The ideological form taken by the consolidation of the counter-revolution in Russia, from where it spread through the subjugation and instrumentalization of the Third International from its Fifth Congress onwards and through Russian imperialist expansion from the 1940s. Its main characteristic is the identification as "socialism" of a state capitalism based on the party-state fusion and the affirmation of a state-run, centralized and militarized organization of production. Although Stalinism takes particular forms in different countries and generates different currents serving and depending on the origins of different state bourgeoisies (Maoism, Hoxhaism, Castroism, etc.), they all share the exaltation of wage labor and an open nationalism, completed depending on the case by anti-Semitic, xenophobic or openly racist tendencies, an obscurantist culture and a retrograde sexual morality.
Stalinism and counter-revolution
The triumph of the October Revolution was followed by a civil war and the invasion of the former Russian Empire by the main capitalist powers of the time. In the besieged Russian state, with its proletariat scattered by famine and war, holding out while waiting for the World Revolution meant above all rebuilding relations with the peasant petty bourgeoisie in order to feed the cities. The "New Economic Policy" (NEP) was adopted, a desperate attempt at resistance that consisted fundamentally in halting the attack on capitalist relations and organizing a state capitalism that would rebuild the productive framework.
Rebuilding production by creating, practically out of nothing, a "state capitalism under the leadership of the proletariat" (Lenin) is in itself something desperate. But it was even more so considering that the soviet structure had been emptied along with the factories. Only the Bolshevik party remained as the last guarantor of the revolutionary program. Its youngest cadres, trained during the war, would be the ones to take the reconstruction of national capital into their hands. With the soviets languishing -in the best of cases- the leaders sent by the party began to turn into real "factory dictators" and collectively to form a bureaucracy that would gradually take shape within the party and align itself more and more around the Stalinist faction.
The program of the bureaucratic faction would converge towards the primacy of reconstituted capital in every field: from differential wages to foreign policy. That is where the banner of "socialism in one country" comes from. What were at first apparently pragmatic attitudes would soon become a clash of class interests. For the bureaucracy, if the revolutionary movement was not strong enough to overthrow capitalism in the central countries, it had at least to secure non-intervention against Russia by supporting non-belligerent governments.
The problem is that this translated first into precipitation, smothering the remnants of the German revolutionary movement, and then into a head-on clash between the interests of the world revolution -which needed to break with "national liberation" movements in order to develop- and those of the Russian state, which favored nationalists and "progressives" according to its own interests. The betrayal by the Russian party and the International of the mass strike in Britain first, and above all of the Chinese revolution immediately afterwards, showed with piles of corpses that the formula "socialism in one country" meant nothing other than the subordination of the revolutionary movements of the world to the supposed "construction of socialism in Russia".
From then on, each consolidation of the state bureaucracy born of the Bolshevik party would become a new setback for the revolution, and each setback of the revolution in a new country would strengthen the bureaucracy in Russia. All in a "crescendo" that would culminate in the policy of "popular fronts" -alliance with the "democratic" sectors of the bourgeoisie- and the open leadership of the Stalinized CPs in the repression of the other great European revolution: Spain.
With all this, what kind of property relations did the October Revolution establish? Certainly not socialist ones. That revolution was made by true communists, but their sole aim was permanent revolution (Lenin in the April Theses), waiting for the proletariat of the developed countries to come to their aid. Even the tactics of the Bolsheviks before the seizure of power were entirely inspired by that perspective, which is enough to reject them at the present hour.
After the magnificent attempt called war communism, which, far from responding only to the emergencies of the civil war, aimed directly at the disappearance of wage labor, there was a turn towards state capitalism as Lenin conceived it: capitalist relations of production and distribution, but real political power of the proletariat, based on the soviets. The effective preservation of that power was, in Lenin's eyes, the only guarantee of a future socialist development; it would allow it to wait for the victory of other revolutions in industrialized countries and to pass together to the transitional society and to communism.
It can be stated today that the only truly socialist thing that existed in the former Soviet Union was, despite its defects, political power. Once the power of the soviets had disappeared and the Bolshevik party had been corrupted, there was nothing left but state capitalism, pure and simple, which went on consolidating itself and recognizing itself as such from the NEP to the five-year plans. Property, production and distribution relations were brought back to the most rigorous capitalist norms.
Thus was carried out a counter-revolution such as history had never known, whose main concern is to prevent any proletarian revolution in the world. Is any more proof needed after the surrender of power to Hitler in 1933, after the crushing of the Spanish revolution, not by Franco but by the Russian government and its Spanish Stalinists, after the imperialist policy of national resistance and all the reactionary work of Moscow and its parties since the postwar period?
"Critique of the Draft Manifesto for a New Workers' Party of the Workers' League of England", 1961