The Care & Feeding Of Revolutions

Joseph Stalin is far and away the most mysterious man in the world. What he believes and what he is planning to do are immensely urgent questions for everybody in every country. Especially for Americans. Last week the cloud of mystery around Stalin was penetrated. Foreign Affairs published in its January issue a 40-page article by "Historicus," entitled Stalin on Revolution. The article* contained few facts that were new. Yet it was big news. For it pulled together the whole kit & caboodle of Stalin's essential beliefs, the beliefs on which he bases his decisions. It was the first time that this had been done in such concise form. Historicus presents a scholar's brief packed with bobtailed quotations of tortured Marxist prose. Following is a decoding of what he has to say:

Is Stalin just an opportunist, saying and doing what seems best -- for him -- at the moment? Many Americans believe that, and thereby lose an opportunity to understand what threatens them. Stalin's line shifts. Sometimes he acts like a flaming revolutionist, sometimes like a good fellow who just wants to get along. The latter aspect is especially prominent in interviews given by Stalin over the years to visiting writers from the West. The confusion adds up to the "inscrutable Stalin," the man nobody knows. This misconception about Stalin is one of the most important facts of world politics today.

It was different with other great revolutionists. Marx knitted his beliefs together into a theory and a program, and then spelled it all out in a book. So did Lenin. So did Trotsky. (So did Hitler.) On the basis of their theories, a reader could make an educated guess about what they were up to.

But Stalin -- so runs the misconception -- has no ideological blueprint. With Lenin dead, he ditched all such nonsense. In his dealings with the world, he has gone this way and that. In the first years of the New Deal, Stalin and his Communists denounced the New Dealers as "social fascists." Then came the United Front : everybody who was against Hitler was a Progressive. Next, the Stalin-Hitler axis, which touched off the war. The war was an Imperialist War until Russia got in; then it was a People's War. After V-E day the Western nations were no longer allies of Russia, but suddenly became parts of what Stalin calls the Imperialist Front.

Those are the turns, as the American has witnessed them. And it is hard for him to discern in them anything he can describe by the word "principle."

Historicus does not deny Stalin's arrant opportunism. What he shows is that Stalin and the world Communist Party guide their main course on the basis of a hard core of theory, and have done so for 25 years with "amazing consistency." Around the hard core of theory is a hard layer of what Stalin calls program. Around this is a layer of strategy, then an outer husk of tactics.

The key to understanding Stalin is right here, says Historicus: the tactics always, the strategy often, are expendable and replaceable; these are the party-line flipflops that make the headlines, but they do not change the core of theory and program. To understand the manipulable strategy and tactics, Stalin's followers -- and his intended victims -- have to understand the inner theory and program. Historicus puts his heaviest stress on Stalin's use of fixed theory right along with and intermeshed with shifting tactics. Stalin employs both, simultaneously. Most politicians of the West tend to bear down on one or the other, in a given situation.

Of Dialectic & Horse Thieves

The bedrock of Stalin's theory is Leninist-Marxism, and is known technically in the trade as "dialectical, historical materialism. "It is not new or secret, but it is what, in large measure, makes Stalin Stalin. Much of it was originated by Marx, modified by Lenin and picked up by Stalin. Since Stalin is the living actor on the stage, Historicus for convenience labels any of the theory Stalin consistently quotes as Stalin's theory.* All of Historicus' argument is based on Stalin's words, with Stalin's emphasis, not on the words of Marx or Lenin, except where Stalin repeats them with obvious approval.

The theory starts with this : what happens to social systems is not the result of men's ideas (which would be "idealism"), but the result of "material" environment. That is, social systems change primarily because of "objective" influences and not "subjective" influences (whereby people get the idea of making the change, and do it).

According to the theory, history is a succession of such changes in social systems. The changes occur because of "contradictions " (jargon for conflicts, struggles). The changes are not just the defeat of one of the forces in contradiction, but the evolution of something new, something different from both (this is the "dialectic"). The something new is always a step upward, the evolution by violent cross-breeding of a higher type of society.

Through all this historical process, everything is relative --meaning that although a slave-owning economy is viewed as deplorable today, it was once, when it had just succeeded the primitive communal system, a "step forward." In other words, there is no "eternal justice." Men's ideas, their point of view (their "consciousness"), are reflections of these contradictions, of these struggling, contending forces, and of their eruptions into new things. Says Stalin: "The material life of society . . . is primary, and its spiritual life secondary, derivative." An example (not Stalin's): in the U.S. frontier days, a man's life depended on his horse. Therefore, to steal a horse was a capital crime; tree gallows were handy for horse thieves. The material conditions created a deep feeling.

Pay Dirt

As Historicus shows, Stalin and the Leninist-Marxists before him were out to evolve a "science" of revolutions, a way of charting the ups & downs of social systems. This is not quite on a par with the science of physics, but it is at least parallel to, say, the Dow theory of stockmarket behavior. Some stock traders look to the Dow theory to tell them when to buy or sell. Stalin and the other Marxists wanted a theory that would tell them when a "break" was likely in the Imperialist Front. They kept their eye glued to "the material life of society." The big thing in it, they found, is "the means of production of material goods." The means of production "determines" two things especially: the kind of social system that prevails, and "the evolution of society from one system to another."

Here Stalin & Co. came to pay dirt. The means of production under capitalism involves a contradiction between "productive forces" (the tools and the workers) and "productive relations" (the relations between capitalists and laborers). New tools or equipment make the old capitalist-labor relations obsolete. The new productive forces require "social ownership" (Communism) for their full expansion. Otherwise, there will be depressions, in which shoe-factory workers, as an example, will be out of work at the same time that they (and others) need shoes.

This is the so-called Primary Contradiction of Capitalism, and is the sockdolager of the Marxist argument. In the long run, as Stalin reasons, the depressions will come oftener & oftener, and thus Communism will have to take over. Under Communism, the shoe factories will work as long as people need shoes.

Such is the "scientific" certainty with which Stalin reasons that capitalism is inevitably on the way out.

The big central contradiction of capitalism, which Marx elaborated in Das Kapital, gives birth to three other contradictions. They are all grist to Stalin's mill.

The first is the "class struggle." Under capitalism the main antagonists are the capitalists and the proletariat--the industrial workers. The other elements, such as the farmers and the middle class, fluctuate and drift. The proletariat, Stalin concludes, is the inevitable vehicle for revolution.

The second contradiction is between capitalistic countries and their colonies. Stalin contends that, within an empire, this is the counterpart of the class struggle. This contradiction results in crises and in national-liberation movements.

The third contradiction is between rival capitalistic empires, which, says Stalin, started the two world wars.

After World War I, there arose a fourth contradiction--between the capitalistic "camp" and the anticapitalistic Soviet Union.

The Crisis Factory

Historicus goes on to trace how Stalin uses the above contradictions.

All of them, Stalin maintains, "interact upon one another" to produce the "objective" (or automatic) conditions for revolution. Thus, says Stalin, a revolution is ripe when the following four situations have resulted from the seething of the contradictions: 1) the proletariat doesn't like the old system any more; 2) the upper classes can't keep going under the old way -- it just won't work; 3) the wishy-washy elements (the lower middle class and the farmers) desert the dominant class and go over to the proletariat; 4) internationally, the dominant class is isolated to a considerable degree, so that it can't get help from other capitalistic governments, while the proletariat can get help from fellow proletariats in other capitalistic countries and from Soviet Russia.

Such a crisis, according to the old Marxists, would bring on an internal revolutionary situation in each of the countries independently, depending on how advanced was the stage of capitalism. It was Lenin who broke away from Marx's idea of the revolutionary process operating all by itself in each country. Lenin deduced, contrary to Marx, that the series of Communist revolutions might start in a backward country, rather than in an advanced country. Lenin, justifying the un-Marxian revolution in slowpoke Russia, called this a "break" in the world front.

The Weak Link

Since World War I, Stalin (following Lenin) has come to believe that the flowing of the contradictions means, not the classical revolutions, but war first, followed by revolutions. Says Historicus: "In Stalin's thinking, the importance of war as a midwife of revolution can scarcely be exaggerated." War, Stalin says, develops a "weak link" in the imperialist-capitalist chain.

This is a forehint of Stalin's general position on war: to use it (or any other convenient lever) to the full in furthering revolution, not just to wait until, after the war, the classical Marxian conditions of revolution arise.

Here Historicus leaves the subject of automatic or "objective" forces that produce revolution, and turns to the other factor: "subjective" force. A revolution brought about mainly by subjective forces would be one in which people themselves simply had the idea for a revolution, and went ahead with it. (Most Latin American revolutions are 90% subjective.)

Stalin says, in effect, that the automatic blossoming of revolution is fine, but that many a near-revolution will fail if there is not a trained, hardheaded, ruthless organization which can, at just the right moment, topple the edifice. Here is where Stalin, along with Lenin, battles the ultra-leftists in the Marxist movement as well as the weak rightists for relaxing and pinning their hope for revolution on objective factors.

By applying the dialectic to the Communist Party, Stalin justifies the party's steel discipline and its merciless purges. Because the party embodies "scientific" truth, the party must be "monolithic," totalitarian, a centrally controlled army under military discipline. A party comrade who judges a situation "incorrectly" becomes a gun turned against the revolution.

With the automatic blossoming of revolution assured by "science," and with the deeds of a ruthless party similarly justified, Stalin can turn to the concrete issue: world strategy. The details of his ideas are necessarily secret. But, Historicus shows convincingly, the central plan is use of the Soviet Union as a base for revolution in every country in the world.

Says Stalin: "The goal is to consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat in one country, using it as a base for the overthrow of imperialism in all countries. Revolution spreads beyond the limits of one country; the epoch of world revolution has begun."

Eyewash for the West

How should the Soviet Union be used as a base? Stalin is even plainer. In one of his basic doctrinal writings, which has been republished in millions of copies, in many languages, right up to the present, he says: ". . . The development of world revolution will be the more rapid and thorough, the more effective the aid rendered by the first Socialist country [Russia] to the workers . . . of all other countries. In what should this aid be expressed? . . . The 'victorious proletariat' of the one country [here he quotes Lenin] . . . after organizing its own Socialist production, should stand up . . . against the remaining, capitalist world, attracting to itself the oppressed classes of other countries, raising revolts in those countries against the capitalists, [and] in the event of necessity coming out even with armed force [the Red Army] against the exploiting classes and their governments.' "

Against this, Stalin's interviews with Roy Howard (1936) and Harold King of Reuters (1943), purporting to disavow world revolutionary aims, can only appear as eyewash, and that is just how Historicus explains them. The interviews, he says, "do not really contradict the strategic aim of world revolution because they refer to a temporary tactic."

Historicus emphasizes that Stalin, in applying his abstract theory, is ever ready to engage in flexible tactics. He does not hold, like a narrow doctrinaire, that the objective preconditions of revolution are a fixed quantity. Rather, these preconditions are "interdependent variables which are to be manipulated to satisfy just one equation."

The equation, as Historicus frames it, is: "Revolution occurs where the Communist command concentrates superiority of forces at a point on the Capitalist front where the bourgeoisie can be isolated and overwhelmed. In other words, 'revolutionary crises' do not have to be waited for; they can to some extent be organized."

"Terrible Collisions"

Stalin's grand, flexible strategy is, Historicus says, to make Russia a base to support two movements--the proletariat of the West and the anti-imperialist movements for national liberation in the East--merging them into [Stalin's phrase] "a single world front against the world front of imperialism."

The two systems, Stalin writes, would be organized around two centers: "a Socialist center, binding to itself the countries that gravitate to Socialism, and a capitalist center, binding to itself the countries that gravitate to capitalism. The struggle between these two centers for the possession of the world economy will decide the fate of capitalism and Communism in the whole world."

Is this a hint of war between Russia and the U.S.? That Stalin foresees such a war is made clear by the following, one of Stalin's favorite quotations from Lenin (and also widely republished up to the present):"'. . . The existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with the imperialist states for a long time is unthinkable. In the end, either one or the other will conquer. And until that end comes, a series of the most terrible collisions between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states is inevitable.' "

To this, the "inscrutable" Stalin appends the comment: "Clear, one would think."

* Stalin was 69 this week. As a birthday gift, the Czech Reds decided to build a monument. The design, when chosen in public contest, "must express Mr. Stalin's personality, mostly from his ideological features."

* It was the second time in two years that Foreign Affairs had rung the bell on the subject of Russia. In the summer of 1947 it published the eye-opening study, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, by "X." Mr. X was George F. Kennan, head of the State Department's policy planning staff. Historicus, according to Washington gossip, is George A. Morgan, 43-year-old Foreign Service officer, who is now First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Morgan was formerly a philosophy professor at Hamilton College and at Duke University.

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