By Gerry Downing

Alexandre Dugin.: A National Bolshevik

We have major differences with this document. Socialist Fight rejoined the LCFI on the basis that not fusing with the Consistent Democrats would allow our seeming close agreement on the nature of the war in Ukraine to develop and then the initial cause of the split in 2020, the Jewish Question, antisemitism and critical defence of Gilad Atzmon and David Dukes by Ian, to be rediscussed and resolved.

However, Ian’s document, in particular the section on the politics of Aleksandr Dugin and Vladamir Putin and the nature of the Russian and Chinese state, indicate that these 2020 differences still exist. Of course, united front work on the war should continue but the ground he gives  to Alexandre Dugin, (the LCFI seem willing to accommodate this). There are clear differences between their earlier April 2022 document Postmodern Left, Eurasianism and National-Bolshevism (Fascism) 13.4.22 with which we have few differences and Ian’s document, The Ukraine War and WWIII: Is the Multipolar World a Reformist Utopia? June 21, 2023, with which we have big differences.

We do not agree with Ian’s opening paragraph referring to “the incomplete nature of the counterrevolution that took hold in the USSR, and most centrally Russia, in August 1991” because “it did not result in the dismemberment and destruction of the Russian Federation… in many cases, they preserved attitudes to property and the various components and classes of Russian society that that were simply customary and had been for many decades, almost as an automatic reflex”.

In our view the counter-revolution in August 1991 was complete, it led to the break-up of the USSR, the restoration of a capitalist state, the installation of a US stooge leader, Boris Yeltsin, with US-imperialist economic advisors assisting him to get (fraudulently) re-elected in 1996. He abolished the nationalised property relations by selling state assets off to state officials for buttons; they became millionaire oligarchs overnight. Under Yeltsin GDP fell by 50%, hyperinflation, corruption, and mafia-type gangsterism took over. The welfare state was practically abolished and there were food and fuel shortages, wages and pensions went unpaid. The war with Chechnya was very unpopular. On Ian’s admission, “Life expectancy fell by around 5 years under Gorbachev and Yeltsin in the early 1990s”. Male life expectancy fell by 10 years in places in the former USSR in the former deformed workers’ states of Eastern Europe. The rise of Putin following the economic crisis of 1999-2000 saw some re-nationalisations and some marginalisation of the more openly pro-US oligarchs to benefit native Russian capitalists and partially stop the US, and EU to a lesser degree, plundering the economy.

Neither is there such a category in Marxism as “hybrid post-Stalinist states” or “hybrid capitalist/post-capitalist states like Russia and China”. The word “hybrid”, used 12 time in Ian’s piece, rejects the Marxist principle that the mode of production that a given state guards and defends defines that state.

There are no hybrid or transitional states or any other type of a “hybrid” or “transitional states”; there is a unique point in time when the class nature of a state changes. Then the state ceases to be a slave state and becomes a feudal state, ceases to be a feudal state and becomes a capitalist state or ceases to be a capitalist state and becomes a workers state.

It is true that once the economy of a state becomes capitalist a semi-feudal government may rule over it, as was the case before the English Revolution of the 1640s or the French Revolution of the 1790s (BTW Danton does not belong in the same French revolutionary company as Robespierre and Saint-Just in the latter as Ian claims).

So even after the Glorious Revolution in England of 1688 elements of the land-owning aristocracy continued to dominate the government of the state and the Tory squirarchy found their way back in via the City of London, so in that regard the wheel of history could not be rolled backward either there or in France in the 19th century, despite monarchist restoration, emperor restorations, bonapartism etc.

But this is not true of workers states, healthy, degenerated, or deformed ones, either going forward from capitalist states to workers states or collapsing in the opposite direction. Russia became a workers state in October 1917 and reverted to a capitalist state in August 1991 in the USSR and similarly for Eastern Europe in that short period from 1989 to 1991.

The Chinese state became a workers state in late 1952 and reverted to a capitalist state in October 1992 when the Congress accepted Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist restoration programme following his Southern Tour (accompanied by the top generals in the People’s Liberation Army) of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai.

The state press quickly fell in line and general secretary Jiang Zemin accepted his agenda which was agreed in October at the 14th congress; foreign investment and free market economics were now the dominant mode of production in China – the deformed workers state was then abolished.

Ian quotes from Trotsky’s Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State? (1937) but fails to find the bit which contradicts his analysis:

 “Only the intrusion of a revolutionary or a counterrevolutionary force in property relations can change the class nature of the state… Should a bourgeois counterrevolution succeed in the USSR, the new government for a lengthy period would have to base itself upon the nationalized economy. But what does such a type of temporary conflict between the economy and the state mean? It means a revolution or a counter-revolution. The victory of one class over another signifies that it will reconstruct the economy in the interests of the victors. But such a dichotomous condition, which is a necessary stage in every social overturn, has nothing in common with the theory of a classless state which in the absence of a real boss is being exploited by a clerk, i.e., by the bureaucracy” (our emphasis)

In 1930, Trotsky, in defence of his theory of Permanent Revolution, discussed “The Transitional Period in Italy”. First of all, he defined the degenerated regime under Stalin as “a totalitarian régime” and went on to observe of it, “whether of Stalinist or Fascist type, by its very essence can be only a temporary transitional régime”.

The dictatorship of the proletariat still existed in a deformed way so it could either go forward to the political revolution to restore the original Soviet workers’ democracy or it could revert to being a capitalist state. Trotsky had understood that there was a danger of this happening in the 1920s with the failure of the German and Chinese revolutions in 1923 and 1927, or the 1930s, or during WWII.

In fact, it did not happen until August 1991. But he correctly analysed the dynamic that produced that counter-revolution. As with Britain from the 1660 restoration of the monarchy to the 1832 election, when a semi-feudal government ruled over a capitalist state, now in China a nominally Chinese Communist Party (containing a big number of millionaires and billionaires) rules over China and Vietnam, but both states are fully capitalists, with production geared to profit their billionaire ruling classes and international capitalist enterprises.

Comparing the situation in Russia and China today we can see it is somewhat analogous to Italy in 1930 although Russia and China are not fascist states (some today aver they are just that) – some measures of freedom for the working class still exist, although these are extremely limited. But repression is not comparable to Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy or Franco’s Spain of the 1930s and 40s:

“Following from what has been said comes the question of the “transitional” period in Italy. At the very outset it is necessary to establish very clearly: transition from what to what? A period of transition from the bourgeois (or “popular”) revolution to the proletarian revolution – that is the one thing. A period of transition from the fascist dictatorship to the proletarian dictatorship-that is something else. If the first conception is envisaged, the question of the bourgeois revolution is posed in the first place, and it is then a question of establishing the role of the proletariat in it. Only after that will the question of the transitional period toward a proletarian revolution be posed. If the second conception is envisaged, the question is then posed of a series of battles,” disturbances, changing situation, abrupt turns, constituting in their entirety the different stages of the proletarian revolution. These stages may be many. But in no case can they contain within them a bourgeois revolution or its mysterious hybrid, the “popular” revolution (our emphasis).

And now we move on to the section on Alexander Dugin

Ian Donovan rejects all political categories in his piece. His categorisation of Putin as “a kind of a mild Bonapartist who balances between forces to his left and to his right” is simply wrong and evasive. Whilst not a fascist state, in Russia independent trade unions, and political workers organizations are barely tolerated but can operate. Nevertheless, it is a far rightist regime, LGBT+ organisations are now (November 30 2023) being made illegal. Wikipedia reports: “(Berlin) – Russia’s Supreme Court ruled today that the “international LGBT movement” is an “extremist organization,” jeopardizing all forms of LGBT rights activism in the country, Human Rights Watch said today.

In a closed hearing, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Justice Ministry’s lawsuit accusing the “LGBT movement” of inciting social and religious discord.”

Ian claims, “the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), the former Stalinist Party which has many subjective communists among its base but has not determined as yet what it really stands for”. It is a counter-revolutionary red-brown Stalinist formation and all genuine Trotskyists, along with other revolutionary socialists, have no problem recognising it as such. The fact that it has “many subjective communists among its base”, as do all Stalinist formations, does not change this- it is not a, “former Stalinist party” but is a current one. The following from Timothy J. Colton, at Harvard University and Michael McFaul, at Stanford University sets the record straight on its unprincipled popular front red-brown manoeuvring:

“Zyuganov prevailed upon the KPRF’s rivals on the left to subscribe to his anti-Yeltsin coalition, dubbed the Bloc of Popular and Patriotic Forces. The bloc purported to speak for 126 organizations. Many participants came away convinced that leftist unity and collaboration with Russian nationalists — the unholy marriage of “red and brown,” as liberals phrased it — would henceforth be the key to electoral success. The 1996 bloc reorganized itself as the Popular-Patriotic Union of Russia and, with Zyuganov’s blessing, took the lead in lending assistance to gubernatorial candidates of a communist bent.”

This from Wikipedia:

“The First Secretary Gennady Zyuganov also expressed that they should learn from China’s successful example and build Russian socialism. He also encouraged all party members to read “Selected works of Deng Xiaoping”. He said during his visit to China in 2008: “Had we learned from the success of China earlier, the Soviet Union would not have dissolved”.

The Chinese state became capitalist following those “Southern Tour protests” when the 14th Congress on October 1992 accepted Deng’s capitalist restoration programme.  Deng Xiaoping made the front-page Time Magazine Person of the Year twice, in great appreciation of his services to world imperialism. Wikipedia tells us:

“Deng was named the Time Person of the Year for 1978 and 1985. He was criticized for ordering a military crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests yet was praised for his reaffirmation of the reform program in his Southern Tour protests as well as the reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese control in 1997 and the return of Macau in 1999”.

And what are we to make of the following very confused passage in support of Alexander Dugin:

“A close examination of Dugin’s politics reveals that he is opposed to ethnic nationalism, rejects the whole concept of the nation-state explicitly in theory, and actually looking back at history has managed to construct an ‘Orthodox Christian’ rationale for critical support for Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party forces in the 1918-21 Civil War against the mainly Christian Orthodox White Guard forces, whom he very perceptively dismisses as tools of Anglo-American imperialism and therefore enslavers of the Russian people… Thus Dugin, the ‘right-wing’ pressure on Putin, is revealed as a hybrid, and a perfect illustrator of the hybrid nature of the state. A supposed ‘fascist’ who argues for critical support for Bolshevism, whereas actual fascists, like Hitler and Mussolini, were driven by the most virulent hatred for Bolshevism.”

Anyone with a passing knowledge of this history will understand that this describes the National Bolshevik (NazBol) programme, which is explicitly fascist, although it is Russian fascism and not Nazism, which is German fascism. Remember NAZI means National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

Wikipedia [2] says, “National Bolshevism, whose supporters are known as National Bolsheviks and colloquially as Nazbols, is a syncretic political movement committed to combining ultranationalism and communism.”

All serious Marxists know that ultranationalism and communism are two opposite and incompatible political stances.

Wikipedia further spells out Stalin’s accommodation with the Nazbols where socialism in a single country from 1924 signalled the turn away from internationalism and world revolution towards defence of the national privileges of the conservative bureaucracy. As in Germany there were those, like the Strasser brothers, who sought to combine socialism and fascism to win the backward workers:

“Ustryalov and others…, were eventually able to return to the Soviet Union and following the co-option of aspects of nationalism by Stalin and his ideologue Andrei Zhdanov enjoyed membership of the intellectual elite under the designation non-party Bolsheviks.” [3]

Here the ideological basis for WWII was forged, not a war for socialist revolution as Lenin and Trotsky fought the Russian civil war from 1919-21 but the “great Patriotic War” which Stalin fought WWII, ideologizing great Tzars of the past and the Orthodox Church in alliance with every reactionary right winger who was ‘patriotic’.

The Nazbols who were “a frequent target under Lenin” were “officially recognised and even promoted under Stalin, albeit after accepting the main tenets of Stalinism”. It was the main weapon for reviving reactionary Russian nationalism which “an official part of state ideology in the 1930s”.

However “many of the original proponents of National Bolshevism, such as Ustryalov and members of the Smenovekhovtsy were suppressed and executed during the Great Purge for “anti-Soviet agitation”, espionage and other counter-revolutionary activities.” [4]

Russian historian Andrei Savin stated that “Stalin’s policy shifted away from internationalism towards National Bolshevism a view also shared by David Brandenberger and Evgeny Dobrenko” we learn.

These were about the only fascists he did execute in the great purges of 1936-38, the vast majority were genuine revolutionary socialists, Trotskyists in the main, other  leftists or former leftists.

We have just seen the latest Communist Fight, April-May 2024, which contains a joint statement between the LCFI and Class Consciousness (Australia) with which we have little difference or with their joint statement on the Crocus Hall attack on Russia.

However on page 6 we get Political Zionism and Its Genocidal Hegemony in the Imperialist World, with which we profoundly disagree. Ian has yet again proposed the wrong world hegemon and the tail wagging the dog. The USA is the global hegemonic power, not Political Zionism, FFS!

Notes

[1] The Ukraine War and WWIII: Is the Multipolar World a Reformist Utopia?, Ian Donovan, Consistent Democrats  June 21, 2023.

[2] National Bolshevism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bolshevism.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.▲

Mational Bolsheviks (NazBols) try to present themselves as national communists but the are outright fascists, just like the German Nazis were not German national socialists.