Stalinism is not an exclusively Russian phenomenon. It is only the Russian name for what we have seen rise throughout the world in 1933 with the destruction of the national state, the centralization of capital, fascism, the Plan. Pamphlet #1 traced the rise of state capitalism and, theoretically, we will trace it here again in the next section. At this point we wish to stop a moment at its specifically Russian physiognomy.
No truer commentary on the Russian Revolution was ever made than by its great leader, Lenin, who saw not only the elemental forces unleashed, but the barbarism of the counter-revolution that would be needed to stop it. He spoke in one and the same breath of how the Russian workers must seize power and hold out until the workers of the advanced countries came to its aid, and at the same time of the fact that "no backward step towards capitalism would be possible without the most atrocious violence perpetrated upon the masses".
Stalin rose to power because he had the necessary barbarism required to re-establish capitalism once the European revolution lay crushed. The world does not stand still and once the revolution on a European scale had not succeeded, the counter-revolution rolled its arsenal in. But it was a new type of capitalism, a total ruthlessness needed by the monstrosity of capitalism in its death-agony.
First, to destroy the workers' state, Stalin and the Stalinists had to murder Trotsky and nine-tenths of the Old Bolshevik Party that had led the revolution. Then that new bureaucracy committed the most atrocious violence on the Russian workers. The only way they could keep the Russian workers down was through the establishment of bureaucratic tyranny, purges, concentration camps, GPU (NKVD and MVD) surveillance day and night.
Stalin rose to power because each stage of world capitalist production has posed only two alternatives: either the self-activity of the workers or the Plan over the workers. And Stalin was ready to choose the Plan.
The Plan, so the speak, also chose Stalin, for only one who had been as disloyal as Stalin and had concentrated in his hands more power than he knew what to do with (as Lenin noted in his Will) possessed the sort of ruthlessness needed to turn the clock of history back. The Plan stopped at nothing because it was total, and Stalin stopped at nothing because he was ruthlessly disloyal to the workers' state. Together they (1) liquidated millions of peasants, (2) tied millions of workers to the factory with a terror that private capital had not exercised for it never had the total state power, (3) sent other millions who had rebelled against this totalitarian machine to the concentration camps.
Clearly something new had arrived in the world with the First Five Year Plan. The country to follow in its footsteps was Hitler's Germany. Bureaucratism, ending in the one-party state, is rooted in the need to discipline workers in production.
This explains also the existence of the labor bureaucracy. This is the reason why the labor bureaucratis behave as they do; it is their function to discipline workers. The workers feel this to be so and that is why the white heat hatred of the labor bureaucracy. What they are searching for is the type of total revolt that will once and for all put an end to bureaucracy as a category - to labor bureaucrats, to intellectual planners and self-appointed leaders.
This new quality of the proletariat could not be fully appreciated even by the greatest living Marxist of the day - Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky fought Stalinism from the beginning of its appearance with the death of Lenin in 1924. But the method of the struggle foretold its doom, for he never once turned to look for the economic roots of Stalinism - the new quality of state capitalism. Rather he denied its very existence. Limiting his fight to the "wrong politics" that Stalin pursued, he could offer the masses nothing more than the "right politics" and the "right leadership". He could not open a fundamentally new road for the proletariat trying to hack its way out from under these totalitarian planners, for he himself stood for a "planned economy".
Of course Trotsky the great revolutionary hailed the rise of the CIO and the sit-downs in France and the Spanish Revolution. But he could not see the entirely new quality of this revolt because he had no conception that there was a new economic quality to the epoch in which he lived. For him the epoch had not changed basically from the period of World War I and Lenin's analysis of imperialism. What Trotsky tried to do was to preserve Leninism as it was in 1917. Thus he still maintained that because property was nationalized, Stalinist Russia remained "a workers' state".
World War II did not shake Trotsky from his false position. His stubborn insistence on the defense of Stalinist Russia brought no workers to his side, but it did succeed in splitting the Trotskyist movement itself.
We went with the Workers Party which had split from orthodox Trotskyism. But within a year (1941) we found ourselves in opposition to the majority of that party led by Max Schactman. It all revolved around our new theory of state-capitalism, which included in it the class analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Last updated on 09 January 2026