World Revolution, 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International by C. L. R. James

Author:C. L. R. James [James, C. L. R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Communism & Socialism, History, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Politics & Government, Russia & the Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9780822373346
Google: NXMtDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0742C6BZK
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2017-07-27T03:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10    |      The Platform and the Five-Year Plan

In preparation for the Fifteenth Party Conference in December, 1927, the Oppositionists summarised their position in a document known as the Platform.1 It contained their charges against the Stalinist regime and their proposals for the regeneration of Russia. Such success as the Soviet Union has achieved it owes to working on the principles outlined in the document, as far as this was possible under the Stalinist regime.

The Opposition based its whole approach to the fundamental problems of the Soviet Union in the spirit of fearless facing of the truth before the party and the masses, which we have so insisted upon in this book; and the platform begins with a quotation from Lenin’s speech at the last Party Congress he attended, where he told the Russian people quite frankly that under the New Economic Policy the Soviet State was slipping away from Socialist control and he did not know where it was going. Stalin’s method, on the other hand, was to use the party and State apparatus to cover up failures and under a false appearance of success suppress criticism. By his incessant lying2 he confused the party and the masses and made it difficult to find and follow the correct road.

The Proletariat Weakening

Three hostile forces—the kulak, the Nepman and the bureaucrat—had grown at an alarming rate between 1924 and 1927. They were the chief support of the Stalinist regime in its struggle against the Opposition and now endangered the very existence of the Socialist State. The difference between agricultural and industrial prices, between wholesale and retail prices, and the difference between domestic prices and world prices, the contraband goods which came steadily into the Soviet Union, all these were a constant source of private gain, creating capitalists. The role of indirect taxes had grown at the expense of the direct by which automatically the tax burden moved from the wealthier to the poorer. The income of the kulak had increased incomparably more than that of the worker. Real wages in 1927 stood on about the same level as in the autumn of 1925, yet the national income had increased; that of kulaks, private capitalist merchants and speculators having increased with enormous rapidity.

To mobilise the forces of the party and the masses against the dangers was neither panic nor pessimism, but the duty of the proletariat in the Socialist State. A certain growth of the kulak, Nepman and bureaucrat was unavoidable under the NEP. As long as Russia remained a small peasant country there was a more solid basis for Capitalism than for Communism. But the capitalist forces could only be overcome by a steady systematic working-class policy, relying upon the peasant poor in union with the middle peasant, working on the preparation and development of the world proletarian revolution. It was necessary to manoeuvre, but under Lenin the manoeuvering always remained upon the line of the proletarian revolution. Under him the party always knew why a manoeuver was undertaken, the limits of it,

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