conscious, worked out policy whose aim was to provide the governmental form of the reconstruction of the capitalist state apparatus in these countries. The consciousness with which this was carried out can be gathered from the following statement of Gottwald to a confidential meeting of the Czech CP functionaries in May 1945: "We must continually remind ourselves that in the present phase, we are following the line of the national and democratic ..... and not the line of the social revolution." (4)

These coalition governments were genuine coalitions with real, and important bourgeois forces. The capitalists later claimed it was all a facade for the Stalinist seizure of power but this claim did not quite jibe with their screeches when the Stalinists finally did move on their agents in these governments and their political organizations. All the more important was this development since in most of these countries (we except only Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Albania) these bourgeois parties would have been majority parties if free elections were actually held. In fact in Hungary, where free elections were held, the capitalist Small Farmers Party got 57% of the vote and the CP only 17%. Before these countries could be later sovietised it was necessary to liquidate the leaders of these bourgeois parties, and to destroy the parties themselves. 

The State Administrative Structures

The social structures of these countries varied considerably. Generally the countries which had been "axis" powers had their state apparatus more intact because they signed separate peace treaties and went over as a whole to the allied side. Thus both Romania and Bulgaria not only maintained their old state structures but actually were monarchies through a good part of this period. In fact as late as November 8, 1946 the Romanian Stalinist daily wished the king "a long life, good health, and a reign rich in democratic achievements." (5)

Hungary had perhaps the most intact state apparatus. Of those that had been allies, both Poland and Yugoslavia-Albania had virtually no old state apparatus left. In Yugoslavia-Albania it was due to civil war while in Poland it was due to the actions of the Germans who treated PoaInd perhaps worse than any other occupied country (for, because Germany had annexed so much Polish territory, it feared a revived Poland after the war.) Czechoslovakia was similar to Poland but not as complete a destruction took place, especially in the Slovak section which had been an Axis power. 

Germain aptly described this general process in 1946: 

"The bourgeois character of the state flows from the capitalist nature of the relations of production, and is expressed in a special kind of state structure. This structure (hierarchical and centralised administration, apparatus of repression, etc.) is preserved everywhere, with the same officials still functioning since the 'purge' touched only the smallest fraction of them. The only exception is Yugoslavia, and to a lesser degree Poland. In these countries the people who made up the former state apparatus have almost completely disappeared, as a result of certain historical factors. Further proof of the bourgeois character of the state is the fact that the new state apparatus makes use of roughly the same structure as the previous apparatus did." (6)

Here we have a picture of the whole complex process. In some states the old administration survives intact; in others it was almost totally destroyed and is reconstituted on the old model from scratch. Considering the future theories based on the creation of "new" state apparatuses, it is important to understand at this point that the same essential type of state apparatus existed in all these countries despite their diversity as to origin of the apparatus. To the extent that Yugoslavia was to evolve differently in the future it was not due to differences in state apparatus. No one in this early period could find any basis for claiming that the Yugoslav state, or for that matter the Polish state, was more "working class" than the Bulgarian state or the Czech state. 

These states were created through a process of subordination of the popular local committees which, depending on their indigenous roots from country to country, represented an element of dual power in the early period of "liberation." It is this process which Germain refers to in the case of Yugoslavia where these local committees were the most highly developed. Thus the bourgeois state apparatuses were reconstituted through a process of the subordination and eventual destruction of those institutions which represented the potential of a future democratic workers' state apparatus. 

We do not wish to give the impression that these states were "healthy" or "normal" bourgeois states. The state apparatuses were reconstituted under conditions of mass upheaval and by a power which, while it might fmd it temporarily useful to support the bourgeoisie in the area, could not be considered a trustworthy ally of the bourgeoisie because of the class nature of the state upon which it rested. Therefore, as Germain mentions in the above quote, almost from the first, extensive purges took place removing from the state apparatus those elements considered unreliable by the USSR and its agents. Considering the role of the bourgeoisie in these countries during the war, many of the most trusted agents of the bourgeoisie were purged from the state apparatus as collaborators with the Nazis. In their place were put people who either were Stalinists or who understood that they were beholden to the Stalinists. 

This was especially true in the army and police sector of the state for Stalin was above all concerned with the preservation of the region as a strategic buffer incapable of being a base for an offensive against the USSR. Being a practical man, he figured that as long as he had pretty good control of the repressive apparatuses of these states and as long as the Red Army was there in the background for possible use, he had control of the situation. Thus while carrying through a very real policy of reconstruction of the bourgeois state in this region, he never fully trusted the bourgeoisie he was reconstructing nor the international capitalist forces which he realized stood not that far behind them. 

Eugene Varga, one of Stalin's chief theoreticians of the period, characterized the states as follows in 1947, when the purging process had gone much farther than in the earlier period and when in fact the transition to the drive towards structural transformation was beginning: 

The social structure of these states differs from all those hitherto known to us; it is something totally new in the history of mankind. It is neither a bourgeois dictatorship nor a proletarian dictatorship. The old state apparatus has not been smashed, as in the Soviet Union, but reorganized by means of a continuous inclusion in it of the supporters of the new regime. (7) 

Interestingly he left out of his list of states of this type Romania, Hungary, and, of course, East Germany. Martin Horvath, as a Hungarian where the structural assimilation process began later and where the old state apparatus was preserved for longer, characterized the state as not having gone beyond capitalist bounds: "In view of the fact that a People's Democracy does not destroy the right to own the means of production, it can simply be regarded as the most progressive form of bourgeois democracy (or, to put it more correctly, its only progressive form.)" (8) On the other extreme Tito after the breakup of his early coalition government, characterized the People's Democracy as a variant of the dictatorship of the proletariat - as different in form and not in content with the Russian State. This theoretical diversity, which reflected the actual differences between the pace of developments in the different states, was never really worked out by the Stalinists as by the time the theoretical dispute was raised it was resolved by the actual drive towards the structural transformation of the region as a whole. 

The Nationalizations 

Nationalization also occurred on an uneven pattern. Here it is important to realize that nationalization was simply forced upon the Stalinists because of a combination of the fact that many of the factories in this whole area were owned by the Germans and that in addition many factories were simply seized by the workers. Therefore in many cases the state nationalized a factory in order to take it out of the hands of the workers and sometimes even put the old capitalist owners back in as "managers." It is also important to realize that the state administering these nationalized factories was ruled by a coalition government including bourgeois parties. 

In this regard Germain notes, "In Czechoslovakia, the passage by the National Assembly of the nationalizations law was hailed in the bourgeois press as a victory. The enterprises passed from the hands of the workers to the hands of the state, which again runs them in the interests of the bourgeois class. In Poland the nationalization decrees explicitly confirmed 'the authority of the director'." (9) In Yugoslavia the bulk of industry was actually seized by the workers upon "liberation" but its status as nationalized property was not recognized until 1947, over a year and a half after it was recognized in Poland and Czechoslovakia. This shows the extent to which expropriation of the bourgeoisie was carried through under the initiative of the masses with the Stalinists acting as a restraining factor recognizing the expropriations only where necessary and in order to suppress workers' control and subordinate the seized property to the central state apparatus.

Despite extensive nationalization private property continued to exist and was openly accepted by all the governments of the region. Poland's Bierut stated: "In the state of People's Democracy there still exist classes which live by exploiting the work of others; these are the capitalists, various entrepreneurs, well-to-do merchants, factory owners employing a certain number of workers, rich peasants, speculators, and other non-workers." (10)

In Poland close to 90% of all industry was nationalized within the first year of "liberation"· and Czechoslovakia followed this pattern relatively closely. In Hungary, however, the banks were not nationalized until January, 1948. Interestingly Germain, writing in 1946, quite correctly pointed out that nationalization was on the same level in Finland as it was in Bulgaria and Romania. Austria was listed as being much more nationalized than any of these three countries. As history was to show both Finland and Austria were to pass into the capitalist orbit defInitively while Romania and Bulgaria were to be transformed into deformed workers' states. Thus we see that in all these countries the essentials of capitalist social and property relations remained weakened but intact. Capitalist structures survived from country to country through an uneven pattern but it survived. The process of the reconstruction of capitalist structures in Eastern Europe just like the process of structural assimilation which was to  follow must be viewed as a complex one in which political, social, structural and economic factors are intertwined. To separate out a single factor, such as nationalization, or for that matter, political rule, and attempt to understand the changes in the society as a whole simply by noting changes in this single factor is completely misleading and superficial. 

FOOTNOTES - PART II

1. Germain, Ernest. "The Soviet Union After the War, International Information Bulletin. Vol. 1, No. 2 (Socialist Workers Party, New York) pp. 8, 9.

2. See Zbigniew K. Brzezinski. The Soviet Bloc. Unity and Conflict (Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., New York, 1961) Chapters 1-5.

3. Seton-Watson, Hugh. The East European Revolution (Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., New York, 1956) p. 191. Seton-Watson bases this assertion on direct reports from Ferenc Nagy and Sujok.

 

4. Brzezinski. Op cit. p. 27. 

5. Ibid p. 16.

6. Germain. Op cit. p. 12. 

7. Daniels, Robert V. A Documentary History of Communism, Vol. 2 (Vintage Books, New York, 1962) p. 152. 

8. Brzezinski. Op cit. p. 27. 

9. Germain. Op cit. p. 11. 

10. Brzezinski. Op cit. p. 28. 

PART III - SOVlET POLICY IN THE EAST EUROPEAN BUFFER 

Phase Two - The Drive Towards Structural Assimilation 1947-1951 

The International Context 

One of the most difficult aspects of achieving an understanding of East European events of the post-war period is striking the proper balance between international and domestic factors. On the one hand we have taken trouble to emphasize in the preceding section that the USSR relied essentially on indigenous forces in achieving its goals in Eastern Europe. The Communist Parties based themselves in part on the working classes of their respective countries and with the support of the USSR and implicit threat of action by the Red Army, they were major factors in determining the evolution of these countries. The bourgeois parties that were reconstituted likewise represented legitimate internal forces which were not removed from the scene easily - and certainly not non-violently. On the other hand, in the ultimate sense, it was international considerations which determined the final social evolution of the countries in this region. But for a somewhat different international relationship of forces Yugoslavia could have become Greece or conversely Austria could have followed the pattern of East Germany. The evolution of the buffer zone as a totality was determined basically by the conscious decision of Stalin in reaction to a new international situation. However, in the implementation of Stalin's decision, important internal East European forces played the critical role. And further, as Yugoslavia was to illustrate, once the process had developed beyond a certain point it was not necessarily completely controllable by the USSR. 

As we noted earlier, Stalin's whole approach to the buffer zone was motivated by an attempt to defend the USSR through the maintenance of a friendly strategic zone at the USSR's borders and a relative state of international stability with capitalism for a period of time. Stalin was not interested in epochs or for that matter even in decades. But it is also quite likely that he expected a little longer period of "peaceful co-existence" with the US than the measly two years he got (and they were not very "peaceful" years at that.) Therefore the intensive war drive of the imperialist camp which formally opened with Winston Churchill's Fulton, Missouri speech in 1946 caught him off guard and for a period of time he reacted in a cautious· and conciliatory fashion hoping that the US capitalists would "come to their senses." 

Sometime during the various maneuvers around the inauguration of the Marshall Plan in 1947, Stalin read the handwriting on the wall and made a sharp tum in the direction of the defensive consolidation of that section of the world still remaining under the direct domination of the USSR. Zhdanov was paraded to the front of the stage, in the USSR and the Stalinist "hards" took over everywhere conducting a drive against any and all signs of even potential opposition. In the buffer zone this meant a coordinated, conscious, directed drive towards the structural transformation of these countries on the model of the USSR. (1)

In September, 1947 at Slarska Poreba, Poland, the first meeting of the Cominform took place attended by all East European Communist Parties with France and Italy thrown in for good measure. The Cominform was organized for the specific purpose of consolidating the quite diverse Communist Parties of Eastern Europe into a monolithic force directly controlled by the USSR to be utilized to transform Eastern Europe into a social system compatible with the USSR's. Its first meeting marks the beginning of the regionally coordinated push in this direction in every country of Eastern Europe. Its last actual meeting was held in 1949 when the essentials of this process had been completed. After that date the role of the Cominform was purely propagandistic, aimed largely against Tito (the organization was formally dissolved several years after it had fallen into disuse, as a gesture of friendliness towards Tito.) Because even the most subordinated and controlled international body tends to lessen the weight of the USSR itself in the Stalinist movement by at least formally recognizing that the Soviet party is but one of many, the Stalinists resort to such international bodies only when absolutely necessary and dissolve them as soon as possible. 

Zhdanov delivered the International Report to the conference which noted the existence in the world of two camps. The imperialist camp is led by the US which is seeking world supremacy. "But America's aspirations to world supremacy encounter an obstacle in the USSR, the stronghold of anti-imperialist and anti-fascist policy, and its growing internatonal influence, in the new democracies, which have escaped from the control of Britain and American imperialism, and in the workers of all countries, including America itself who do not want a new war for the supremacy of their oppressors." "The vague and deliberately guarded formulations of the Marshall Plan", Zdhanov continues quite accurately, "amount in essence to a scheme to create a bloc of states bound by obligations to the United States..." (2)

Around the same time the well-known Stalinist economist Varga presented his thesis that the People's Democracies have passed through the bourgeois stage and are in transition to the proletarian stage. These states, he felt, will establish close and friendly relations with the USSR "primarily because the present social order brings them closer to the Soviet Union, because of all the great powers the Soviet Union alone is interested in the maintenance and further progressive development of the social order and political regime existing in these countries..." (3) And above all "the present regime in these countries provides the guarantee that they will not, in the future, again voluntarily serve as a place d'armes for any power which tries to attack the Soviet Union..." (4)

These theoretical formulations were both assessments of changes which had already taken place in some of these countries and political orders that such changes be initiated in areas that had lagged behind. Behind it all was the decision of the USSR that the maintenance of the buffer zone as a strategic defense area for the USSR demanded the transformation of social relations in these countries so that the countries would be compatible with the USSR. 

The diversity that really existed, as well as the direction in which the general drive was headed, was summarized well in a speech in April, 1948 by Colonel Tulpanov, the political officer of the Soviet Military Administration in East Germany: "Yugoslavia has already reached the other bank (a socialist state); Bulgaria is taking the last few strokes to reach it; Poland and Czechoslovakia are about in the middle of the river followed by Romania and Hungary, which have gone about a third of the way; while the Soviet Occupation Zone has just taken the first few strokes from the bourgeois bank." (5) Thus with the formation of the Cominform began an intensive drive to structurally transform all the countries of Eastern Europe after the model of the USSR - to reach the "other bank." 

The Destruction of the Political and Social Power of the Bourgeoisie

While the tempo of development varied from country to country in Eastern Europe the process within each country, and over a period of time within the region as a whole, was an identical one. It is the understanding of this process, which we call structural assimilation, with a Marxist method and the integrating of this understanding into our general theory of Stalinism which is the real challenge before us. 

Essentially this process was composed of three interrelated developments: 1) the completion of the destruction of the basic political, social and economic hold of the bourgeoisie; 2) the consolidation of a monolithic Stalinist party; and 3) the interpenetration of the state apparatus of the party. Elements of all three developments can be traced back to the very beginning of the postwar evolution of these states. Thus, as we have noted earlier, the bourgeoisie survived in these states in only a weakened, emasculated form. The process of the construction of Stalinist parties and their increasing dominance over the political life of these countries also commenced with the entry of the Red Army into the respective country. The reconstituted bourgeois states had, in the very process of their being reconstituted, been penetrated by elements subservient to the Stalinists, especially in the repressive arms of the state. 

The direct economic power of the bourgeois class in Eastern Europe had been basically eroded with the nationalizations which followed the war. Its social power resided mainly in the peasantry, which had been transformed into a viable petty bourgeois force by the land reforms, in the middle urban classes who controlled a large section of retail and wholesale trade, and in the state administration. This very real social power found political expression primarily in the petty bourgeois peasant parties that were in most countries the real majority parties, and also partially in the social democratic parties and even in the Communist parties. The formation of genuine coalition governments including the peasant and social democratic parties legitimized their role in society and played the role of limiting social transformations in the country to those acceptable to the bourgeois forces within these parties. Thus the political expression of this bourgeois social stratum was of extreme importance to the bourgeoisie precisely because of the very real social weakness of the bourgeoisie in these countries. Therefore the breakup of the coalition governments, the destruction of the peasant parties, and the fusion of the social democratic with the Communist parties played a far greater role in the destruction of the social power of the bourgeoisie in these countries than transformations in the political superstructure usually do.

The general pattern that this process followed began with the harassment of the peasant party even while it remained in the government coalition. This was done when it was recognized that this party had the support of the majority of the population. At the beginning, this process was relatively easy for the Stalinists and even supported by many workers and poor peasants. These parties had become refuges for all sorts of compromised bourgeois elements and further had certain ties with the Western capitalist countries (even if not always of the direct "paid agent" sort the Stalinists accused them of.) Therefore, with the exception of Czechoslovakia and for a short period Hungary, these parties lived a half legal, half illegal existence during the bulk of the period prior to their total liquidation. 

The significant dates in this process usually relate to the flight from the country or the jailing and trial of the leading figure of the peasant party. There usually followed a period in which the peasant party had been effectively destroyed or transformed into a docile instrument of the Stalinists. In Poland it was the flight of Mikolajczyk from the country and with it the destruction of the Polish People's Party as an independent organization. In Hungary the main back of the bourgeois opposition was broken with the arrest of Bela Kovacs, leader of the Small Holders Party in early 1947 and the flight of Ferenc Nagy in March of 1947. However, the process was not completed until the jailing of Cardinal Mindzenty, a man with a truly feudal mind, in December of 1948. The dates for Bulgaria and Romania fall within this general period. 

One exception to the pattern should be mentioned at this point - Czechoslovakia. Here the bourgeois parties functioned with virtually complete freedom until 1948. The CP was the largest party in the country, as we have noted earlier, because of the genuine support it received from the working class. In February of 1948 the CP came to power through a combination of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary action which involved real mobilizations of the working class. Following the seizure of power an intensified drive took place against the bourgeois parties and they were effectively destroyed in a few short months. 

It is important to emphasize here that this process did not result in most cases in a formal resumption of rule by a single party. Rather rump coalitions continued of parties that were essentially tools of the Stalinists. The very real process that occurred was the destruction of the independent political arm of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois forces in the country. This was accompanied by the wholesale jailings of the effective leaders and political cadres of these parties and all those suspected of being their agents within the state administration. Thus this political process seriously pruned back the social power of the bourgeois elements by effectively eliminating their direct voice within the political superstructure. This process, by itself, would have no more destroyed the real social rule of the bourgeoisie than the nationalization of an earlier period had done.

This political process received its formal codification in the adoption of new constitutions in these countries modeled directly after the USSR's. While in and of itself a constitution is not a fundamental thing, there is no doubt that a basic juridical codification is an important indicator of the state of social relations in a country. It was in that spirit that Trotsky analyzed the new Soviet Constitution in 1936. Yugoslavia was way ahead of the pack with a new constitution in 1946. Bulgaria led the new drive adopting its constitution on November 4, 1947. Interestingly, this constitution represented a major change from an earlier one passed only in May of that year. Between May and November the last meeting of the Cominform was held. Romania followed on April 13, 1948; Czechoslovakia on May 9, 1948; Hungary on August 20, 1949; and Poland dragged behind waiting to July 22, 1952. The completion of the destruction of the economic underpinnings of the bourgeois forces in these countries did not represent such a drastic change as the destruction of their political power. In most of these countries, by 1947, the commanding heights of industry were in the hands of the state. Thus the critical question was in whose hands the state was rather than the mopping up operation on the remains of private capitalist holdings. Still this period marked a renewed nationalization drive in those countries which still had substantial private capitalist operations. (6) More significant were steps taken to destroy the social power of the petty bourgeois classes. These included the virtual take over of wholesale trade and the takeover of a large section of retail trade. Also a drive towards forced collectivization was begun during the latter part of this period. Its aim was both to support the industrialization efforts of the country and to place the peasantry directly under state control.

Above all the essential process in the economic field was the beginnings of a real planification of the economy, the drive towards an intensive build up of heavy industry, and a further reorientation of international trade away from the West into bilateral trading with the USSR. (7) The dating of the beginning of the Five-Year plans in the respective countries gives an indication of completion of the basic phases of this process: Bulgaria: 1949-53; Czechoslovakia: 1949-1953; Hungary: 1950-1954; Poland: 1950-1955; Romania: 1951-1955; East Germany: 1951-1955. 

The Consolidation of the Monolithic Party

The process of consolidating the monolithic party and the interpenetration of this party with the state apparatus was obviously a closely interrelated political and social process. Further, it was carried on simultaneously with the destruction of the bourgeois parties and the purging of their agents, or potential agents, within the state apparatus. Taken together the process is essentially one of social revolution - the destruction of the remnants of power of one ruling class and its replacement by a social stratum which at bottom represented the historic interests of another class - the working class - though to be sure in a highly distorted fashion.

The nature of the Communist Party varied greatly from country to country. Some like the Polish party were strictly postwar creations even though the basic cadres were from the pre-war party. Others, like the Czech, Bulgarian and Yugoslav parties, had been real forces in their respective countries before "liberation", had solid roots in the working class, and a developed indigenous political leadership. All these parties experienced a very large growth immediately following the war - a growth primarily due to an influx of careerist elements but also partially a reflection of the leftward movement of the working classes. Even the worst, most subservient to Moscow of them, had a certain mass base in the working class of their own country. 

The leadership of the parties varied as to its origins though generally it was produced by three "schools" which had some bearing on its future evolution. Some of the leaders had been in the resistance movements during the war and thus had a greater base of support in their own party and in their own country - Tito is the best though by no means a typical example of this type of leader. Others were trained in the International Brigades in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. There, of course, they went through the Stalinist GPU school of functioning but still they emerged with a somewhat different outlook from the third group - the direct "Moscow men" who spent the war in the USSR as a paid part of the USSR's international staff. These men were to rise to power in most of the East European countries in the latter part of this period.

Two central aspects of the process of creating the monolithic party are the purging of the CPs and the forced unification of the CPs with the social democratic parties. The purging process in the East European parties was of a scope rivaled only by the Moscow Trials period in the USSR. The figures speak: for themselves: 370,000 were purged from the Polish party; 550,000 from the Czech party; Romania - 200,000; Hungary: 200,000; East Germany: 300,000 and Bulgaria, 90,000. The purposes of the purges were several. In the first place they were aimed at removing from the party all elements potentially likely to function as agents of those social classes that were being forcefully removed from power in these countries. This step was necessary because the essentially class collaborationist policies of the earlier period had led to many essentially bourgeois elements joining the CPs. A second category were those elements within the CP who might actually or potentially resist the structural transformation policy dictated by the Kremlin - who may have preferred a slower pace. The most important figure who actually had advocated such a policy was Gomulka, and his removal from power in the Polish party in 1948-49 was an important turning point for the development of the whole region. A third, and perhaps most numerous category were those elements within the CP capable of resisting or questioning the course of the CP leadership and its abject subservience to the USSR. This included both those elements who had some roots or connection with the masses themselves (whom, as we shall see, the transformation process was to alienate deeply) and those who represented the interests of the domestic Stalinist party and its bureaucracy and who may have originally pushed for a faster pace of structural transformation. This latter element was best represented in Tito and those Stalinist "hards" who had been closely associated with Zhdanov and Varga (soon to be purged in the USSR.) This was the essential political significance of both the Tito break and the Rajk and Slansky trials. 

While the purge was quite massive in a country like Poland which had an amorphous CP riddled with petty bourgeois elements, it was especially violent and brutal in those countries where the CP had deep roots in the class and a relatively independent developed leadership. In Czechoslovakia the purge affected the bulk of the CP and reached deep into the state bureaucracy as well.

The forced unification of the social democratic parties with the CPs was a very important aspect of the creation of the monolithic single party. In the first place it offered the most convenient way for the Stalinists to remove a competing working class party. It would have been much more costly for them politically to have directly suppressed a working class party in the same fashion as they did a bourgeois party. More important, probably, was that, with the extensive purging of the "unreliables" in their own party, they were in need of cadres to man their organization and the state administration. The social democrats helped them fill this need and thus interestingly gave the world another example of the essential identity of these two political trends. The Stalinists found large sections of the social democratic leaders more reliable personnel for their ruling party than many of their own members who they were forced to purge. The date of the merger of these two parties is another indicator of the development of the monolithic party in the respective countries: Romania, February 23, 1948; Czechoslovakia, June 27, 1948; Bulgaria, August 11, 1948; Poland, December 15, 1948. 

Interpenetration of the Monolithic Party with the State Apparatus

“From the first days of the Soviet regime the counterweight to bureaucratism was the party. If the bureaucracy managed the state, still the party controlled the bureaucracy. Keenly vigilant lest inequality transcend the limits of what was necessary, the party was always in a state of open or disguised struggle with the bureaucracy. The historic rule of Stalin's faction was to destroy this duplication, subjecting the party to its own officialdom and merging the latter in the officialdom of the state. Thus was created the present totalitarian state.” Leon Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed

The development of the monolithic party was accompanied by the final destruction of the independence of the trade union movement (an important byproduct of the merger with the social democrats) and its subordination to the state; and the intensification of the purging of the state apparatus and its subordination to and interpenetration with the monolithic party. Throughout this period the state bureaucracy grew by leaps and bounds. In most East European countries figures show at least a doubling in the size of the state administration alone, not to mention the party bureaucracy, the trade unions, collective farms, etc., in the post war period over the pre-war period. (8) 

Of course these social transformations led to important structural transformations in the state itself. The most important of these was the growth of the National Planning Board and the subordination and reorganization of other governmental departments to fit the needs of administering a planned economy where the essential economic decisions are made by the state. However these structural changes were not fundamental and the resultant state in form was not that different from Mussolini's quite capitalist corporate state. Both Mussolini's state and the East European states were fundamentally different in form from the soviet-type of the early period of the USSR or the Paris Commune. In class content, however, the East European states are in the same class camp with the early soviet-type state and not with the Mussolini type state. This contradiction between form and content is one of the fundamental contradictions of the degenerated or deformed workers states.  

This difference in content flowed not from the formal state structure in these countries but from the control over the state apparatus by the apparatus of the Stalinist party. The Stalinist party, in turn, was not a capitalist party. It had legitimate roots in the working class of its own country and, to the extent that it was independent of its own working class, it was dependent upon - and fundamentally an extension of - the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. This bureaucracy in turn rested upon the foundations of a workers state and thus was capable of moving independently of and against the capitalist class. It was through this process that the East European states became subordinated to the working class, even though in a distorted Stalinist form. 

It is important that we do not slide quickly over a basic aspect of this process which presents certain difficult problems for us theoretically. The process of the structural transformation of the East European states was carried through by a deep purging of the state apparatus, its interpenetration with the party apparatus, and significant though not fundamental changes in its formal organization. It was not carried through by the destruction of the old bourgeois state apparatus in its entirety and the erection of a new working class state apparatus. Not only has much of the formal administrative structure been kept intact to this day but a good section of the personnel of the old state administration has been maintained. Thus when the West Germans published figures on the number of former Nazis in the East German state apparatus they are not lying (needless to say neither are the East Germans when they do the same on West Germany) nor is the situation in East Germany that much different from the rest of East Europe.

Of course there were quite significant changes in the overall weight of social forces within the state administration. Generally the top posts in the apparatus went to CP reliables. On the bottom layers, substantial numbers of workers were brought up into the apparatus. It is in the middle administrative layers that the old personnel survives to this day - many sporting their CP membership cards. 

The Relative Weight of the USSR and Domestic Forces

The process of structural assimilation was carried through in every country in Eastern Europe by the combined efforts of internal forces and the external role of the USSR. The relative weight of external and internal forces varied from country to country depending on the indigenous strength of the Stalinist movement in the particular country and its relative reliability in the eyes of the Kremlin. Looking at the process as a whole in East Europe, the inauguration of the drive toward structural transformation was marked by a real increase in the direct intervention of the USSR into the affairs of the East European countries. Throughout the period of the coalition regimes the USSR played a backseat role in the political affairs of the country intervening as a preventative measure only when it felt absolutely compelled to do so. From 1947 on, the intervention of the USSR into the internal affairs of the East European countries became a general rule and this intervention was not far beneath the surface. 

As the Yugoslav break was to prove, the agents of the GPU functioned throughout the East European countries in a completely autonomous fashion free to arrest nationals without even consulting national authorities. The Soviet ambassadors played an important role in directing the internal affairs of the countries they were stationed in and the judgements of various national CP leaders had a direct bearing on their careers (much of this is revealed in Imre Nagy's writings as well as in the Tito business.) This was supplemented by a constant interchange of Soviet "advisors" and by frequent trips of the CP leadership of a particular country to the USSR. In addition, more direct coercive influence existed in the form of the actual penetration of the state institutions of many East European countries by Soviet personnel. This was especially true of the secret police and army. Finally behind it all stood the Soviet army. That this could very well be a decisive factor in these conditions was illustrated by the actual events in Hungary. These political and military ties of the East European countries were reinforced by direct economic dependence on the USSR through a series of bilateral trade agreements. With this sector of Europe more and more cut off from the capitalist west, the individual countries became more and more dependent on the USSR economically. It thus can be said that, as a general pattern, the East European region came to be administered as if it were actually an integrated part of the USSR itself. In fact, actual incorporation of these countries into the USSR may well have benefitted them by allowing the area to economically be developed on a regional pattern. 

However, it would be a big mistake to see the transformation of East Europe as something carried out by the USSR at bayonet point. In reality the direct role of the USSR, while increased over the pre-1947 period, in the main remained that of a supporting factor to the Communist Parties of the respective countries. It was these parties which carried through the actual transformation process. Where the USSR played a more direct role, especially when it actually penetrated the existing state apparatus, it was either because of the unreliability of the domestic CP or because of its inherent weakness. 

This domestic CP, however, was no independent force unrelated to the USSR. Rather, in every one of these countries the leadership of the CP was a specially selected body of men trained in the school of Stalinism, completely subservient in their ideology to the USSR regime. Thus they must be understood theoretically to be essentially extensions of the Soviet bureaucracy itself to which they were more beholden than they were to the working class of their own country or any other class for that matter. Only by thoroughly understanding the nature of these CPs is it possible to theoretically explain why the pattern of development in all the East European countries was so similar and the resulting system so identical, even though the degree of direct Soviet intervention varied greatly from country to country. 

In Balance: The Progressive and Reactionary Features

The more one studies the events in East Europe the more one is amazed at how an essentially progressive process - the destruction of capitalism and the laying of the foundations for a future socialist development - could be carried through in such a fundamentally reactionary manner. While this was quite apparent at the time, it is unquestionable now as we have witnessed the East German Uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian and Polish Revolutions of 1956. 

We must call to the attention of the reader the highly significant time lag of two years between the massive revolutionary impact of the immediate post war period and the beginning of the drive towards structural transformation. The basic progressive conquests of the workers and peasants in Post War Europe were acquired by their own efforts in 1944-1945 only to be partially stolen from them by the Stalinists - who gave them back two years later in such a way as to alienate the workers and peasants from their own conquests. Grotesque as it may sound, that is actually what took place. 

As we have noted earlier, the combination of the action of the masses, the entry of the Red Army, and the previous destruction of war and the Germans, led to a situation in which the "commanding heights" of industry was nationalized in these countries. In addition the old, almost feudalistic landowners were expropriated and a redivision of the land occurred - a profoundly progressive measure in these backward agricultural countries. When it comes to social ownership therefore, the structural transformation process simply completed a process basically finished. Further this process would have been completed two years earlier by the masses themselves if it were not for the intervention of the USSR with its bourgeois coalition policy. 

Masses, under Stalinist leadership, or lacking any defined leadership, can thus under certain conditions of the prostration of the capitalist class largely expropriate the major holdings of the capitalist class. However, they are incapable of completing the process of the destruction of the capitalist class and the creation of their own state forms without a conscious revolutionary leadership. The Stalinists, with the support of the USSR, were therefore able to halt the process before its completion and reestablish a weakened but still existent form of bourgeois rule for a short period. In the period following 1947 the Stalinists, acting largely independently of the working class, in a reactionary way carried through the historically progressive task of removing from power the bourgeoisie which had remained in power only because of their own treacherous policies in the previous period. It is in this and this alone that lies the progressive content of the Stalinist transformations of the period. And this progressive task they carried through in such a reactionary manner as to totally alienate the working class itself so that within seven years of the completion of the main aspects of this process the working class was in armed revolt against the Stalinist regime. 

As we have mentioned earlier the Red Army entered Eastern Europe with the prestige of the Russian Revolution and USSR's heroic defensive struggle in World War II behind it. Everywhere the Soviet troops were greeted as liberators, as representatives of a new social order. This was true in Nazi occupied "allied" countries as well as former "axis" countries. In the early period this positive image of the USSR was partially dissipated by the way in which the Soviet troops and the USSR treated the people in the territories under its control. The former "axis" countries were subjected to barbaric treatment of an almost unbelievable scope aimed not simply at the collaborators with the Nazis but against the population as a whole including the working class. (9) This was the result of Stalin's reactionary policy of utilizing such base passions as national hatred and chauvinism of the crudest forms to mobilize the Soviet people. In addition the USSR economically drained the buffer area in order to build up its own economy. While this draining operation was most intensive in the "axis" countries where it was excused as "reparations", it was also present in the "allied" countries as the Yugoslavs so eloquently later testified. In addition, as we have noted, the USSR carried on a conscious policy aimed at dissipating the revolutionary energies of the working class and peasantry to prevent the working class from coming to power. 

These policies of the USSR did much to undercut the positive impact of the Red Army'~ liberation and by 1947 led to a certain amount of popular support being given to petty bourgeois oppositional figures even by a section of the working class and the poorer peasants. Still there remained a certain degree of goodwill among the workers and peasants in several of these countries for the USSR and some genuine support for the CPs. This goodwill was to be completely and utterly dissipated during the period of the structural transformation of these countries, a process in which the working class played almost no role at all. 

While there was support for the steps taken by the Stalinists against the petty bourgeois parties among many advanced workers (especially in Czechoslovakia), this was undercut by the fact that the moves against the bourgeois forces were accompanied by an increase of police terror against the working class as well. This was the period of the great purges, of the opening of literally hundreds of concentration camps, of the development of uncontrolled, privileged and rapacious bureaucracy which dominated every section of life in these countries and usurped the remnants of genuine working class organization and influence in the country at large and within the CP itself. 

While workers supported the final wiping out of the remnants of private enterprise within these countries, this was accompanied by an intensive heavy industrialization drive which lowered the real wages of the working class way below the not too high level they had been at during the early post-war period. As the workers saw their own economic lot deteriorate they could not help but notice the growing economic privileges of the new bureaucracy. 

While the poor peasants generally supported the moves of the state against the Kulak element in the countryside these progressive moves were shortly followed by forced collectivization drives which alienated the great bulk of the peasantry. While some among the intellectuals benefitted from the transformations by becoming incorporated into the privileged bureaucracy itself, the intellectuals found their new privileges were accompanied by police state regulation of the intellectual and cultural field so that the best of them became thoroughly alienated from the Stalinist state. 

So we see that virtually every section of the population, except those directly benefiting from the privileges the bureaucracy possessed (and even some of them) were alienated for good and progressive reasons from the Stalinist regimes in these countries who were forced to rule more and more directly by means of police state terror and the threat of Soviet intervention. In the course of this process the national aspirations of this region, with its many nationalities and its centuries of subjugation to chauvinist powers, were trampled upon. Thus the structural transformation process was accompanied by a growth in nationalist feelings among the masses which could only strengthen reactionary influences among the peasantry and even the working class. 

At every point Soviet policy in East Europe was motivated by a deep-going fear of Stalin's that the incorporation of this region into the Soviet bloc might lead to internal resistance and opposition to the ruling Soviet bureaucracy and its agents throughout the region. This explains the extremely reactionary way in which this process was carried out and why it was accompanied by a purging of all those elements within the Stalinist parties which might have possibly resisted the Soviet bureaucracy - if only in the interests of the bureaucratic stratum in their own country. 

This can be seen in the grotesque policy followed under Stalin towards the economic development of the region. During the early post war period, Tito and Dimitrov had pursued a policy of a proposed Balkan Federation whose aim it was to link together in a loose way all the countries of the buffer. As long as the East European region remained within the capitalist orbit, Stalin encouraged this policy and its first steps were worked out by the coordinated activities of the Bulgarians and the Yugoslavs. (10) In addition other countries of the Buffer established friendly relations with each other. However, as soon as Stalin started on his drive of structural transformation this progressive project was immediately dropped. Each country in the region was kept separate from each other country, and its sole political, social and economic ties were directly to the USSR. The relations between one country and another in the region always went through the USSR. Even diplomatic dealings and treaties were bilateral rather than multilateral. 

This had a terribly harmful effect on the economies of the East European countries. Each country had to attempt to develop itself on an autarchic pattern and further, regardless of local conditions, each country had to emulate the development of the USSR in the 30's and thus emphasize heavy industry and forced collectivization. Through this process Stalin kept these countries extremely weak and utterly dependent on the USSR, and the USSR alone. In addition the ruling Stalinist parties were so thoroughly alienated within their own countries that they were more and more dependent on the USSR for protection from their own masses (remember Hungary.) This pattern has only been partially ameliorated in the post-Stalin period and then only because economic catastrophe threatened the complete and utter breakdown of the system in the whole region. 

Events in Eastern Europe must have and do have an effect on Western Europe. Czechoslovakia juts deep into Central Europe; Austria shares a long border with Hungary; Greece is surrounded on all but one side by Stalinist countries; Germany is cut in two. Perhaps the most damning thing that can be said about the social transformations in Eastern Europe is that they had absolutely no revolutionary impact on the workers in Western Europe. In fact they had a profound negative impact, discrediting the very concept of socialism itself among many, many advanced workers. So we see that the Stalinists carried through a progressive transformation in Eastern Europe in such a way as to deeply alienate the working classes in whose name the transformation took place, both in Eastern and Western Europe. 

Structural Assimilation of the Buffer as a Pattern 

As the foregoing two sections reveal, the pattern of social development in the buffer was fundamentally different from the "normal" pattern of social overturn such as that which led to the victory of October. It is of central importance theoretically to understand thoroughly this pattern and to avoid a distorting or telescoping of events in such a way as to obscure the real process that took place. 

Under conditions of the worldwide prostration of capitalism immediately following the war, the Soviet Union, through military means, obtained an essential dominance over a whole region, a dominance the imperialists were in no position to seriously challenge. Thus the USSR could do pretty much what it wished in the region without seriously risking a head-on conflict with imperialism. The developments in the buffer are simply unthinkable if it were not for both the existence of the USSR and the weakness of imperialism.

The second major feature of the pattern of structural assimilation in the buffer was the relationship of the masses to this process. It is here that the greatest distortion of historical development has occurred in our movement. The period of greatest mass upsurge in every country of the buffer is precisely the period of coalition governments with the bourgeoisie. In other words at exactly the time when mass pressure was the greatest, the Communist Parties resisted most any fundamental social change. The old bourgeois state structure was rebuilt in a concrete process of destruction of all potential expressions of dual power. The actual social transformations occurred in every country of the buffer only after the mass struggle had been dissipated and the masses themselves had been largely alienated from the state and demoralized. 

Thirdly, the actual process of structural assimilation must be viewed in its totality. No single factor, such as nationalizations or even dominance of the CPs should be viewed in isolation but rather one must seek to understand this process as a whole. Essentially structural assimilation is a combined process of the destruction of the political and social power of the bourgeoisie through administrative means, the consolidation of a monolithic party which is essentially an extension of the Soviet bureaucracy, the purging of the state apparatus of bourgeois elements and the fusion of the party and state bureaucracies into a single ruling bureaucratic caste. Internationally it means a tum of the individual country towards increasing economic interdependence with the USSR and other Soviet bloc countries removing the country as much from the capitalist world market as the USSR itself is, and an increase in the influence within the country of the Soviet Union with a decrease in the influence of the capitalist countries. 

FOOTNOTES - PART III 

1. It is always difficult to evaluate at what exact point a conscious decision was made by Stalin which resulted in a change of line in Eastern Europe. It is even harder to estimate to what extent Stalin planned ahead of time to make such a change in the future. However, Djilas's recent writings are highly suggestive, but we are afraid not definitive, on this point. (Djilas, Milovan. Conversations With Stalin, Harcourt Brace and World, 1962.) Djilas pictures Stalin as conscious as early as 1945 of the necessity to transform socially the buffer region: "This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach." (page 114) Two years later he is quoted as expressing the same sentiments on Germany: "The West will make Western Germany their own, and we shall tum Eastern Germany into our own state." (p. 153) However, Djilas also quotes Stalin as being critical of the Yugoslavs for lagging in working out a coalition government with capitalist elements and fearful that the Bulgarians were proceeding too fast to the left. Thus it appears clear that even if Djilas is accurate on Stalin's early convictions to structurally transform Eastern Europe, (and we are inclined to think he is) this in no way vitiates the fact that Stalin just as ardently sought to maintain capitalist relations for a period in order to preserve peaceful relations with the capitalist world. The tum when it did come in 1947 was no less a sharp one for the fact that it was not altogether without preparation in various East European countries. 

2. Daniels, Op cit. p. 157. 

3. Ibid. p. 154. 

4. Ibid. p. 155. 

5. Brzezinski, Op cit. p. 79. 

6. In Czechoslovakia the nationalized sector contained 57.7 percent of the labor force after the war; 63.7 per cent in 1947; 89.2 per cent in 1949. The latter figure included 96 per cent of the total industrial workers. In Romania by 1949 85 per cent of the total industrial production was nationalized. In Hungary about half the industrial labor force was in the state sector. Bulgaria, by a single act in December 1947, increased the state sector (judging by percentage of production) from 6 per cent to 93 per cent. In Poland a mere 11 percent of the labor force was in the private sector in 1946. This figure dwindled to 7 per cent in 1948 and 4.6 percent in 1949. 

7. The following gives the percentage of their total export-import trade which the particular country had with countries within the Soviet bloc. Bulgaria 1937 - 12%, 1948 - 74%, 1951 - 92%; Hungary: 1937 - 13%, 1948 - 34%, 1951 -67%; Romania: 1937 - 18%,1948 -71%,1951 -79%; Czechoslovakia: 1937 - 11%, 1948 - 30%,1951 - 60%. 

8. The Polish state administration, excluding party functionaries and state-enterprise officials, increased from 172,000 in the pre-war period to 348,500 in the post-war period despite a decrease of 30% in the population. Pre-war Czechoslovakia had 345,000 officials. This figure was raised to 792,000 in 1956 and the ratio of productive workers to administrative personnel declined from 4: 1 to 2.3 2: 1. 

9. Germain, The Soviet Union ... Op cit. pp. 9-10. 

10. Djilas throws interesting light on the intrigues in relation to the Balkan Federation. See: Djilas, Op cit. especially "Section III, Disappointments.”

PART IV: THE EAST EUROPEAN EVENTS AND MARXIST THEORY 

Trotsky on Structural Assimilation  

The Trotskyist movement did not have to tackle this question of Stalinist expansionism totally unprepared. Trotsky himself had analyzed the USSR's entry into Eastern Poland, its war against Finland, and its establishment of strategic military bases in the Baltic states in the period just prior to World War II. Because these events featured prominently in the polemics with Shachtman, luckily they were treated with a thoroughness that might not otherwise have been the case. 

In Eastern Poland, and partly in Finland, the USSR carried through a process which Trotsky called "sovietization" and which Germain later called "structural assimilation". In order to secure the territory as a structural part of the Soviet Union, the USSR was forced to carry through a limited civil war by essentially bureaucratic-military means which wiped out capitalist property relations in these territories and established a society identical in its essentials with that existing in the USSR. Thus, in territories under the direct control of the Red Army and with the limited participation of the masses, the Soviet Union was capable of carrying out a "measure, revolutionary in character - 'the expropriation of the expropriators' - ...achieved in a military -bureaucratic fashion." (I) 

Trotsky stated that: 

"The overturn in property relations which was accomplished there could have been achieved only by the state that issued from the October Revolution". (2) 

Thus he saw the property overturn in these areas as emanating from the October Revolution itself, as an extension of the workers state which that revolution produced and thus as testimony to the fact that its progressive character had yet to be undermined by the ruling bureaucracy. Further, the overturn was not the act of a conscious revolutionary force seeking to spread revolution, as both the bureaucratic collectivists and the Stalinist apologists claim. Rather, "the overturn was forced upon the Kremlin oligarchy through its struggle for self-preservation under specific conditions." (3) Thus its expansionism was essentially defensive in character. Trotsky also emphasized that while the progressive content of these social transformations must be defended the transformations as a whole are part and parcel and intimately linked with the reactionary international policies of the Soviet bureaucracy. 

"The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organisation of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this one, and the only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution. Our general appraisal of the Kremlin and the Comintern does not, however, alter the particular fact that the statification of property in the occupied territories is in itself a progressive measure". (4) 

Or as he states categorically elsewhere: 

"We do not entrust the Kremlin with any historic mission. We were and remain against the seizures of new territories by the Kremlin." (5)

This complex approach of Trotsky's to the phenomenon of Stalinist expansionism as he witnessed it in his day is of considerable importance. Needless to say Shachtman never understood what he was saying. Sadly, later events were to prove that others as well did not understand him. In summary, then, Trotsky held that the USSR, despite its deformation, still retained the essentials of the state property forms which issued from the October Revolution. Because of this, the Soviet bureaucracy is capable of expanding into new territories and carrying through a structural transformation there. While we defend the progressive results of this process we are not advocates of the expansion of Stalinism. We feel this process is carried through in a reactionary bureaucratic military manner, and is used by the bureaucracy as a substitute for a genuine proletarian revolutionary world strategy. 

The Buffer Zone Discussion 

The early work of Ernest Germain on the role of Stalinism in the East European buffer remains one of the most valuable theoretical contributions made by anyone in our movement in the post-war period. Beginning with Trotsky's essential analysis of Stalinism in Revolution Betrayed, paying particular attention to the additional analysis Trotsky made of the Finnish and Polish events in In Defence of Marxism, and having a very fine grasp of the actual developments in the area, Germain started our movement off on the right track. 

Germain contended correctly that in the first period the role of the Kremlin was to prop up capitalism in Eastern Europe rather than to carry through its revolutionary overthrow even though the situation was more than ripe for such an overthrow. However, because of the very nature of the USSR as a workers state, its military and political hegemony over the area had a tendency to erode capitalist power in the buffer. It was therefore possible, Germain thought, that the USSR would overturn capitalist relations in Eastern Europe in essentially the same manner that the USSR did in Poland and Finland on the eve of the war. He called this method of military-bureaucratic overturn, structural assimilation.

Germain first presented this essential theory of structural assimilation in an excellent article, The Soviet Union After the War which was first published in French in September 1946. In this article he stated:

"The bureaucracy can definitely bring new territories into its control only by assimilating them structurally on the economic base which issued from the October Revolution. Thus structural assimilation may be gradual and may appear as a tendency. It is not at all necessary that the bureaucracy assimilate structurally all the territories which it is temporarily occupying; what is important is to determine the tendency. An understanding of the extent to which this tendency may be realized depends on relations of forces between the bureaucracy and imperialism on the one hand and between the bureaucracy and the proletariat on the other." (6) 

In 1948, at the Second World Congress of the Fourth International, the last really Trotskyist world congress to be held, the important theses on the whole general question of Stalinism, "The USSR and Stalinism" was overwhelmingly passed. It is important to note that this meeting was held after the drive toward the structural assimilation of the buffer had already begun, though by no means had it been completed. This resolution restated the basic analysis Germain had made in 1946, noted the turn of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, but felt that this tendency in the direction of structural assimilation would not be consummated. (7) 

At the meeting of the Seventh Plenum of the IEC of the Fourth International, held in April 1949, the last of a series of resolutions and the theses on the buffer with the backing of the central leadership of the International was passed. By now the process of structural assimilation had almost been completed in most countries of the buffer. The resolution noted: 

"...The buffer countries - aside from Finland and the Soviet occupied zones in Germany and Austria - constitute today a unique type of hybrid transitional society in the process of transformation, with features that are as yet so fluid and lacking precision, that it is extremely difficult to summarize its fundamental nature in a concise formula. (8)

"...We continue to define the buffer countries as capitalist countries on the road to structural assimilation with the USSR. This definition, necessarily awkward and too concise to embrace the different aspects of the buffer zone, thus signifies essentially that in the course of the process of the structural assimilation of these countries the dialectical leap has not yet been produced. It stresses both the historic origins of the present situation, as well as the social physiognomy which is as yet undecided. But it does not at all imply that the bourgeoisie is in power as the dominant class in these countries. This definition implies that the situation in the buffer countries likewise differs from the situation in a 'normal' and 'classic' capitalist society. It serves exclusively to denote the place of these countries in relation both to capitalism and the USSR, since Marxist sociology excludes the existence of economies and states that are neither capitalist nor Soviet (workers' or degenerated workers'.)" (9)

It was in the aftermath of this Plenum that the real buffer discussion began - with Michel Pablo's challenge to Germain's theoretical approach. While Germain's early work was excellent, he began to run into very serious theoretical difficulty as a result of two not unrelated events. The first was the conscious drive of the Stalinists towards structural assimilation of the Buffer countries which began in 1947, before the Second World Congress and was at its height at the time of the IEC meeting in 1949. The second event was the break of Yugoslavia from the Kremlin during the same period which as an immediate result produced a serious and deep turn to the left on the part of the Yugoslav leadership. Pabloism, in its first form, was an impressionistic reaction to these events. 

Germain's problem was that, (a) while he considered structural assimilation a possibility in Eastern Europe the main thrust of his analysis was that the Kremlin would continue to maintain capitalist relations there and (b) to the extent that he viewed structural assimilation as a possibility for Eastern Europe he viewed it as occurring in exactly the identical way as it had occurred in parts of Finland and Poland and the Baltic states - that is by means of complete absorption into the USSR. This led to a situation where the main content of much of Germain's polemic with Pablo in 1949 and 1950 was devoted to an attempt to prove that capitalist relations continued to exist in Eastern Europe, a position which became harder and harder to maintain as each day passed. 

Pablo's "theoretical solution" was a different matter entirely. It represented a complete break with the past Trotskyist analysis of Stalinism and with the essential dialectical method itself. Everything about the way Pablo approached these theoretical problems was wrong, alien. He began in his article, "The Class Nature of Yugoslavia" (10) with an impressionistic reaction to Yugoslavia rather than with the analysis the movement had been making of the buffer. Then as a subordinate aspect of his analysis of Yugoslavia he presented a criterion whereby the entire buffer could be considered a workers' state. Thus he presented two entirely separate and unrelated criteria for determining that Yugoslavia was a workers' state. Germain summarized them as follows:

"(a) The rust holds that Yugoslavia is (and logically has been at least since 1945) a workers' state because the proletarian revolution was victorious there, taking a peculiar and unforeseen form in the Partisan movement during the war." 

“b) The second is that Yugoslavia is (and has been since as early as 1947) a workers' state because industry and wholesale trade have been nationalised and the bourgeoisie has lost political power." (11) 

Obviously point (b), what evolved into the famous "three criteria" for determining workers' states, was as true of the rest of the buffer as it was of Yugoslavia while point (a) was based on an analysis of events peculiar (at that time anyway) to Yugoslavia. In order to make some sort of sense out of all this the movement then proceeded to have two separate discussions: one on the buffer in general and the other on Yugoslavia. Thus, in the SWP, a Plenum in February of 1950 supported Germain (12) and resolved that the buffer, excluding Yugoslavia remained capitalist, while a Plenum in December of 1950 supported Pablo (13) and resolved that Yugoslavia was a workers' state.

In order to facilitate an understanding of this problem we, too, must now set aside the Yugoslav question only to take it up once more when we have resolved in a rounded fashion an understanding of the rest of the buffer. Our tasks however, will not be to come to two unrelated analyses of these two theoretical problems making no real attempt to create an integrated and non-contradictory total theoretical outlook. Rather we will seek to apply at a later point the essential analysis which we work out on the buffer to Yugoslavia in much the same way that we will now seek to apply Trotsky's analysis of earlier developments to the buffer. 

The actual evolution of the discussion showed that it was very difficult indeed to keep these two discussions really separate. This was because, even in his discussion of the buffer in general, Pablo was proceeding on the basis of a new non-Trotskyist theory of the role of Stalinism in the revolutionary process. It was his position that between capitalism and socialism there would be a transitional period, which could last for centuries, during which the emerging workers' states would have a distorted and deformed character. Thus Stalinism - that is political forces which produce distorted or deformed workers' states - would be the main revolutionary factor for a whole epoch and the role of the working class under Trotskyist leadership would be postponed to the end of this centuries-long transitional period. 

With such an outlook his central concern was to establish "criteria" to "prove” that this or that state was now a distorted or deformed workers' state. He seemed little concerned with a clear explanation of the exact process which produced the particular state for the obvious reason that he felt all sorts of confused and diverse processes were at work - he saw many, many roads to the establishment of workers' states (the one he had least faith in was that of direct proletarian revolution.) 

In his second major polemical article (14) Pablo claimed that the buffer countries were becoming workers' states because: (a) nationalizations; (b) the process of structural assimilation was being completed; and (c) the masses actually were carrying through a proletarian revolution in a very "controlled" way (this is another form of his first method of determining that Yugoslavia was a workers' state.) So here we find a little bit for everybody. Pablo's article seemed to have been based upon the methodological principle that if each individual theoretical explanation seems insufficient, standing by itself, to explain an obvious result, then combine the several inadequate theories in the hopes that the total effect will be to convince all and sundry of the desired conclusion. 

The problem, however, is that the task before our movement then, and the task before us now, is not to "prove" a conclusion - that is to provide a basis for the labeling of the East European states as deformed workers' states. Our task was, and is, rather to understand how such states came into existence. Thus it is precisely this most confused area of our past theory - the understanding of the origins, the revolutionary process which produced these workers' states - that is most critically important to revolutionists whose main concern is precisely the creation of workers' states. 

Pablo's third argument (argument “c” above) about the role of the masses, is based essentially on a complete distortion of the actual events as they occurred. Only in Czechoslovakia can a case be made for even controlled mass participation in the social overturn and there only at the initial stages. So we simply cannot accept this as a serious attempt to understand the process as it took place!n the buffer as a whole. 

Pablo was of course right in viewing the process of structural assimilation as having been essentially completed in 1950 (argument "b" above.) However, Pablo had no comprehension or even real interest in structural assimilation as a theory. To him it was just one process alongside several other processes which produced workers' states. Thus he never comprehended the methodological approach that lay behind Germain's whole analysis of East European events since 1946. So, strange as it may seem, Germain, who most vigorously denied that structural assimilation had been completed in this period was more correct in his methodological approach than Pablo who so strongly insisted that the process of structural assimilation (which he did not even understand) was completed. 

It was in fact Pablo's first argument (argument “a" above) which was to survive as the dominant "theory" within the Fourth International for explaining the emergence of workers' states not only in Eastern Europe but everywhere else as well. As long as a state could qualify under the "three criteria" - nationalization of the basic means of production, monopoly of foreign trade, planned economy - it could properly be called a workers' state and that was all that needed to be said. But whatever else may be said about the "three criteria" it should be clear that in themselves they are not a theory at all. At best they can be called a half-theory of the state, and interestingly the second half at that.

That is, they are a way of determining what label should be placed on a state by studying only the end-product of a social process. In no sense are they an attempt to explain the social process which produced this end product. Obviously Pablo himself realized this and thus his attempt to confuse the issue by combining the "three criteria" with two mutually contradictory theories of the social process - arguments "b" and "c" above. Pablo's latter day followers - especially the SWP - no longer even make an attempt to explain this social process. 

At the time John G. Wright, the most theoretically developed person then in the SWP, understood the completely bankrupt character of this "theoretical" argument as well as its alien origins. This is what he had to say in a polemic with an American supporter of Pablo, Bert Cochran (E.R. Frank):

This sociological approach amounts to the following: we set down two parallel columns and in one column we jot down the outstanding characteristics of the Soviet Union as it is today, in 1950; .and in this connection we may, if we so desire, take note of its historical origin in what Comrade E.R. Frank labels as the revolution of a 'Classic Type'. 

In an adjoining column we set down all the buffer states, including Yugoslavia and see what similarities can be found with the USSR under Stalin - this time without paying any regard whatever to the historical origin of what happened in each of these countries, ignoring who carried out certain measures, why and under what circumstances, ignoring just how they were carried out, who benefited thereby and so on. 

And at the end, without weighing any of these diverse factors or evaluating them from the class standpoint and ignoring all the dissimilarities - especially that of origin - you conclude that all similarities constitute an identity. And therefore, in Eastern Europe what you have are revolutions of a 'new and special type'. What has this in common with our dialectical method? Very little.

...We are told that we are poor Marxists unless we apply a sociological method with unmistakable academic whiskers on it. It happens to be the formaIistic method of comparative sociology which lays stress on dazzling similarities or 'common formulas' regardless of time and place, class and origin. 

...Up to now our Trotskyist school of thought has rejected as false the notion of approaching economic factors, singly or collectively, as if they led an independent existence; as if they could be weighed and evaluated at any time and any circumstances, separate and apart from their class roots and class content, independently of the methods of economic leadership and finally - what is most important - independently of the political programme and leadership involved. Yet all this appears to fall away in the thinking and argumentation of the 'workers' statists'. We are presented with bare facts and statistics of nationalizations. The course of events leading to them, the entire Kremlin policy with all its twists and turns from Potsdam to 1950, not to mention the wartime policies, evaporate into thin air. All this seems to be without apparent importance compared to the decisive 'reality' of nationalizations. Assuredly this bears little resemblance to our method of thinking. 

Thus far in the discussion there has been considerable reference to the 1939-49 dispute with the petty-bourgeois opposition inside the SWP. This is only to be welcomed. But from the standpoint of method the following must be borne in mind. In evaluating the class nature of the USSR, our opponents of 1939-40 denied completely the role of the economic foundation. The polemic, of necessity, stressed this aspect; the subjective factor, its role and importance, appeared to fall into a subordinate position. But, in reality, that was not the case. Because all of us, and in the first instance Trotsky, never dealt with Soviet nationalized economy as such, but invariably stressed its origins in the proletarian revolution and its subsequent evolution. We took into account all the changes introduced by the Kremlin and concluded that the qualitative stage or reversion to capitalism had not yet occurred in their remaining conquests of October. (emphasis ours.) (15)

By early 1951, on the eve of the Third World Congress of the Fourth International, events in East Europe had reached a point where Germain could no longer maintain his resistance to designating the states in this region as having working class character. Germain issued at that time an extremely important document known in the movement as the "Ten Theses" or in its longer form "What Should be Modified and What Should be Maintained in the Theses of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International on the Question of Stalinism?" This document finally recognized that the buffer countries had been transformed into deformed workers' states by the process of structural assimilation. However, by this time Germain had been so demoralized and confused by the sweep of events, that he made no serious attempt to answer in depth his own earlier theoretical objections to such a conclusion. 

This analysis of the buffer was rounded out in the form of a resolution which was passed by the Third World Congress (16.) This has been the position of our international movement on this question for the past dozen years. 

Germain's Theoretical Objections

Several theoretical problems plagued Germain and contributed substantially to his inability to think through the theory of structural assimilation and properly assess the transformations that were occurring between 1947 and 1951.

Germain viewed structural assimilation as essentially a process of direct absorption of the whole region into the USSR. This is certainly what happened in Poland and Finland before the war. Germain's problem was that rather than seeking to understand the essence of Trotsky's theoretical approach to structural assimilation in his day, he seemed to expect a mechanical repetition of what happened earlier. Since this is not the way things went he could not understand what really was happening. 

Germain reasoned essentially as follows (17.) First he gave considerable emphasis to the fact that Trotsky stressed that the masses played a certain limited role in the overturn of property relations in Eastern Poland. He correctly attacked Pablo and his supporters for distorting reality in trying to see such a role for the masses in the postwar structural assimilation. But this was not a really critical and central theoretical objection. The working class character was given to the social overturn not by any limited role the working class may have played here or there but by the essential class nature of the force which all admit played the major role in the transformation process - the Stalinist bureaucracy and apparatus. 

Germain's second line of argumentation essentially negated the critical importance of the first line of argumentation. He recognized that under very 'special circumstances it was possible for structural assimilation to occur without the masses playing any significant role. He cited as an example the assimilation of the Baltic states during the war. However, he insisted that such assimilation was possible only because the Baltic states were incorporated within the boundaries of the USSR and this allowed the Stalinists to wipe out the bourgeoisie as a class through means of terror and police action which would have been out of the question outside the boundaries of the USSR. 

Pablo accused Germain of making a fetish out of national boundaries and on this one point we are forced to agree with Pablo. It is clear from the whole development of the buffer that Stalin made no such fetish. In actual fact the Stalinists in Eastern Europe did wipe out the bourgeoisie (and many others as well) through a very effective and ruthless terror and without (with the partial exception of Czechoslovakia as we have noted earlier) any serious reliance on the indigenous working class. It is difficult to see how it could have been done more ruthlessly within the boundaries of the USSR. 

In fact there is some evidence that the exact form in which the structural assimilation process was to take place - that is whether or not there was to be any physical absorption of areas into the USSR - was something which Stalin did not decide upon right at the beginning. Milovan Djilas, whose book Conversations with Stalin has a deep ring of authenticity to it and much of which has been verified by other sources, states the following:

"From his (Stalin's) stated position and from vague allusions by Soviet diplomats at the time, it seemed that the Soviet leaders were also toying with the thought of reorganizing the Soviet Union by joining to it the "peoples' democracies" - the Ukraine with Hungary and Romania, and Byelorussia with Poland and Czechoslovakia, while the Balkan states were to be joined with Russia! However obscure and hypothetical all these plans may have been, one thing is certain: Stalin sought solutions and forms for the East European countries that would solidify and secure Moscow's domination and hegemony for a long time to come. (18)

It may very well have been Stalin's troubles with Tito which led him to decide upon giving up this course. Whatever may be the actual facts in regard to what Djilas reports, it does little to alter the essential theoretical question. Once one recognizes and fully absorbs the concept that the Stalinist movement worldwide, to the extent that it is independent of indigenous class forces, is basically an extension of the Soviet bureaucracy then when this Stalinist movement, in a region in which the USSR clearly dominates, carries through a social transformation it matters little whether the territory is formally a part of the USSR. 

Thirdly, he felt that the backward nature of the area and the smallness of the countries involved did not provide a material base necessary for even developing the fIrst beginnings of a workers' state. Thus, at a minimum, a Balkan Federation was necessary to provide the material basis for a development of a workers' state. 

While there is no doubt that the Eastern European countries were quite incapable of taking even the fIrst steps of establishing a workers' state in complete isolation lacking even the resources and territory at the disposal of the Russians in 1917, these states did not really exist in complete isolation. The transformation process was accompanied by a very close and direct economic linking with the USSR which in this period was already a powerful country economically. Further, it is also clear that these countries experienced deep distortions and perversions of their economic development precisely because of their relatively autarchic development. Germain's point was in truth largely correct - but not totally correct. Thus the narrowness of the material base for the transformation of these countries, given the close support of the USSR, was not a critical enough factor to actually prevent the transformation, but it was an important enough factor to deeply injure their economic development. 

Germain's fourth major objection was on the purely theoretical level and it was his most serious - the most difficult to answer even today. Germain noted that if one declares the East European states to be workers' states one must square their actual process of development into workers' states with the Leninist theory of the state. The Leninist concept of the state holds that a workers' state can be formed only by a process of the total destruction of the existing bourgeois state apparatus and the creation of a completely new type of state on the basis of the workers' and peasants' councils which spring up out of the mass.

In East Europe all such councils, or even potential expressions of mass will, were crushed during the first period of collaboration with the bourgeoisie. The actual social transformation was carried through in the state sector by a process of purging a section of the state bureaucracy, the inundation of the state apparatus with supporters of the Stalinists, and the fusion of the state and Communist Party bureaucracies. The basic bourgeois state structure was kept essentially intact and many of the personnel remained to this day. A similar process took place in the command sector of the army and police, etc. Thus it was Germain's contention that to label the East European states as working class in fundamental character was to carry through a basic revision of Lenin's view of the state comparable to Bernstein.

Later events have done nothing to alleviate this theoretical dilemma. In fact the contrary has occurred. Today virtually all in our movement properly recognize the East European states to have a working class character. Not only this but we also recognize Yugoslavia and China to be workers' states and as we shall see later the identical problem is posed by their evolution. Those who hold Cuba to be a workers' state also have to face this theoretical problem. 

It is a sad commentary on the theoretical level of our movement that since 1950 when Germain rust raised this problem, no one in our movement has sought to face up to it - including Germain. This is but another reflection of our essential thesis that our movement has not been approaching the problem of the creation of new workers' states in the post-war period in the proper way. The central question of a theoretical understanding of the process by which these states are created is ignored and discussion on all sides seems to center around the subsidiary point of what is the proper label for the end result of this social process.
In trying to deal with this theoretical problem we are getting at the very heart of an understanding of structural assimilation. The process of structural assimilation is an essentially different process from the normal revolutionary process with which we are familiar. Any attempt to superimpose on events in Eastern Europe the type of process which led to the victory of the October Revolution is doomed to complete failure. Things just did not happen that way.

We are not dealing here with a clear progressive revolutionary dynamic. The working class under Marxist leadership did not carry on a struggle which led to the destruction of the bourgeoisie and the replacement of the bourgeois state based on proletarian forms.

 The fundamentally different process that occurred in Eastern Europe can be understood more clearly if one pauses for a second to think on the essential differences between the evolution of the USSR and that of Eastern Europe - of the distinction between a deformed workers' state and a degenerated workers' state. Pablo invented the term "deformed workers' state" to explain the fact that while the present social structure in the USSR is the result of the degeneration of a healthy workers' state created by a genuine revolution under a truly Marxist leadership, the deformed workers' states emerged in the very beginning in degenerate form never having passed through a healthy stage. This fundamental difference in evolution explains clearer than anything else the essential difference in the process which created the USSR as it is today and that which created the East European states. 

When we add to the essential difference in process the fundamental identity in end result then we can begin to get at the root of the problem. In essence the creation of deformed workers' states in East Europe was a process of the extension of the already existent degenerated workers' state in the USSR. Only in this way can we explain both the identity in end result and the difference in process. Thus we are dealing here not with a simple progressive revolutionary development but the extension into a new territory of a highly degenerated form of a progressive social system. Thus in the very process of social transformation degenerative as well as progressive features are to be found at one and the same time. The "normal" cycle of revolutionary advance followed by Thermidor was in East Europe compressed into the same essential process. There was an essential oneness and identity to these two oppositional processes. 

As we noted in the introduction to this project, Trotsky viewed the USSR as a workers' state which had moved backward, had degenerated in a bourgeois direction. Thus it contained highly contradictory elements - some reflecting the still not totally destroyed progressive results of the October Revolution and some reflecting the bourgeois society which had come before. The old, bourgeois aspect of Soviet society is concentrated primarily precisely in the state apparatus - in the usurpation by a petty bourgeois bureaucratic caste of the political power of the working class. The progressive new aspect of Soviet society is found primarily in the economic field, in the planned economy which has been distorted but which remains intact in its essentials. Thus Trotsky called for a political revolution rather than a social one thus making clear that it was in this political sphere that the greatest change was needed - that is, it was here that the closest identity with capitalist society existed. 

Trotsky was to make this point even clearer in a highly perceptive section of Revolution Betrayed, a section with considerable bearing on the theoretical problem we are discussing:

"If...a bourgeois party were to overthrow the ruling Soviet caste it would find no small number of ready servants among the present bureaucracy, administrators, directors, party secretaries and privileged upper circles in general. A purgation of the state apparatus would, of course, be necessary in this case , too. But a bourgeois restoration would probably have to clean out fewer people than a revolutionary party."  (19) 

It is therefore understandable that with the extension of the degenerated workers' state into new areas the least change would occur in the political superstructure. If a bourgeois counterrevolution would remove less of the bureaucracy than a political revolution then certainly the extension of the USSR into a bourgeois state would likewise remove few of the old personnel of the bourgeois state apparatus, would create fewer changes in the state apparatus. In addition, the state apparatus, which was to emerge from this process was to stand in partial contradiction to the property forms established. Thus the fundamental contradiction of Soviet society was carried over into the East European buffer from the very beginning - the contradiction between the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy and the progressive property forms. This was to fmd concrete expression in the East German uprising and the Polish and Hungarian revolutions which followed structural assimilation so shortly after its basic completion. 

In a fundamental theoretical sense what was new in the state apparatuses in the East European states was created by a proletarian revolution - the Russian October Revolution. Can anyone seriously conceive of these states being created if the Russian Revolution had not taken place first and the essential conquests of this revolution preserved even with fundamental bourgeois distortions? 

We can therefore state that the lack of a clear revolutionary change in the state apparatus during the process of the extension of the degenerated workers' state, is a clear indication of the correctness of Trotsky's assessment of the counterrevolutionary nature of the bureaucratic caste and that this caste represents essentially a retrogression in a bourgeois direction rather than a new progressive class force in its own right. One final lesson from this theoretical problem: wherever events confront us with this same theoretical problem we can be sure that we are again witnessing the same kind of contradictory social transformation which characterized the buffer - that is that once again structural assimilation is taking place. 

Only the theory of structural assimilation can explain the social transformations which occurred in East Europe. A concrete study of the events in East Europe and a careful consideration of all the theoretical objections which have been raised to the theory of structural assimilation as an explanation of these events lead us to this conclusion. We must now turn to Yugoslavia and China to see how our theory stands up under these even more difficult tests. 

FOOTNOTES - PART IV 

1. Trotsky, Leon. In Defence of Marxism (Pioneer Publishers, 1942) p. 18. Only a very skeletal presentation of Trotsky's analysis is presented in this section. The reader is urged to read or re-read In Defence of Marxism pp. 18-21, 56-59, 130-137, 170-178. 

2. Ibid. p. 175. 

3. Ibid. p. 175. 

4. Ibid. p. 19. 

5. Ibid. p. 20. 

6. Germain, Ernest. "Soviet Union After the War" Op Cit. pp. 7-8. 

7. "USSR and Stalinism - Theses adopted by the Second World Congress" Fourth International, June 1948. pp. 118, 119.

8. "The Evolution of the Buffer Countries" International Information Bulletin, June 1949, p. 17.

9. Ibid. p. 19. 

10. International Information Bulletin, December 1949. 

11. Germain, Ernest. "The Yugoslav Question, the Question of the Soviet Buffer Zone, and their Implication for Marxist Theory" International Information Bulletin, January 1950, p. 3. 

12. Stein, M. "The Class Nature of the Buffer Countries in Eastern Europe" Discussion Bulletin, No. 3, June 1950. 

13. Weiss, Murry. "Report on Yugoslavia" Discussion Bulletin No. 6, January, 1951. 

14. Pablo, Michel. "Yugoslavia and the Rest of the Buffer Zone" International Information Bulletin, May 1950. 

15. Wright, John G. "The Importance of Method in the Discussion on the Kremlin-Dominated Buffer Zone" Discussion Bulletin No. 2, April 1950. 

16. "Draft Resolution on the Class Character of the European Countries in the Soviet Buffer Zone" International Information Bulletin, July 1951. 

17. For the clearest exposition of Germain's theoretical views see: Germain, Ernest. "The Yugoslav Question..." 

l8. Djilas, Milovan, Op Cit. p. 177. 

19. Trotsky, Leon. Revolution Betrayed p. 253. 

PART V: THE YUGOSLAV EXPERIENCE; MYTH AND REALITY 

Yugoslavia: The Myth

The theoretical analysis of the evolution of Yugoslavia was to cause a tremendous amount of confusion in our movement. We must understand that the discussion of these events was taking place in a very small international movement, many sections of which only had the most tenuous connection with the working class, during a period in which the class struggle was on the ebb - in which the bourgeoisie was re-stabilizing its rule over the bulk of humanity. So it was very understandable that many should leave our movement in this period and that many of those who remained were to grasp at anything which seemed to offer an easier more "realistic" road to socialism than the building of our small movement as a vanguard for the class as a whole. The amazing aspect of this whole period was not the confusion but that some sought to resist the revisionist theories which became so dominant. 

Also the quite unexpected break of the Yugoslavs with the USSR was to come at a time when our movement had not yet fully comprehended the developments in the buffer as a whole. Thus we had no fully thought out theoretical structure within which to seek to place the Yugoslav developments. This was to so completely confuse the theoretical process that even today it is difficult to make any real sense out of the important discussion process. 

The first decision one must make in seeking to theoretically understand the Yugoslav evolution is to decide within what kind of pattern, what kind of social process, to place Yugoslavia. Up to 1948 no one thought of looking upon Yugoslavia in any other way except as part and parcel of the political and social evolution of the buffer as a whole. After 1949 and the split between Tito and Stalin, the exact opposite situation existed - no one saw Yugoslavia as at all related to the buffer evolution and everyone insisted it reflected a different, unique process. 

The predominant view in the International on this question after 1949 reflected an attempt to fit Yugoslav developments within the framework of the October pattern of development. That is, the comrades claimed to see in the Yugoslav evolution a genuine proletarian revolution led by a Marxist party which resulted in a workers' state and rejected out of hand any consideration that the Yugoslav state also could have been the result of an extension of an already degenerated workers' state. 

It was, of course, impossible for anyone to claim that the evolution of Yugoslavia was identical to that of the October events and thus certain critically important modifications were introduced. It was recognized that in its early stage the Yugoslav Communist Party was a Stalinist, not a Marxist party. However, it was claimed that under the pressure of the masses, the YCP was transformed into a "left-centrist" party. Thus to the extent that the YCP "led a revolution" it came into conflict with Stalinism, it became non-Stalinist and thus our concept of Stalinism as counterrevolutionary seemed to remain unimpaired. 

The resultant state structure was also not identical with the soviets of 1917. Democratic forms of workers' rule were absent in any clear way. But we are informed October was only a "norm", and real revolutionary events of our time are distinguished by the fact that they depart from this "norm." The price we must pay for "left-centrist" leadership of a revolution is a certain "distortion" or "deformation" of the end product.

However, we can hope for the best in the future. It is not excluded that the YCP will develop from its present "left-centrist" position into a Trotskyist party, complete the development of soviet forms, join the Fourth International and spur on a glorious "revolutionary regroupment" on a worldwide scale. The lessons we are to learn from this new experience as Murry Weiss of the SWP so well put it in 1950, is that "Stalinist parties can be transformed" and that "a centrist party can lead a workers' revolution to power." ( 1 )

But to a serious, thinking Marxist, these were no minor lessons which Comrades Pablo and Weiss, in particular, were seeking to teach us at that time. For over one hundred years a central tenet of Marxism has been the necessity for the working class to be led by a Marxist party which had a Marxist theory - that is a consistent class struggle outlook. The great lesson of October was that only such a party could bring the working class to power, and that all centrist parties must inevitably fail at this most critical task. Now it is discovered that all this internal theoretical and political struggle which has taken up so much of the movement's time for a hundred years is not necessary. A centrist party can lead a revolution to victory if only the masses "pressurize" it. The penalty for centrism is not failure to make a revolution but distortions of the resultant product of the revolution. Even this should not worry one for obviously if pressure can transform a party to the point of bringing the class to power, who can say that more pressure cannot transform this leadership even further and force it to correct the distortions in the resultant state structure? 

If all this be the case then what role is left for us, the conscious Marxists other than to assist in the process of bringing pressure to bear on other, larger political groups? What even is the need for internal discussion, theoretical work, and the many books of Trotsky, Lenin, and Marx?

But there is even a little more at stake in this new theory of Yugoslavia. Contrary to the claims of its authors, our traditional assessment of Stalinism is not "saved" by the convenient gimmick of stating that to the extent that Stalinists carry through a revolution they no longer are Stalinist. For what in essence we are saying is that Stalinism as a political trend can be transformed into an effective revolutionary vehicle under pressure from the masses. If the masses can thus transform Stalinism into its opposite certainly Stalinism can no longer be viewed as a serious impediment to revolutionary development!

Michel Pablo's theory of "centuries of deformed workers' states" was but an inevitable logical deduction from the assessment of Yugoslavia made by the bulk of the movement at that time. Who could seriously deny that the Yugoslav development was not to be the pattern for the whole next epoch of humanity? The same is true of Pablo's "sui generis entrism." If the Stalinist parties could be transformed into revolutionary vehicles by mass pressure, it is absolutely correct for Trotskyists to deeply bury themselves in these parties. To refuse to do so certainly was abstentionism from what was viewed as the real, meaningful political developments of our day. 

There was, of course, considerable resistance to all this at the beginning. Germain ldd the way internationally but his effectiveness was seriously weakened by his insistence that Yugoslavia as late as 1950 was still a capitalist state. In the United States John G. Wright upheld the same position as Germain in the party against a virtually unanimous leadership. (2) Many rank and filers, however, were very unhappy with the direction the Yugoslav question seemed to be leading the movement. But serious theoretical resistance to the central underpinning of Pablo's "centuries" thesis - his analysis of Yugoslavia - collapsed when Germain published his famous "Ten Theses" in 1951 which completely supported Pablo on this essential point. (3) Germain was never again to seriously resist Pablo and the opposition of those sections that were later to form the IC concentrated on the most blatant manifestations of Pablo's theories such as his "centuries" concept, his "war-revolution" thesis, and his entrism sui generis but never directly tackled the very roots of Pablo's outlook which are to be found in his analysis of Yugoslavia. 

It is not hard to see the very real liquidationist implications Pablo's approach had for our movement. But it is our duty to do more than point this out. Marxism must base itself on facts not faith. If the facts really contradict our reason for being we must face up to them anyway - and cease to be. This is certainly the case if history is to show us another, easier method for consummating our central task of socialist revolution. Our forces are so weak that it would be a tremendous boon for the world working class if other, larger forces actually could lead it to power. The sacrifice of our little organizations would indeed be a small price to pay for this great advance for our class. But if this view is not substantiated by historical developments - if on the contrary we are driving towards liquidating the essential instrument of proletarian revolution because of a false impression of reality - then we truly are criminals in the eyes of the world working class. We must therefore approach the real historical developments with a full understanding of what is at stake and reject all that is superficial, illusory. 

Yugoslavia: The Reality 

In order to understand theoretically the development of Yugoslavia it is important to emphasize both what is unique in Yugoslav history and what Yugoslavia shares with the development of the rest of the buffer. This is no simple task for the Yugoslavs themselves in the past period after their split with Stalin created a whole mythology of their past history. Among the foremost propagators of the Yugoslav myth was the Fourth International itself! But we will do our best to get at the facts. 

Tito began his career as a Stalinist as a special Comintern agent working out of Moscow in the 1930's whose special field was the Balkans. His last assignment was to go to Yugoslavia in 1937, where the party was considered to have considerable dissident "Trotskyite" elements in it. He was to take over and develop a cohesive monolithic party subordinate to the Kremlin. This he achieved so that when the war began he had a relatively small (no more than 12,000) but quite cohesive and disciplined formation. The pattern that Tito followed during the war was identical in its main respects with the pattern followed by the Stalinists in most of the Balkans - most particularly in Greece, Albania and Eastern Bulgaria. In all these areas the Stalinists were instrumental in the formation of partisan guerrilla armies in the countryside mainly recruited from the peasantry. Politically the Stalinists sought to create a common "Liberation Front" with all sections of the population, including the bourgeoisie, the landowners and the church. However, while this was partially achieved for temporary periods in these countries, on the whole this class collaborationist line was torn asunder by the social upheaval that took place in these countries. The partisans found the only social force capable of real struggle against the Nazis was the peasantry in the countryside and the working class in the underground metropolitan movement. Further, these peasants could only be organized through a social programme of a profoundly revolutionary nature whose main feature was land reform. On the other hand the bulk of the bourgeoisie and the landowners, faced with this social revolutionary movement, collaborated with the Nazis and Italians against the partisan movement. So a civil war situation developed in these countries. 

In Yugoslavia, the Stalinists sought to the best of their ability to contain the social revolution within a bourgeois framework and to merge their forces with those of the bourgeois Mikhailovich's Chetniks. However as long as they espoused a land reform programme and mobilized the peasantry, the Chetniks would prefer the Nazis to them. But should they openly abandon their peasant programme then they would destroy the effectiveness of their resistance force. 

In this period certain differences cropped up between Tito and Stalin which were later blown up all out of proportion. Stalin kept putting pressure on Tito to tone down the social programme of the Partisans and to try to come to an agreement with the Chetniks. Tito resisted this pressure not out of any principled objection to the proposals but because they were practically impossible of achievement because the Chetniks had gone over to the Nazis and any toning down of the social programme would destroy the necessary peasant support the partisans rested upon. Not only did Stalin in the end go along with Tito's judgment on this but so did the imperialists and even the bourgeois government in exile. For in 1944 the Allies stopped all military aid to the Chetniks and sent aid to the partisans. Also the bourgeois London Yugoslav exile government followed suit. In this period the partisans issued a declaration which made clear their aim was to maintain the struggle within capitalist bounds:

"The National Liberation Movement of Yugoslavia is in its essence a movement which has been endorsed by the entire people, and is both national and democratic. Therefore, we must emphasise once more that the leaders of the Movement of National Liberation of Yugoslavia have before them one single important aim: to fight against the occupiers and their lackeys and build up a federative democratic Yugoslavia, and not - as our enemies accuse us - the aim of introducing Communism." (4) 

Yugoslavia was liberated in the main by the Partisans themselves though parts of the country were liberated by the Red Army and the liberation of Belgrade was carried through jointly by the Red Army and the partisans. Thus, with the military victory of the partisans, a deep and profound civil war was consummated with the bourgeoisie completely discredited and in flight, the old bourgeois state apparatus non-existent, and an armed peasant mass in control of the country . All the revolutionary features of the buffer in general (and all of Europe for that matter) were in Yugoslavia most intensively felt. In addition, incipient organs of dual power already existed in the countryside in the form of Liberation Committees which had considerable regional power and which were in large part democratic and reflective of the interests of the peasantry. The formation of similar committees in the major cities and the fusion of the peasant and worker forces would in short order have established real Soviet Power in Yugoslavia.

It was precisely at this moment that Tito concluded an agreement with the Bourgeois London exile government for a coalition regime, the famous Tito-Subasich Agreement. Germain correctly notes the importance of this event:

"The real question of the reconstitution of a state apparatus in Yugoslavia was posed at the time the Partisan armies approached the big cities. And this was precisely the time when the Tito-Subasich agreement was concluded!" (all caps in original) (5)

This agreement which Pablo and Weiss passed off as an episodic error was of fundamental importance as it limited the revolution to the bourgeois democratic framework at the precise period when the elemental upheaval of the masses was pushing it to a socialist conclusion. While the coalition government was only to last a few months in Yugoslavia as compared to a few years in the rest of the buffer (a sign of the revolutionary intensity of events in Yugoslavia) it existed long enough to permit the reconstitution of the state apparatus on a bourgeois basis. The local committees on the countryside were subordinated to a centralized state apparatus identical in form to that in the other East European countries. The local committees in the city, where the presence of the working class immediately raised the question of class rule, were bureaucratically formed from the very beginning and never had a really independent existence.  

Only after the revolutionary movement was stopped in its tracks by a bloc with the remnants of domestic capitalist forces and the more important international imperialist forces behind them, only later did the process of structural change take place - after the mass movement had been subordinated to the bourgeois state apparatus. Germain summarizes it well: 

"The state apparatus reconstructed in 1944-45 was not a workers' state apparatus. The revolutionary movement of the Yugoslav masses stopped before reaching its goal, and this stoppage of the mass movement was the price paid by the Yugoslav CP for its recognition by imperialism and by the royal clique of Subasich. Stopped before achieving its aim, the movement of the masses remained dormant up to 1948. If later, as in the other buffer zone countries the CP in power eliminated the bourgeois parties and took radical nationalisation measures these were done by purely administrative methods. The CP in power did not appeal to the masses at any time before the split with the Kremlin. If the action of the masses before 1945 presents fundamental differences with that of the other buffer zone countries, it does not play any role between 1945 and 1948, the period during which all the political and economic overturns occurred in Yugoslavia." (6)

Germain correctly points out that after 1945, Yugoslav developments followed closely the pattern of the rest of the buffer. This is why no one in our movement, or in any other movement for that matter, saw Yugoslavia as the unique development it was later claimed to be. This in our opinion was not due to simple theoretical blindness, but rather to the fact that throughout the whole period until 1948 Yugoslavia was an important and integral part of the whole buffer zone. Even the complete destruction of the state apparatus was not a qualitative difference from other buffer countries. The state apparatus in Poland was almost as completely destroyed and was reconstructed in much the same manner. In fact, when it came to nationalizations, Yugoslavia actually lagged behind Poland and Czechoslovakia. 

Of course the relative greater weight of the mass movement in Yugoslavia and the absence of sizable Red Army deployments combined with the solid organization of the YCP were important factors which differed in degree from similar factors in other buffer countries. The strength of the mass movement increased the instability of the coalition government making conditions quite impossible for the bourgeois cabinet ministers. It also forced the YCP, for fear of a genuine takeover by the masses themselves, to carry through the structural transformation sooner than in other buffer countries. The fact that Tito assumed power pretty much on his own without complete dependence on the Red Army combined with his carrying through the structural transformation process at an earlier date than in the other countries, gave Tito, by 1948, an independent base of power in his own bureaucratic state apparatus and monolithic party which made it possible for him to resist Stalin - something not possible for most of the other buffer CP leaders. 

Pablo claimed at the time that Tito, in so far as he carried through a genuine proletarian revolution, broke with the Kremlin and ceased being a Stalinist. We must state clearly and emphatically that this is pure mythology having no basis at all in the facts! Tito, during the process of the reconstitution of the bourgeois state as well as during the process of structural transformation was fully a Stalinist in every sense of the word. Not one bit of evidence has been produced to show that Stalin opposed the structural transformation process - though it is possible that he may have felt that Tito's timing was a bit too quick. All evidence rather verifies the view that Tito carried through this transformation with the agreement of Stalin and that during this period Tito was the most avidly loyal Stalinist in all of Eastern Europe. 

The approach of the YCP leadership in this period is most graphically illustrated in the report of June 5th, 1945 of the Soviet Minister in Belgrade to the Kremlin. This was later revealed in the publication of the Yugoslav-USSR correspondence: 

"We would like, continued Kardelj, the Soviet Union to look at us as representatives of one of the future Soviet Republics, and not as upon representatives of another country, capable of independently solving questions...(They) consider the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as being a part of the All-Union Communist Party, that is to say, that our relationship...(should emphasise) that Yugoslavia in the future would be admitted a constituent part of the USSR. Therefore they would like us to criticise them directly and openly and to give them advice in what way to conduct home and foreign policy of Yugoslavia in the right direction." (7) 

Tito himself had this to say about this period of Yugoslav history:

"We had too many illusions and were too uncritical in taking and replanting in Yugoslavia everything that was being done in the Soviet Union." (8) 

It perhaps may be difficult for comrades to understand how the leaders of the YCP could have gone through the partisan experience, had a number of differences with the Kremlin leadership from time to time, but remained in this period not only Stalinists but as one commentator has put it "more Stalinist than Stalin." (9) Milovan Djilas's previously quoted book, Conversations With Stalin, is extremely helpful in this respect as he gives considerable detail on the differences the Yugoslavs had with Stalin but also expresses their deep feelings of identity with Stalin, their essentially Stalinist outlook. One of the most recent books published on Yugoslavia well summarizes this period in the following way:

"The new Yugoslavia was not technically a 'satellite'; it was not forced by Moscow to do things against its will. Nevertheless, up to 1943 it was, no less than the satellites proper, oriented to Moscow in word and deed and thus, in effect, represented an extension of Soviet Power." (10) 

"Titoism" did exist as a trend of sorts in this period within the Stalinist movement. It represented the most hardened Stalinist line similar to "Zhdanovism" in the USSR. As we have earlier noted, "Gomulkaism" was its opposite. Stalin utilized Zhdanov and Tito precisely to spur the development of structural transformation when he decided on this course. However, as the process unfolded, the "Titoists" and the "Zhdanovists" precisely because of their hardened Stalinist character became potential sources of opposition within the Stalinist system and had to be subordinated or purged. Thus Tito, who in 1946 was considered a possible heir of Stalin as head of the international Stalinist movement, in 1948 needed to be subordinated to the interests of the USSR in order to facilitate the subordination of the whole region to the USSR as a country. 

The Tito myth makers not only distorted Tito's real relations with Stalin in the period before 1948, they also over-emphasised his uniqueness and the uniqueness of the whole Yugoslav development. The Yugoslav pattern during the war was in all essentials identical with the pattern followed by the Albanians and the Greeks. Here, too, there were partisan peasant guerrillas. Here, too, there was a condition of civil war with the bourgeoisie in the Axis camp. Here, too, the liberation was accomplished by the partisans. In fact Albania was completely liberated by the partisans while in Yugoslavia the Red Army played at least a small role. 

The different courses taken by Greece and Albania were not at all due to any superiority of the Stalinists in one of these countries over the other. In fact a very good case can be made for the more revolutionary character of the Greek over the Yugoslav party. Greece was turned over to the imperialists as part of a deal made between Stalin and Churchill. Had the correlation of forces been more disadvantageous to the Kremlin than it was at the time who could doubt but that Yugoslavia might also have been turned over? If that had been the case can there be any question but that Tito would have reacted much as the Greek Stalinists reacted? 

Albania makes the same point in still another way. Small, primitive Albania went through in microcosm the identical development that Yugoslavia did. It formed the bourgeois coalition government in much the same way and this coalition broke up in much the same way. It carried through the structural transformation at an early date as did Yugoslavia. At no time did the Red Army ever enter Albania. Up to 1948 there was no ground whatsoever for viewing Hoxha as any more or less a Stalinist as Tito. In the period prior to the Yugoslav break, Djilas has recently revealed, Stalin played with the idea of encouraging Yugoslavia to absorb Albania. In order to preserve Albania from this fate, when Stalin broke with Yugoslavia, Albania became avidly Stalinist. Today, when Yugoslavia is being brought back into the Stalinist camp, Albania suddenly discovers its "Leninist" orthodoxy and seeks an ally in China. Little Albania did not fit into our myth makers' preconception so this incongruous piece of the jigsaw puzzle was quietly dropped to the floor. Who would miss such a small country? Strange as it may seem nobody did miss it. 

The outbreak of the Tito-Stalin dispute in 1948 and 1949 was of course an event of extreme importance both for the future evolution of Yugoslavia and as a precursor for a process of splinterings in the Soviet bloc as a whole which has become so apparent today. An understanding of the real causes for this split is essential in an understanding of Yugoslavia.

It is extremely important to note that this conflict began as a conflict between the bureaucracy of the USSR and that of Yugoslavia. There is no evidence whatsoever of pressure from the masses playing any role of significance at the beginning of this process. (11) The conflict was essentially over the closely related issues of Stalin's attempts to economically take advantage of Yugoslavia as he had done in the rest of the buffer and the Yugoslavs' desire to maintain some real authority for its own bureaucracy. Thus the disputed questions first centered around such issues as: the various joint USSR-Yugoslav enterprises, trade relations between the two countries, questions of control over the Yugoslav army and its relationship to the military establishment in the USSR, relations of Yugoslavia with other buffer countries, etc.

This conflict began in a period when the USSR was seeking to consolidate the buffer as a whole on a social basis compatible with the USSR. Thus Stalin feared deeply that any tendencies towards resistance to USSR influence over the buffer as a whole would soon be internal opposition - that is opposition within the Soviet system as a whole on a worldwide basis. Such internal opposition is intolerable to the very totalitarian structure of the degenerated workers' state.

The USSR did nothing in Yugoslavia different essentially from what it did in the other buffer countries. What was unique was the ability of the Yugoslavs to resist the domination of the Soviet Union as a country over it. Furthermore, while only the Yugoslavs successfully resisted Stalin, Titoism as a trend of resistance within the bureaucracy to such domination existed in all the buffer country CPs. Thus Yugoslavia differed from the rest of the buffer essentially in its ability to resist successfully. 

Yugoslavia's bureaucracy was able to resist successfully because it had already consolidated its power through the process of structural assimilation some two years before the rest of the buffer. In addition the Yugoslav bureaucracy had been fashioned through a combined process of partisan military operations and governmental rule over large sections of Yugoslavia for several years prior to the establishment of its rule over all of Yugoslavia.

Following the break with the Kremlin the YCP did begin a partial controlled mobilization of the Yugoslav masses from on top. (12) The break with the Kremlin severely weakened the bureaucracy and in order to seek new bases of support in an extremely difficult period it was thus forced to make a limited left turn as far as its internal policies were concerned. However, while conducting thus a more radical line internally, externally it initiated a rightward course of conciliation with world imperialism. This course led it to actually support the imperialist side of the Korean conflict. 

Thus Yugoslavia exhibited a unique form of bonapartist rule. The bureaucracy in part rested itself on the masses to which it made real, but very limited concessions. The most important of these was its system of limited local control through workers' councils. However, it did not give up its real power to these councils as is amply illustrated today when Krushchev himself endorsed these. 

The bureaucracy also in part rested on world imperialism which extended to Yugoslavia important economic aid and with which it carried on the bulk of its trade. But, contrary to the predictions of the Kremlin, it never went fully over to capitalism.  

And finally, and this has been understood the least, the Yugoslav leadership also rested in part on the USSR. There can be not the slightest doubt that the ability of Yugoslavia to survive in the absence of the existence of the USSR was out of the question. Only the possibility that Yugoslavia might return to the Soviet Bloc should the imperialists play rough with it, prevented imperialism from so acting. Its main aim, in any event, in relation to Yugoslavia was to encourage a process of splintering and disintegration in the Soviet Bloc as a whole rather than any particular immediate gain in Yugoslavia per se. Thus the imperialists have not acted sharply to the return of Yugoslavia to closer relations with the USSR. The imperialists undoubtedly correctly feel such a development will bolster that section of the Stalinist bureaucracy internationally which is willing to work with the West - for the West’s aims. 

Finally we must reemphasise that the creation of the basic social structure of Yugoslavia took place prior to the break with the USSR. The bureaucracy which ruled Yugoslavia at the end of the war, rules Yugoslavia today. At no time in this entire post-war period was there the slightest evidence of any serious dismantling of this bureaucracy. The fundamental social structure of Yugoslavia has remained constant from 1946 to 1963 and in its essence is identical to that existing in the USSR"today. Yugoslavia, while being a definite independent factor within the world Stalinist system, never fully broke out of that system. So today it carries through its rapprochement with Krushchev without any internal strains whatsoever and in fact with the seeming blessing of the West. 

We can therefore see that Yugoslavia broke from the Kremlin for the same reasons that Albania solidarised itself with the Kremlin. Albania today breaks from the USSR largely because the break between Yugoslavia and the USSR was not defInitive. 

The Theory of Yugoslav Development

It is our conviction that the attempt to impose upon Yugoslav developments the pattern of October - even in a distorted form - leads only to a distortion of actual development. The essential distortion is to telescope into one continuous period the early partisan struggle when indeed the yep was under considerable mass pressure, and the period following the split with the USSR when again the YCP did mobilize, from on top, the masses - leaving out the critically important 1944-48 period which is so difficult to fit into the preconceived pattern of these empiricists. 

However, it was precisely at the height of the mass upsurge in 1944-45 that the yep formed a coalition government with Subasich. It was during this period that the state structure, which had been destroyed by years of occupation and civil war, was rebuilt on a bourgeois model. All in our movement recognize that the actual social transformation took place after the breakup of this coalition government in 1945. Thus no one claims that the state which first emerged from civil war struggle was a workers' state. Thus the workers' state was created in Yugoslavia, during the period of the receding of the mass movement, and by the same essential means as in the rest of the buffer - by administrative means. 

What then was truly unique in Yugoslav development? Little if anything remained of the old state structure in 1944 and thus the state needed to be rebuilt almost from scratch. But this was essentially the case in Poland; and China, whose evolution was to be seen as so closely following Yugoslavia, had far more extensive remnants of the old state structure than either Poland or Yugoslavia. The Red Army while playing a minor role in liberation, immediately withdrew and played no direct role in the social overturn. But the Red Army never entered Albania and, even more interesting, the Red Army had completely withdrawn from Czechoslovakia at the time of the coup there and the social transformation that was to follow. No, the presence of the Red Army is an oversimplified explanation of structural assimilation.

Essentially, there was nothing peculiar to Yugoslav development other than a particular combination of (a) an almost complete absence of a viable capitalist class; (b) the existence in the early period of a powerful mass movement primarily peasant in nature; and (c) the existence from almost the beginning of a more cohesive and self-confident bureaucracy. (a) and (b) meant that the "bourgeois" stage in Yugoslavia was of shorter duration and more superficial and (c) allowed for the structural assimilation of the country at an earlier date than in the rest of the buffer. Both the existence of a more stable bureaucracy to begin with and the early structural assimilation of the country put the YCP leaders into a position where they were able to resist the deeply chauvinist aspect of the Kremlin policy in this period - an aspect which hurt the interests of the national bureaucracy in Yugoslavia itself. 

Once the buffer in general is really understood there are no theoretical problems connected with Yugoslav developments in particular. The basic point is to recognize the nature of the domestic CPs as essentially an extension of the Soviet bureaucracy itself. Once this is recognized then social transformations of a more "indigenous" character like that in Yugoslavia can be comprehended. Yugoslavia differed only in degree in this respect - this was not a qualitative difference. 

The split of Yugoslavia with the USSR and its current rapprochement can only be understood when one recognizes that this split was not definitive - that Yugoslavia never fundamentally left the Soviet camp. It always relied in part on the existence of its immediate enemy - the USSR. 

We must reject the attempt to impose the October pattern on Yugoslav developments in even a distorted form not only because the theoretical conclusions that must be drawn from such an application are repugnant to us but also because this simply cannot be done without distorting reality itself. We are forced to apply the theory of structural assimilation to Yugoslavia not simply to "solve" a theoretical problem, but because only such a theory can explain the real evolution of Yugoslavia. We remain Marxists not for dogma sake but because only Marxism can explain reality - past, present and future.

FOOTNOTES - PART V. 

1. For the best rounded exposition of this thesis see: Weiss, Murry. "Report on Yugoslavia", Op cit. 

2. Wright, John G. "Memorandum on Yugoslavia" Internal Bulletin, Vol. 12, No. 3, October, 1950. 

3. Germain, Ernest. "What Should be ... " Op cit.  

4. Daniels, Op cit. p. 134. 

5. Germain, Ernest. "The Yugoslav Question ... :' Op cit.  pp. 6-7. 

6. Ibid. p. 8. 

7. Brzezinski, Op cit.  p. 39. 

8. Hoffman, George W. and Fred Warner Neal. Yugoslavia and the New Communism (20th Century Fund, New York, 1962) p. 81. 

9. Brzezinski, Op cit.  p. 38. 

10. Hoffman et al. Op cit. p. 81. 

11. Some bourgeois commentators have tried to view the conflict as essentially rooted in a conflict over peasant policy. Of course there is no doubt that the Yugoslavs sought a slower pace of collectivisation than the USSR advocated. Also the peasants certainly had some influence on the YCP as it is estimated that over half its members were peasants in 1945. But this was also a factor in other countries of the buffer, most especially Poland. It is doubtful if the theorists of "mass pressure" on the YCP were thinking of peasant pressure against collectivisation - in any event. 

12. Germain, who at the beginning, anyway, was more sensitive to actual developments in Yugoslavia - as his own theory of the capitalist nature of Yugoslavia collapsed - sought briefly to maintain that the proletarian revolution took place at this time after the split. While such a theory could maintain an October-like pattern for Yugoslavia it had no relation to reality so he soon gave it up. See: "Draft Resolutions on the Development of the Yugoslav Revolution." International Information Bulletin, September 1950. 

PART VI: STRUCTURAL ASSIMILATION IN ASIA

China and the Yugoslav Pattern

By the time the social transformation of China began in earnest, the Fourth International was split into two groups, the International Secretariat led by Michel Pablo and the International Committee inspired by the SWP. The discussion of the Chinese question was thus, for the most part, conducted separately in the two international organizations. However, it would be a mistake to interpret this as meaning the theoretical analyses that both forces evolved were unrelated. As the IC comrades never seriously reexamined the analysis the Fourth International as a whole had made of Yugoslavia, these comrades could not fully break out of the Pabloite methodological approach in their analysis of China. 

Let us first look at how the Pabloites themselves analyzed China. The resolution of their "Fourth World Congress" (1954), states: 

"In large parts of China, notably in most of the provinces south of the Yangtze, the Mao Tse-tung government has purely and simply taken over on its own account the old central administrations of the Kuomintang, including the very governors themselves. Only the armed power has been completely recast and represents an armed power with a different social character. State administration here has remained on the whole what it was before. Moreover, this involves the richest provinces in China, containing the centre of light industry and of the bourgeoisie. The latter's representatives in the central government, even though they do not wield much power on the national level, represent useful observers for their class and are preparing positions for retaking power 'bit by bit', as Chen Po-ta has said. "(21) 

While much of industry was taken over in the period immediately following the coming to power because it had been deserted by the bourgeoisie, there remained substantial bourgeois holdings throughout the country. Mao himself proclaimed in 1949: "Our policy is to restrict capitalism and not to eliminate it ... " (22) The importance of these capitalist holdings can only be understood within the framework of the existence of a bourgeois state apparatus over large sections of China and the CCP's policy of rule through a coalition government, even if the bourgeois representatives within this coalition were quite weak. It was thus in the interconnection of these various levels of bourgeois influence that the bourgeoisie continued to have influence in China in this period. Germain also noted this: "It is solely in the special conditions of this state apparatus that the bourgeois property which survives takes on exceptional significance. For in this way it allows the bourgeoisie simultaneously to exert control from within, and to disintegrate and corrupt from without .. " (23) It should be remembered that Germain is writing in 1952, almost three years after the coming to power of the CCP. 

The 1949 Revolution thus produced a highly emaciated form of bourgeois rule (shall we say "phantom' or "ghost-like" rule?) The bourgeoisie maintained influence through large sections of the old state apparatus which were untouched, through continued existence of capitalist economic holdings, and through the form of a coalition government pledged to go no further than the "democratic stage." At the same time the main power in China was the CCP and the CCP was not a bourgeois party as it had roots in other than the national bourgeois class of China. Thus the instability and weakness of bourgeois power in China in the period from 1949 to 1952. Not only Germain, but even Pablo was not quite ready to call China a workers' state in the middle of 1952. The SWP was to wait two more years. 

In the discussions held in our movement in 1952 only Peng was to project as a possible future development for China what he called its "East Europeanisation." After first dealing with the two basic alternatives for China of capitalist counterrevolution or genuine proletarian revolution, Peng poses a "third" way: 

"The two perspectives set forth above deal with only the most fundamental outcomes of the possible eventual developments in the Chinese situation. But, in view of the opportunist bureaucratic deformations of the CCP leadership and its present intimate relations with the Kremlin, these two perspectives will meet frantic resistance since either one of them would be fatal for this leadership. Consequently, it will consciously or unconsciously choose a third road - the road of gradual assimilation into the Soviet Union. That is to say, under the ever-increasing menace from bourgeois reactionary forces allied with imperialism and the ever-growing dissatisfaction and pressure of the masses, on the one hand, the CCP would empirically exclude by gradual steps the bourgeois parties and cliques from the political field. Through operations of 'purge' and 'fusion', it would annihilate these factions and the 'Coalition Government', and form a 'one-party dictatorship' in name and in content, which would conform to the so-called 'transformation from peoples' democratic dictatorship to proletarian dictatorship.' 

On the economic plane, it would carry out a gradual expropriation of bourgeois private properties, the expansion of nationalised properties, in keeping with the so-called 'ascension from the economy of the New Democracy towards the socialist economy.' On the other hand, while executing these political and economic measures, the CCP would make certain concessions to the pressure of the masses in order to utilise them as a weapon to suppress reactionary influences. But it would never basically loosen its rigorous bureaucratic grip upon the revolutionary activities of the masses, especially of workers and poor peasants, lest they pass over the permitted boundaries or interfere with its basic line. 

This line may be called 'the line of East-Europeanisation'. But there exists an essential difference between the two processes: the 'assimilation' of the buffer states was accomplished entirely under military control of the Kremlin, and through its directly designated Stalinist bureaucrats in those countries. In China, due to the vastness of territory, the numerousness of the population, and the powerful influence of the CCP itself, in the absence of the Soviet Army, and especially taking into account the experience of the Yugoslav events, the Kremlin can rely only on its general superiority in economic and military force and its control over Manchuria and Sinkiang to threaten and exert pressure on the CCP. However, in appearance, it would still pay certain respects to the 'independence and sovereignty' of the regime of the CCP and allow it to proceed on its own 'initiative.' (24)

This is, of course, exactly what happened. Under the increased pressure of world imperialism expressed most directly in the Korean War and needing to stabilize its rule, the CCP began the process of structural assimilation in 1952. The bureaucracy ruling China had been formed many, many years earlier in the process of civil war and was therefore much more cohesive than its counterparts in Eastern Europe. Thus it moved more slowly, deliberately in carrying through the social transformation. The mass upsurge which accompanied the coming to power in 1949 was now ebbing and the control of the bureaucracy over the whole of the country was not seriously challenged - except externally and thus the significance of any internal agents of the external imperialist enemy. Slowly it purged any unreliable bourgeois elements out of the state apparatus, tamed its coalition partners to the point where they were only window dressing, tremendously increased the nationalized sector of the economy while keeping a few "national bourgeois" as mere window dressing, and carried through a brutal forced collectivisation programme. Even the CCP leadership itself did not see this process reaching the point of the establishment of the "proletarian dictatorship" until 1956. (25)

This was a period of the closest, most intimate relations between the CCP and the Kremlin. There is no evidence whatsoever of Kremlin disapproval of this course - in fact all evide"nce points to its full support and backing of the Chinese regime in this period. While the masses played a limited and controlled role in the process, by and large the transformation took place by bureaucratic and military means. Thus the main factor in the social overturn was the CCP and its bureaucracy. The nature of the CCP was therefore critical to the determination of the nature of the social process. 

The CCP emerged from 30 years of civil war appearing as if it was a peasant party. It was made up largely of peasants, ran a massive peasant army, had the support of the bulk of China's peasantry. But it was soon to show that it was not simply a peasant party. In the period when it was forced to move more and more on the road of structural assimilation it was also, interestingly enough, forced to take steps to change its own social compoJ)ition by stopping -recruitment from the peasantry and recruiting only workers. (27) It then carried through essential social tasks of the proletariat, tasks of an essentially urban social change remote and distant to the peasantry. Finally it forced through a collectivisation programme and at a later date a Commune programme both of which actually deeply alienated the great mass of the peasantry. In actual fact, throughout its entire history, as well as in the post-1949 period, time and again the CCP went counter to the aspirations of the peasantry and opposed land reform and land seizures - many times in a brutal, bureaucratic way. In every such case this action was dictated by the needs of the Kremlin which wanted a popular front regime in China. To the extent that the CCP was and is independent of domestic social classes, it is dependent upon - is essentially an extension of - the bureaucratic caste of the USSR, the distorted product of a workers' revolution. Only when this is understood can one understand the role the CCP played in the social transformation process which occurred in China from 1952 to 1956. 

We can therefore see that the process which took place in China several years after the coming to power of the CCP in 1949 was identical in every essential with the process which took place in the East European buffer including Yugoslavia. The social transformations took place not as a result of mass pressure nor in opposition to the wishes of the Kremlin. They took place essentially on the initiative of the CCP bureaucracy, from on top by military and bureaucratic methods, with the wholehearted cooperation of the Kremlin to fulfill not only the needs of the CCP bureaucrats for a relatively stable base, but also the needs of the Kremlin for a strategic buffer on the East. That extremely perceptive section of the SWP's 1955 resolution which refers to the basic contradictions of the Soviet Union being reproduced on Chinese soil can only be explained theoretically by the theory of structural assimilation. 

The Sino-Soviet Dispute

Perhaps the greatest "leap forward" on the theoretical plane is made by those who jump from the tactical differences Mao had with Stalin in 1947 to the current Sino-Soviet dispute and thus see the conflict as a product of Mao's purported differences with the Kremlin over whether or not to make a revolution in China. Missing is over ten years of the closest possible collaboration between the Mao leadership and the Kremlin - years in which the CCP carried through a successful drive for power, consolidated its regime, and socially transformed China.  

Not only did the CCP collaborate closely with the Kremlin during the struggle for power and the period of the structural assimilation of China, but it played a special role in defense of the Stalinist bureaucracy when it was first really seriously challenged by the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. It was the great weight of the Chinese leadership, with the prestige of victorious revolution behind it, that the USSR was forced to utilize to help build support throughout Eastern Europe for the crushing of the Hungarian workers' uprising. This ignoble effort must never be forgotten by the world working class for it shows both the real nature of Chinese Stalinism as well as the nature of its relations with the Kremlin in that critical period. 

No, the Sino-Soviet dispute was not brought about because the CCP was in any sense more revolutionary than the Russian CPo Its causes lie, like the Stalin-Tito dispute that came before it, in deep and important conflicts in national interests between the bureaucracy ruling the USSR and that ruling China. Only the completion of the social transformation gave the CCP a stable enough base to resist Kremlin pressure to subordinate Chinese development to its grandiose scheme of building "communism" in the USSR at the expense of the other bloc countries. As in the case of Yugoslavia, the solidification of a ruling bureaucracy over a long period of civil war prior to the actual social transformation also contributed to the ability of the Chinese to resist the pressure all Soviet bloc countries felt deeply. 

The real cause of the dispute fmds expression through two related issues which have come out into the open recently. The first is trade relations between China and the USSR. China claims, as Yugoslavia also claimed, that these relations were detrimental to China even though China needed economic development much more than the USSR because of the extremely low economic level of China at the time the CCP took power. The second issue is the conflict over the atomic bomb. In a world in which power and independence are very much wrapped in a country's ability to produce nuclear weapons, this is a question of no small import. Essentially, China has charged that the USSR reneged on its promises to help China develop a bomb of its own and instead sought to come to terms with US imperialism. There can be no doubt that this is the essential content of the recent nuclear test "ban". Atmospheric tests are precisely the kind of tests needed in the early stages of nuclear development. So the large powers, which already have a developed nuclear arsenal, agree to ban a test they no longer need knowing full well that a country like China does need such a test. Essentially then the dispute over nuclear weapons is a reflection of the USSR's desire to keep China in a subordinate international position and its willingness to collaborate with imperialism to achieve this aim. 

The treacherous position that the USSR is taking in the Sino-India border dispute is another reflection of this very same thing. The inability of the Chinese and Indians to reach agreement on this issue is essentially caused by the aggressiveness of India which has strong imperialist backing. Rather than defending China in this situation which directly endangers the social conquests of the Revolution, the USSR today is blaming China for the dispute. Not only that, it is also giving military aid to India including missiles and jets which can be used against the Chinese. It is such deep, concrete issues of conflicting national interest which separate these countries - not the ideological trappings of the contenders which make the impressionists so happy. 

One aspect of the ideological exchange does have some content. It is of considerable significance that China takes the side of Stalin in this dispute. Stalin is looked upon as a great Marxist who is to be emulated and the period of Sino-Soviet relations under Stalin is defended, praised. In this respect the recent charge of the Chinese that it was the CCP which urged wavering Khrushchev to carry through the second intervention which crushed the Hungarian workers is extremely important. Such is the way the CCP "ceased to be Stalinist." It should be amply clear that the CCP in no sense is breaking from Stalinism in the course of this dispute. 

It is of some theoretical interest that the latest Soviet bloc state to come into conflict with the USSR is Romania. Romania is resisting attempts of the USSR to keep it in a subordinate economic position within the Comecon as a supplier of agricultural products. It seeks rather to push forward an autarchic industrial development. Clearly Romania is motivated here by a fear that without serious industrial development it will be economically dominated by other members of the Comecon and by the USSR especially. (Of course on purely economic grounds such autarchic development would be harmful to the development of the East European region.)

Thus the basis for Romania's conflict with the USSR is also largely a question of national conflict just as much so as was the case with Yugoslavia, Albania, and China. Romania, however, was purely the creation of the USSR's domination over Eastern Europe and does not have the more indigenous roots that these other countries (that is, their regimes) have. This verifies our assessment as to the real significance of the unique features of the evolution of these countries. The guerrilla war background of these regimes produced a more solidified bureaucracy more capable of resisting the Kremlin. But this was not a qualitative difference with the rest of the countries that were structurally assimilated. Today, as the bureaucracies of all these countries have had a number of years to develop, this difference in background becomes less and less important. 

Fundamentally we must see this process, which has been perhaps a bit too impressionistically called "the fracturing of the monolith" as a reflection of the fundamental contradictions of Stalinism itself. The USSR has sought to build a strategic buffer on its Eastern and Western borders as a defensive measure against world imperialism. In order to secure this buffer against imperialism, the USSR found it necessary to carry through a social transformation in all these countries, utilizing the local Communist Parties as its instrument. To the extent that these CPs were successful in carrying through this transformation, and thus developing an at least partially independent base of their own, these bureaucracies found they had interests different from and partially in contradiction to the USSR. Thus, to the extent that the USSR expanded itself into new areas, conflict within the resultant Soviet bloc as a whole grew. This is the clearest sign of all that the USSR is not really an expansionist power for to the extent that the Stalinist system extends itself its internal contradictions are aggravated. These contradictions developed not after a long and relatively peaceful rule of Stalinism over its expanding territory but rather as a direct product of the very process of extension itself.

However, despite their deep differences, all these states are also dependent on each other and on the USSR in particular for their survival in a capitalist-dominated world. These conflicts thus remain essentially within the Soviet bloc. For one of these countries to fully pull out of the bloc opens the door to either capitalist restoration or political revolution, both of which spell death to the bureaucracy. This is shown most clearly by the evolution of the most independent state of them all, Yugoslavia.  

The Structural Assimilation of Tibet, North Korea and North Vietnam

The current SWP resolution on China states, in a section on the unfolding of the permanent revolution in China: "The triumphant revolution has tended to extend into the neighboring lands of Tibet, North Vietnam and North Korea ...... " (27) While such a concept raises no insurmountable theoretical problems, we are afraid it is just plain inaccurate (quite in character with the level of theoretical work the SWP is now producing.) The role of Stalinism in the rest of Asia has not been as simple as that. 

The social overturn in Tibet, was, of course, essentially the product of the social overturn in China itself. But Tibet, the Chinese will be the first to make clear, has not historically been considered a "neighboring land" but rather a part of China. Furthermore, the Tibetan overturn was not the product of some impetus China gave to revolutionary forces in Asia. It was in fact the product of the process of structural assimilation once again - this time in its strictest "classic" pre-World War II form. 

An Indian Trotskyist by the name of Kalyan Gupta, points this out in his excellent little pamphlet on the Sino-Indian border dispute. For many years the CCP carried on a policy of peaceful coexistence with the deeply reactionary feudalistic ruling Lama caste of Tibet. As long as the Tibetan monks accepted Chinese domination there were no problems. The Chinese actually bolstered this reactionary force and did little or nothing for the extremely oppressed Tibetan serfs.

However, in the long run such "peaceful co-existence" did not work out. Even though the Chinese leaders did not wish it, the social overturn in China as a whole had an undermining effect on feudal rule even in isolated Tibet. Thus the Tibetan feudal lords finally went into rebellion as a desperate effort to preserve an antiquated social order from erosion. This rebellion opened up Tibet to possible imperialist domination for certainly the monks could not stand alone without external aid. If Tibet were to fall under imperialist domination, the whole vast Southwestern "underbelly" of China would lay exposed and the strategically important Himalaya "buffer" with India would be no more. So, as Gupta notes, "this attempt was crushed by the Peking bureaucracy not with the help of Tibetan serfs but mainly by military means. Later on, they have sought to broaden their social base by organizing the serfs ..... With the onslaught on the feudal structure, the process of the structural assimilation of Tibet into the new Chinese social order (that is, Sovietisation) has also set in." (28) 

The Tibetan experience in 1959 once again shows both how the process of structural assimilation works and also the impossibility of a workers' state coexisting internally with another form of class rule. Rather than being an extension of the Chinese Revolution they represent the final consolidation of all of China by the Peking regime in a second, separate process of structural assimilation. 

The social transformation of North Korea has simply nothing to do whatsoever with the victory of the Chinese revolution. North Korea was occupied by Soviet troops right at the end of the war. It was transformed in an identical way as the East European states with the presence of Soviet troops. Even the Pabloites recognize this. In their 1954 general resolution on Stalinism, they refer to "states produced by the expansionism of the Soviet bureaucracy, the occupation of these countries and their structural assimilation with the Soviet Union by military-bureaucratic means, supported in certain instances by a limited mobilisation of the masses." We are informed that "this is the case in the European buffer zone and in the case of the People's Republic of North Korea (where, incidentally, the mobilisation of the masses was on a larger scale.)" (29) 

Thus the structural assimilation of North Korea was the product of the extension of the USSR's army directly into Asia and not a by-product of the Chinese Revolution. Chinese influence in North Korea dates from its intervention in 1950 on the side of North Korea in the Korean War - some time after the structural assimilation took place. As late as 1959 China had 600,000 troops in North Korea which may help to explain its support for China in the present Sino-Soviet dispute. 

North Vietnam's evolution was closer to that of China than was the evolution of North Korea. However, it paralleled Chinese development rather than being a simple extension of the Chinese Revolution. That is, Ho Chi Minh and the Stalinist leadership of the Vietminh stood in the same relationship to the USSR as did Mao and the CCP. It was the USSR (and to some extent the French CP, the most Stalinist of all the West European Communist Parties) which was the central influence on the Vietnamese Stalinists during their struggle for power and their consolidation of power in a section of the former French Indo-China. That is, the Vietnamese Stalinist movement was an extension of the USSR bureaucracy directly - not an extension of the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy.

As Vietnamese developments followed closely, in parallel, the Chinese developments by a few years, there is no need to go into them here as they raise no new theoretical problems. However, there is one aspect of Vietnamese development which needs some brief comment. The political developments within Indochina since the end of World War II show clearly how detrimental to revolution international Stalinism can be. In the wake of World War II, the Vietminh had complete control of all of French Indochina. The Japanese had surrendered to them and there was no need for any other troops. However, with the prior agreement of the Kremlin, British troops landed and quickly took over the whole country without meeting any resistance from the Vietminh. Then, after a brief period, the British turned the territory over to French troops. This is how French imperialism regained control of the whole of Indochina. 

The French then turned to a brutal repression of the Vietminh who fled to the interior. With the beginning of the cold war and the turn in Kremlin policy in 1947, the Vietminh began a serious offensive. This is how the bloody seven year Indochinese war began. 

Following the shattering defeat of French forces at Dienbienphu in 1954, it was clear that the Vietminh was sweeping the country. French control was restricted only to a couple of cities. With this victory as background the 1954 Geneva Conference took place at the initiative of the USSR. Under pressure from the USSR, and with China's support, the Vietminh settled for an agreement which, in effect, left it only the top half of Vietnam with the imperialists still in control of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. 

Several years later, after the break-up of the coalition government in Laos - totally the fault of the right wing militarists - the Pathet Lao civil war led to a similar situation where the Pathet Lao controlled virtually all of Laos. Once· again an international settlement was arrived at and this time the whole of Laos was to remain in the bourgeois orbit as a "neutralist" country. 

Today the Stalinists are pushing for a similar solution of the civil war in South Vietnam where the Vietcong is gaining day by day. De Gaulle even suggests a “neutralist" regime for all of Vietnam, north and south, and it is understood that Ho Chi Minh is encouraging this initiative of De Gaulle's. However this all works out eventually, Stalinist policy has led to a situation in which, despite the heroic efforts of the mass of Indochinese people, the bulk of Indochina remains under bourgeois domination. Not much of a showcase for Stalinism as an "expansionist" force.  

The Indochinese experience raises a very interesting theoretical question. Since the kind of movements in China and Indochina were so similar, and since both were engaged in real civil war in which the mass of the peasants supported a Stalinist-led movement - why did their final evolution diverge so much? Why is it that most of Indochina was lost and all of China transformed? Certainly Ho Chi Minh is as effective a leader as Mao Tse-tung and the heroism of the masses was as great in both countries. No, the only essential difference was the external one - the different places these countries occupied in the conflicting relations between the USSR and the imperialists. China, sharing an immense border with the USSR, was directly of great strategic value to the USSR. Also, being an independent country, direct imperialist intervention was at least a bit difficult. Indochina was of no direct strategic value to the USSR itself. Thus China was to be preserved as a great strategic buffer to the East for the USSR while Indochina was to be buffeted about at international bargaining tables which were to decide, despite the heroic efforts of the Indochinese peoples, where the line was to be drawn between Soviet and imperialist spheres of interests. But for a somewhat different relationship of forces in the immediate postwar period China, itself, could have suffered Indochina's fate - regardless of the efforts of the great masses of the Chinese people. 

The Overall Role of Stalinism in Asia

The Chinese Revolution was a great historic event. It shows once and for all that the capitalist system is doomed, that capitalism has no real future. The overthrow of capitalism in such an immense country should have had a deep revolutionary impact on all of Asia - and the rest of the world as well. It should have had the kind of impact on the world working class that the Russian Revolution had - in fact, since the Russian workers' state survives and further has been extended into a large part of Europe, it should have had an even bigger impact than the October Revolution.

The Chinese Revolution did have an impact in Asia but it was not qualitatively of the same character as the impact of October. On its own it did not lead to the extension of the revolution to any other Asiatic country, not to mention the rest of the world. The social overturn in North Korea was carried through by the USSR as a direct result of its military occupation following World War II. The social overturn in Tibet, considered by all powers to be a part of China and not external to it, was postponed for a decade and then carried through because the revolt of the Tibetan monks left the CCP no alternative. In Indochina the whole of the region was controlled by the Vietminh prior to the beginning of the 1947 CCP offensive. What the Vietminh was to later regain, it got because of its own independent struggle over seven bloody years and much of this was compromised at Geneva with the support of the Chinese.   

The situation in the rest of Asia was even worse. Everywhere the Stalinist parties abandoned a revolutionary course and supported the national bourgeoisie as long as that bourgeoisie would favor "peaceful coexistence" with the Soviet bloc countries. This was the story in such important Asian countries as India, Japan and Indonesia. 

It is a gross distortion of reality· to attempt today to shift the responsibility for this counterrevolutionary policy of Stalinism in Asia solely to the USSR. The Chinese leadership was even more responsible because the prestige of its 1949 victory carried such great weight in all of Asia. The line of the Chinese CP was one of peaceful coexistence with a vengeance throughout all of Asia for a solid decade. The basic policy of the CCP in Asia was forged first through the famous "Panch Sheel" agreement between China and India in 1954 which proclaimed the "five principles of peaceful coexistence". This policy played an important role in bolstering the bourgeois regime of Nehru in India - the regime which today has stabbed China in the back. This policy of collaboration with the national bourgeoisie was then broadened to include most of Asia at the Bandung Conference of 1955. Even today, when the Maoists take a pseudo-left stand against the Kremlin, the Chinese continue to endorse the policy of the Indonesian and Japanese Communist Parties. These two parties openly defend a bourgeois course for their countries.

Despite the enormity of the Chinese Revolution, this revolution did not extend itself elsewhere in Asia. While the Stalinist leadership of both the USSR and of the CCP favored the military victory of 1949 in China and the structural assimilation which took place later, neither sought to extend the revolution throughout the rest of Asia. The Chinese experience as well as the East European experience, can only be understood through a recognition of the highly contradictory nature of Stalinism. The degenerated workers' state, which emanated from the October Revolution, has extended itself through its agents into large contiguous areas surrounding the USSR - a process we call defensive expansionism - while at the same time opposing throughout the rest of the world social overturn through genuine proletarian revolution. 

FOOTNOTES - PART VI 

1. "The Rise and Decline of Stalinism", Fourth International, No. 1 (Winter 1958) p. 45. 

2. lbid. p. 46. 

3. lbid. p. 46. 

4. Ibid. p. 48. 

5. Discussion Bulletin A-31, (October, 1955). 

6. lbid. pp. 10-11. 

7. Weiss, Murry, "Trotskyism Today", International Socialist Review Vol. 21, No.4 (Fall 1960) p. 110. 

8. lbid. p. 110. 

9. "The SWP Position on China - PC Draft Resolution", Discussion Bulletin Vol. 24, No. 19 (June 1963) p. 4. 

10. Daniels, op. cit. p. 304 

11. Daniels, op. cit. p. 319. 

12. Peng, S.T. "Report on the Chinese Situation", International Information Bulletin (February, 1952). While Peng understood China very well, he accepted unquestioningly the analysis of the International on Yugoslavia. Much of his argumentation was devoted to showing how what was in reality a myth of Yugoslav development would not work as a model for Chinese developments. He did not realize that the reality of Yugoslav development could serve as such a model. It should also be noted that Peng interjected his position on the relation of the CCP to mass pressure and to the Kremlin into the SWP discussion on China in 1961, but its theoretical significance went generally unnoticed. See: Peng, S.T., "On the Nature of the Chinese Communist Party and its Regime - Political Revolution or Democratic Reform", Discussion Bulletin Vol. 22, No.4 (March, 1961). 

13. Ibid. pp. 12-l3. 

14. Ibid. p. 13. 

15. Ibid. p. 13. 

16. Ibid. p. 15. 

17. Djilas, op. cit. p. 182. 

18. Peng, op. cit. p. 8. 

19. Ibid. pp. 8-9. 

20. Fu-jen, Li. "The Kuomintang Faces its Doom", Fourth International, (February, 1949).

21. Germain, Ernest. "Report on the Chinese Question." International Information Bulletin (December 1952), p. 15. 

22. Daniels, op.cit. p. 329. 

23. Germain, op. cit. p. 15. 

24. Peng, op. cit. pp. 42-43. 

25. See: "Liu Shao-chi on the Transition to Socialism" in Daniels, op. cit. pp. 352-356. This report was made in September of 1956. 

26. In 1952 there was an important controversy over this question of the class character of the CCP. Peng claimed the CCP was a peasant party while Germain and others insisted it had a working class character because of its adherence to the USSR. During the period of this dispute the CCP made an important tum towards recruitment of workers. Peng, in time, was forced to modify his position. See in particular: Germain, op. cit. pp. 8-11. 

27. "The SWP Position on China", op. cit. p. 7. 

28. Gupta, Kalyan. Sino-Indian Border Dispute (Bijoy madhab Mallick, Calcutta, 1959) pp. 8-9. 

29. "The Rise and Decline of Stalinism", op. cit. pp. 44-45. 

PART VII - THE LIMITS OF STRUCTURAL ASSIMILATION 

Other Theoretical Variants

In the course of this project we have dealt primarily with the major theoretical and political challenge of Pabloite revisionism within our movement. We have shown that Pabloism not only is deeply liquidationist in its political conclusions, but is based on a complete distortion of reality - the product of a false, non-dialectical method. 'There are other theoretical variants, as much departures from the Marxist method as Pabloism, which have gained currency in and around our movement over the years. It is of particular importance that we deal with these theories as well, for these theories feed on the weaknesses of Pabloism. To reject Pabloism only to make a symmetrical error in the opposite direction would get us no closer to a working class line. As we will see, these theories also do not stand up to the test of real events. 

Bureaucratic Collectivism: The theoretical and political logic of bureaucratic collectivism is abhorrent to all revolutionaries. By recognizing bureaucratic rule in the USSR as a new class  system, the logic of bureaucratic collectivism is to supplant the role of the working class by the new bureaucratic class leaving to us only the task of defending the slaves in the future totalitarian system. 

Certainly no working class movement can be built on the basis of this kind of perspective and the Shachtmanites found it impossible to build even a small, primarily petty bourgeois sect. But we can no more reject bureaucratic collectivism because we find its political conclusions abhorrent than we could reject Pabloism simply for the same reason. We must put bureaucratic collectivism to the real test of objective events.

The expansion of Stalinism into East Europe and later China in the postwar period seemed to many a superficial thinker to be a confirmation of the Shachtmanite outlook. The new bureaucratic class seemed to be expanding its totalitarian grip over a large part of the world. The wave of the future was upon us and perhaps all we could do was rally to the defense of Western "democracy" or give up politics entirely and devote ourselves to the comfortable existence so easily available to the petty bourgeoisie in that period in the United States. 

However, when one looks at the post war period as a totality the theory of bureaucratic collectivism makes no sense whatsoever. It can be defended only by a subjective reaction to an impression of one aspect of postwar events - the expansion of Stalinism. Beginning in the isolated slave labour camps like Vorkuta in Siberia, spreading to the East German workers in 1953 and finally blossoming out in the armed uprising of the workers in Hungary and Poland, another aspect of postwar development was to show itself indelibly clear. Stalinism, after less than three decades of rule in the USSR and less than a decade of rule in Eastern Europe, was to find itself in a mortal conflict which almost brought its downfall. Whatever future it still may have, these events make it clear that this future will be short, the days of the rule of the bureaucracy are numbered. 

Stalinism thus has shown itself to be a transitional stage in historical development rather than a new class society with a period of serious growth and development ahead of it before its contradictions begin to come to the fore. Any theory which does not express the transitional, temporary, conjunctural character of Stalinism must be rejected outright. Bureaucratic collectivism can do this only by making a mockery out of the Marxist concept of class rule and class society. "Ruling class" becomes transformed into a political judgment or just a plain swear word rather than a scientific designation for the role a group of people plays in a fundamentally new type of organization of production. 

Other aspects of the role of Stalinism likewise conflict with bureaucratic collectivist theory. If the bureaucracy is, in reality, a new ruling class based on a new and superior way of organizing production different from both capitalism and socialism, then we must expect to see the bureaucracy as a social class, developing from within the capitalist system itself much as the working class has developed. It was this concept that Burnham had in mind in his "Managerial Revolution" thesis and only in this form is bureaucratic collectivism a consistent theory. But Stalinism did not expand in the postwar world on this basis. It did not grow out of the managerial strata of capitalist society at all. Rather it extended itself from the USSR. Thus the identity of Stalinism with the USSR - its extension through its own agents and in opposition to all strata of the countries in which the transformation took place - cannot be explained through the theory of bureaucratic collectivism. Whatever Stalinism is, it essentially emanates from the USSR and is not an independent social force produced from within capitalist society itself.

A third aspect of the role of Stalinism is totally inexplicable within the framework of bureaucratic collectivism. While the bureaucratic collectivists have little trouble explaining the totalitarian aspect of Stalinist functioning, the role of Stalinism in collaborating with capitalism - that is, its counterrevolutionary role in revolutionary situations - is totally inexplicable from this point of view. The major role of Stalinism in the postwar world has not been to act as an independent class force seeking power in its own right. Rather, it has acted as a conservative force within the working class seeking to prevent any revolutionary change. Only a theory which recognizes in Stalinism a conservative, reactionary element within a progressive world force can understand the contradictory role of Stalinism in the postwar period. 

State Capitalism: The theory of state capitalism is essentially an attempt to answer a theoretical problem raised by bureaucratic collectivism. Its essential role in our movement has been that of a sort of theoretical rebellion from bureaucratic collectivism by people who find the orthodox theory unacceptable. It shares with bureaucratic collectivism a refusal to recognize any state as having a working class character as long as the working class does not have direct control over the state. This aspect of state capitalist theory is usually accepted as an axiomatic, a priori "given" and thus argumentation on this level is always fruitless. 

The state capitalist rebels against the theoretical conclusions of bureaucratic collectivism which he correctly feels destroys the role of the proletariat as much as does Pabloite theory. By seeing Stalinist society as nothing more than a variant form of capitalist rule, the state capitalist preserves the role of the proletariat as the revolutionary force in modern society. The retrogressive counter-revolutionary aspects of Stalinism are, of course, understandable within this theoretical framework. 

It is when this theory confronts the reality of the total role of Stalinism in the actual world that the trouble starts. For instance, as soon as one seeks to explain the actual role Stalinism played in Eastern Europe and in China in the postwar period state capitalism falls down. As we have shown in detail, Stalinism in order to preserve the buffer to the West and East from imperialist domination, was forced to carry through a fundamental transformation of society in these countries which in the process literally obliterated the capitalist class as well as private property.

The only way state capitalism can explain these events is by going over in actuality to that theory the state capitalist so strongly rejects - bureaucratic collectivism. The state capitalist is forced to see in state capital a deep antagonism to private capital - to recognize in fact, if not in words, a qualitative difference between the two. Once this step is taken the differences between state capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism are purely terminological and of no political import. 

State capitalism shares with bureaucratic collectivism an inability to explain precisely why Stalinism as an international development is so closely related to the Soviet Union. If state capitalism is to make any theoretical sense at all it must be seen as a tendency inherent in capitalism itself, not as something emanating from the USSR. The Stalinists must be viewed as agents of state capital. But this is absurd, for these parties have no real ties with state capital developments within their own capitalist countries - their essential identity flows from their role as agents of the Soviet bureaucracy. To explain this "peculiarity" one must, once again, transform one's theory in essence into a variant of bureaucratic collectivism. 

Once Again on the Process of Structural Assimilation

A perennial problem which has plagued every discussion the movement has had on these postwar overturns is that of dating when the overturn took place. For instance, the date when Yugoslavia became a workers' state was variously placed: in 1944 when the Partisan armies achieved essential control of the country; in 1946-47 when the coalition government was broken up and the nationalizations completed; in 1949-50 when the YCP took a limited left tum in its struggle with the Kremlin. The Marcyites dated the social overturn in China with the coming to power of the CCP in 1949; many in the International chose 1952-53; th~ SWP waited until 1955 to declare it a workers' state; the CCP itself tended to date the overturn a little later than the SWP. A similar problem of "dating" plagued the Cuban discussion.

The problem of dating, like the problem of the destruction of the bourgeois state through "fusion and purging", is a reflection of the very process of structural assimilation. Wherever this problem occurs - as long as it is crystal clear that a social overturn has taken place - one knows one is dealing with this process.

The normal revolutionary process has an essential moment when the qualitative change takes place - the famous dialectical leap. Such revolutions have their October - a moment or short period of time in which a fundamental qualitative change in class rule takes place. There is never any real problem in dating a revolution of the October variety. What occurs is the same kind of qualitative leap as occurs in nature. Water is lowered to a particular temperature and, at once, it becomes a solid, leaping over intermediary stages. It is this kind of qualitative change which people vainly seek to find in the abnormal processes of the postwar world.

But not all qUalitative change takes place that way - either in nature or in social phenomena. Since Marx and other Marxists, being essentially interested in revolution, emphasized the importance of qualitative leaps, it would be a mistake to think that they ever claimed this to be the only way qualitative change takes place. In fact one of the richest facets of the dialectical method is its ability to explain another kind of qualitative change: the slow, long, process of a number of quantitative changes bringing about a fundamental qualitative transformation. (1) Only dialectics can explain this process as well, for only dialectics can explain change at all. 

Structural assimilation is the kind of process where change takes place over a relatively extended period of time. It is possible to ascertain around when the process begins and after the process is all over it is clear that a qualitative change has taken place. However, during the process things are nowhere as clear. In fact in the middle of the process things are extremely contradictory for both qualities - what existed before and what is to be - exist in a complex interrelationship. For this reason there exists no one moment when the qualitative change takes place. That the qualitative change has taken place becomes clear only some time after the change has been consummated. As the process can be frozen or even reversed - look at the cases of Finland and Austria - it is proper for Marxists to refuse to draw a final accounting on the process of structural assimilation in any particular country until it is more than certain that the process is completed. Thus, what has been considered a vice, the slowness of our movement in arriving at a conclusion on many of these states, was in fact a virtue. 

The kind of qualitative change taking place is also the cause of the confusion over the exact nature of these states in the early stage of this process. The only kind of definition that can be given to such states in the early period of this process is one which recognizes both the transition taking place and the fact that the transition is not yet completed. Since the transformation of the state is incomplete we must insist it has not yet lost its capitalist character. But since the process of transformation has already begun this capitalist character is expressed in a very weak - phantom-like, if you will - form. It is expressed not so much in the real existence of bourgeois power but in the fact that the existence of a new class power has not yet been consummated. Thus these states are transitional states which maintain a capitalist character only in the historical sense - that is, by recognizing where they come from and that they have not yet gotten to where they seem to be going (but may not necessarily get to). 

There is another problem - this one a terminological problem - which also gives us an insight into the nature of the process we are investigating. The term structural assimilation repels many because they interpret the term assimilation in a very literal sense of direct absorption into the USSR as a country. Certainly this was an important factor with Germain. In fact we were tempted at the beginning to simply discard the term because of this connotation given to it. However, the concept has a certain history in our movement, a history which should be revived. 

The problem is very much like the problem Trotsky had with permanent revolution. He took this term from Marx's pioneer work on the German Revolution of 1848. Many of Trotsky's opponents sought to distort and discredit Trotsky's theory by literally interpreting the term. They insisted that Trotsky, in an ultra-left fashion, was stating that the revolution would ascend without any interruptions at all - without any ebbs or flows. But Trotsky persisted in using the term both because it was a link with Marx and because it did express what he wanted to get at - that the reVolutionary process could not be limited to a single stage without causing its defeat.

Not only does the term structural assimilation provide a link for us with past work done by our movement; it also gets at an essential element of the process itself. In the fundamental theoretical sense all these states were assimilated into the degenerated workers' state which has its origins in October. They were transformed after the image of the degenerated workers' state, in an area where this state has essential hegemony, the motive force of the transformation being either the Soviet bureaucracy itself or its agents, its extension, the domestic Communist Parties. 

There is another, related terminological problem. One of Pablo's original contributions to the buffer discussion was the coining of the term "deformed workers' states." Since these states were deformed from the very beginning, he reasoned~ they did not go through a healthy state from which to degenerate. All this is, of course, true. However, it has led to the concept that deformed workers' states are the indigenous product of deformed revolutions; that is, that centrist leadership leads, not to the defeat of revolution, but only to the deformation of the end product. That this concept can only lead to liquidationist conclusions we have shown elsewhere. 

Since these "deformed" workers' states can only be theoretically understood as extensions of the degenerated workers' state, they are as much degenerated workers' states as is the USSR. To give them another label causes no particular problem, though, unless it implies that there is something qualitatively different in essence about these states to distinguish them from the USSR. To many in our movement it does seem to imply this. Perhaps, for scientific purposes, it is best to consider all these states degenerated workers' states - born in a degenerated form precisely because they were born through the process of extension of the degenerated workers' state. 

The Limits of Structural Assimilation  

The major defect of all other theories of the post-war expansion of Stalinism is the inability of these theories to limit the process. As long as the creation of "deformed" workers' states is seen as the product of totally indigenous social forces, it is impossible theoretically to rule out such "deformed revolutions" wherever such social forces exist - that is, pretty near anywhere on earth. At best the proletariat remains in the running as a sort of contender with other social forces for the privilege of overthrowing capitalism - a highly unsuccessful contender at that. About the most such theories let us say positively about this contender is that the proletariat will do a cleaner, healthier job of it. Most anyone will prefer a dirty job that is concretely accomplished to the promise of a cleaner job. 

Since the theory of structural assimilation explains the real nature of these social overturns, it allows one to state clearly under what specific conditions this process can occur and what general role Stalinism as a world movement will play in the future revolutionary process. This is of extreme direct importance to the day to day work of our movement in all countries of the world.

This process of structural assimilation is not an independent process. It is essentially dependent on the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR. Stalinism, however, is not a revolutionary world force. Its essential role is counterrevolutionary. It supports structural assimilation only as a defensive mechanism against imperialism and only under conditions where no serious confrontation with imperialism takes place. Thus this defensive expansionism takes place with the acquiescence of imperialism and as a substitute for support to genuine proletarian revolution. 

This defensive expansionism must be seen within its proper international context. It occurred in regions where the prostration of imperialism made it impossible for imperialism to seriously resist Soviet hegemony over the region. This was even the case in China where the United States openly abandoned Chiang Kai-shek. Wherever there is serious resistance to expansionism, the USSR opposes such expansionism as it subordinates everything to seeking a temporary modus vivendi with imperialism. Thus, rather than defend itself through support to genuine proletarian revolution, the USSR has resorted to a combined process of the social transformation of strategic border regions under its hegemony and seeking to achieve a modus vivendi with imperialism by collaborating with imperialism to prevent social overturn elsewhere. Thus the consolidation of imperialist hegemony over most of the earth's surface - itself partially the result of Kremlin policy - rules out structural assimilation on any serious scale. 

There is another, in many ways more fundamental, limiting factor: the beginnings of a revival of proletarian struggle internationally. A fundamental characteristic of structural assimilation is that this process takes place only where the proletariat is relatively docile - during the ebb of revolutionary development. The peasantry can be controlled, but the proletariat is another matter. Nowhere did the process of structural assimilation take place when the class struggle was in ascendency. Everywhere it took place where the working class struggle was ebbing, where demoralization was setting in. To the extent to which the working class begins to play more and more of an independent role on the stage of history, the significance of such distorted bureaucratic processes as structural assimilation will become less and less. In the most fundamental sense the working class itself is drawing the limits to Stalinist expansionism by tightening the noose around the neck of Stalinism itself. Today the beginnings of the resurgence of the working class have already been expressed in the decline of Stalinism. Tomorrow they will express themselves in the extinction of Stalinism. 

FOOTNOTE - PART VII 

1. It should be kept in mind that this distinction between two kinds of qualitative change is relative. Any qualitative leap, if looked at closely enough, evolves in a series of minute changes, which one of which marks the qualitative change is difficult to tell. However, in comparison to other phenomena a real leap can be seen to have taken place.