Spartacist League
"The Stalin School of Falsification"
Third Printing 1985
"'Now they are busy implementing economic policies which
reverse the socialist economic base, which restore
private ownership, private production for the market, and
which reproduce on an enormous scale all the
corresponding capitalist social relationships.'
"This passage demonstrates the Maoists' rejection
of elementary Marxism. If, as they hold, a peaceful
social counterrevolution took place in Russia, then
logically a peaceful socialist revolution against
capitalism is also possible--a classical social-democratic
position which Lenin refuted in State and Revolution."
(p. 18)
[Why the above quote is wrong: The Maoists were
correct that the Soviet Union went down the
capitalist-road. In the above quote, the Sparts
quote someone they allege to be Maoist and then
they say that they have to see a bloody civil war
somewhere before they conclude capitalism came
back. The Spartacists repeated this on a daily
basis about their having to have been a "bloody
civil war" to reverse socialism throughout
Brezhnev rule and especially whenever they met
Maoists.
The Spartacist League and others heard the
criticisms that it is incorrect to say the Soviet
Union could have a "deformed workers state" in
which the superstructure was out of line with the
economic base for decades at a time, while in fact
profit was legally and in practice in command of
the Soviet economy, but the Spartacist League held
on to its stupidity until Russia became openly
capitalist. Later the Trotskyist Spartacist League
admitted that it was wrong, as the advent of
Gorbachev and Yeltsin made clear to even the most
bone-headed.
Today, the Sparts put their statement of
principles this way: "“During his long struggle
against the Stalinist bureaucracy Trotsky
considered a number of different paths whereby
capitalism might be restored in the Soviet
Union.... Trotsky used the phrase ‘running
backwards the film of reformism’ to polemicize
against those professed leftists who maintained
that the Stalin regime had already transformed the
USSR into a bourgeois state through a gradual and
organic process—Bernsteinism in reverse....
Trotsky’s view that a capitalist
counterrevolution, as well as a proletarian
political revolution, in Stalin’s Russia would
entail civil war was a prognosis, not a dogma. It
was predicated on resistance by the working class,
not resistance by conservative elements of the
bureaucratic apparatus. That is how the question
is posed in The Revolution Betrayed.... The
decisive element is the consciousness of the
Soviet working class, which is not static but is
affected by innumerable shifting factors
domestically and internationally.”
(See, http://www.icl-fi.org/ENGLISH/DOP.HTM )
(Thus what the Sparts used to call dogma they
now called merely a prognosis--perfect
opportunism in which they left Trotsky untouched.)
Speaking of East Germany, the Sparts said,
"However, capitalist reunification was marked
neither by civil war nor by mass working-class
resistance. As the first counterrevolution in a
deformed workers state, this raised theoretical
questions which the Marxist movement had not yet
faced." (Spartacist 4, Winter 1992-3, English
Edition, Number 47-48, p. 22)
This is a lie. The Maoists faced it long ago and
wrote extensively on "sugar-coated bullets." The
Maoists confronted the Sparts with it, but they
simply would not draw the correct conclusions
regarding capitalist restoration. Trotskyists
today are methodologically incapable of
drawing correct conclusions from reality, because
they have spent decades using idealism to criticize
Stalin and blaming the humyn race for supporting
Stalin as it attempted socialist transformation.
Despite this admission, the Sparts continued to
spout the same-old-same-old about China being
headed by a "Stalinist bureaucracy." (See for
example "Workers Vanguard," May 5, 2000, p. 4] The
Sparts have no capacity to learn and move forward.
Even as late as January 1992, the Sparts continued
their fantasy-life world with respect to Russia:
"The salvation of the Soviet working class now
facing capitalist counterrevolution does not lie
in enterprise self-management and profit-sharing
schemes. It lies in defeating the forces
of counterrevolution in order to presercve and
revitalize the collectivized economy on the basis
of proletarian political power and centralized
planning." (Workers Vanguard, 24Jan92, p. 9)
What was left to preserve? What was still
collectivized? The above demonstrates how much the
Sparts live in a purely verbal world.
That's not all. In 1992, the Sparts were still
saying, "Half a century ago Leon Trotsky predicted
that the inevitable collapse of Stalinist
bureaucratic rule will lead either to bloody
counterrevolution or to the reestablishment of
genuine soviet democracy such as was established
by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917." (Workers
Vanguard, 24Jan92, p. 10).
In the March 6th, 1992 edition of Workers
Vanguard, the Sparts kept singing the same song;
even though even they acknowledged that the
Yeltsin seizure of power for open capitalism was
August 22, 1991.
That's not all, in the April, 17th 1992 Workers
Vanguard, the Sparts were criticizing other
Trotskyists who said there were no longer any
workers' states in the Soviet bloc!
It was over a year after Yeltsin came to power
that the Sparts were able to say that Yeltsin
unleashed his "first direct assault on the workers
movement here." (Workers Vanguard, 2Oct92, p. 4)
What a massive illusion about Yeltsin, that he did
not attack the working-class until the air
controllers strike of August 15, 1992. The Sparts
do not understand that capitalism is a daily
attack on the working-class, and that is what
Russia had long before October, 1992.
Thus the Sparts proved yet again no sense of
reality and why Trotskyists have not done more
than assist in one revolution in one country in
the whole world since 1917.