What happened in 1939-40

Epigraphs: Trotsky on Stalin and orthodox Leninism

Cox (? anti-climax after Trotsky?)
<better on Novack-Hansen?>
In August 1939 Stalin and Hitler signed a pact. It had secret clauses whose existence would soon have public
consequences. But even in the published version of the pact, it was plain that this was much more than a nonaggression pact, that Stalin had entered into partnership with Hitler. Just how active a partnership would become clear
inside a month. Nine days after the announcement of the pact, Hitler, given freedom to act by it, invaded Poland. World
War 2 had begun.
When the pact was announced, Trotsky was on a trip deep into rural Mexico and did not comment for x days/weeks.
Responding <date> to requests that he should comment on the August pact, Trotsky said in explanation for his tardiness
that he had thought it unnecessary because he had already written about it. That was the truth. He had written well in
advance of the USSR-German pact that was being prepared. So had Shachtman. The pact was far from taking them by
surprise.
Nor did the USSR's seeking after great-power "guarantees" from its neighbours take them by surprise. At the July
1939 convention of the SWP, both Max Shachtman and C L R James had attempted to raise the question of pressure by
the USSR on the Baltic states and Finland.
<Footnote: Source? Constance Meyer? Doesn't Shachtman say so too? Or C L R? no reference in SWP book of
minutes>
[C L R James refers to raising this question in the document reprinted in 'The Fate....']
Nevertheless, what happened between 22 August, after the pact was signed, and 30 November, when the USSR
invaded Finland, did take them by surprise. Though he had noted that much more than a non-aggression pact was
involved, again and again as events unfolded Trotsky was surprised by what happened. His day-to-day commentaries on
events record his responses. He notes that Stalin was "Hitler's quartermaster". On <?> he responded to the news that
the Russian army was mobilising with speculation that German/USSR clashes might be imminent. After the USSR had
conquered the eastern part of the Polish state (Western Ukraine, etc.), and the "Red" Army had met its Nazi allies at a
pre-arranged line, Trotsky commented bitterly on what had happened:
<quote>
He tended still see the USSR's action, pact or no pact, in terms of uncontrollable Russo-German rivalry. Nor did
Trotsky expect the invasion of Finland. Despite what the joint Nazi-Stalinist invasion of Poland told of the undisclosed
part of the 22 August pact, Trotsky went on record <x> days before the Russian invasion of 30 November with the
opinion that a deal would be made.
<quote>
Trotsky's usual prescience was here neutralised by his profound belief that the Russian autocracy was too insecure
at home to risk war, and so would do anything to avoid war.
After 22 August, the USSR invaded Poland, forced concessions that gave it control of the three Baltic states, Latvia,
Estonia, and Lithuania (which it took over completely and "sovietised" in June <???> 1940), invaded Bessarabia and
annexed it from Rumania, and invaded Finland (30 November 1939).
Self-evidently, a new stage in Stalinism was unfolding. Pursuing an anti-German alliance with Britain and France, the
Russian autocracy had done foul deeds, the most foul of which - done to ingratiate itself with the democratic imperialist
powers, France and Britain - was the suppression of the working-class revolution within the Spanish civil war. In the
British and French colonial empires, after 1935, the Stalinist parties ceased even toadvocate unqualified liberation of the
colonies. The Communist Parties of the world were made into propagandists for democratic capitalism and democratic
imperialism, and advocates of working-class subordination to middle-class politics. In Britain, for example, they
advocated a Labour coalition with the bourgeois parties, putting themselves, as Trotsky observed, to the right of the rightwing reform-socialist leaders of the Labour Party.
Now, having quelled resistance within a month or so after the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Stalinist parties throughout the
world became propagandists for Hitler and for Hitler's war aims. They presented Hitler and Germany as the victim of the
other imperialist powers. That, more or less, was business as usual; only Stalin's clients had changed.
What happened in Poland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia and Finland was new business. The Russian autocracy had
begun to act as an independent, expansionary, anti-bourgeois force outside the USSR. In fact this was the beginning of
the expansion of the Russian empire.
<Footnote: The USSR was an empire in which the Great Russian nationality oppressed the 57% non-Great-Russian
majority of the population. In effect Trotsky said this in his articles advocating independence for Ukraine.>
Trotsky responded with public outrage to these events.
<quotes>

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So did the opposition that had begun to develop in the SWP after the Hitler-Stalin pact. In terms of upfront response
to events Trotsky and the opposition were closely in step. The difficulties lay elsewhere. The people initially most out of
step with Trotsky were those who would be his prominent allies in the faction fight that would soon develop - in the first
place, James P Cannon. Responses in the camp of Trotsky's future allies ranged from that of Albert Goldman, a
downright no-nonsense honest man, who thought the Russian annexation progressive, to Cannon, who said that such
matters were Russia's military business, and that "defence of the USSR" meant automatic alignment with the USSR in
military affairs.
<Footnote: In political terms, Cannon was here doing exactly what Trotsky justly indicted Shachtman for having done
in 1937 in relation to the Cortes.>
A striking feature of the period from September 1939 to the split in the SWP and the Fourth International in April 1940
was that Trotsky would be unspoken in his condemnation of what the USSR did, and at odds with the comments and
attitudes of his closest factional allies. Trotsky's differences with them were overshadowed by the differences that
emerged with the other pole of the SWP and with the majority of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth
International.
If the discussion in the SWP had not developed, Trotsky's written comments on the beginning of USSR imperialist
expansion would contain a line or two here and there about "defending the USSR" against an imperialist attack, and no
more. Everything else in Trotsky's writings of that period is polemical response to an attempt by Shachtman and others to
draw political conclusion from what they saw as the new imperialist stage of Stalinism. In substance, Trotsky did not deny
this
<"element of imperialism"; driven by search for revenues, etc.>
He had earlier spelled out the programme for national liberation struggle against the Moscow-ruled empire.
Commitment to national rights within the USSR had been Trotsky's policy since the 1920s. New was the idea of national
liberation struggle for outright separation of the oppressed nationalities from Moscow rule. It would be strange if Trotsky's
impassioned polemics in defence of this new approach did not help stimulate the opposition.
In the wake of the invasion of Poland, Shachtman argued that though "defence of the USSR against imperialism"
remained a necessary part of the politics of the Fourth International, that could not mean support of the autocracy's army
in enterprises such as partitioning Poland and attempting to annex Finland. Here, too, Trotsky began by conceding the
fundamentals of the opposition case. He wrote of a hypothetical Russian invasion of British-ruled India through
Afghanistan. (This was being widely discussed as a serious possibility for further USSR action in alliance with Hitler).
<quote>
Trotsky wanted to conciliate the opposition; but he would not do that against his own politics. This was in line with his
whole trajectory. And it was what he would denounce as "conjunctural defeatism". That made the question one of
judgment, not of axiomatic endorsement of the USSR whatever it did with its army. If was a matter of "the Fourth
International will know...", then there was nothing automatic about siding with the USSR in military conflicts, nothing like
Cannon's understanding of this question. The "principle" was not axiomatic "defence" in all circumstances, but defence
against imperialism, subject to political judgment of what was in fact at issue.
It was here that the split developed. In Trotsky's judgment, the outcry that greeted the USSR's invasion of Finland the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations, a body that had proved notably restrained, not to say feeble, in past
responses to aggression against small nations, to the Italian invasion against Ethiopia, for example - was preparation for
Allied intervention on Finland's side. That would have brought the USSR fully into World War 2, on Hitler's side. This, for
Trotsky, overshadowed the question of Finnish rights, which in practice would become a cipher in play between the
warring camps. Defence of the USSR was paramount here.
As it turned out, Trotsky was mistaken, but it was not an unreasonable expectation. The opposition found this
unsatisfying. That they should find it abhorrent to line up even tacitly with the USSR, a pillar of one imperialist bloc, in an
attempt to subjugate a small country just after it had participated with its Nazi partner in wiping Poland off the map - that
was natural to their politics, and anything else would have been against the grain of their politics. Trotsky's recent
polemics in defence of Ukraine's right to secede from the USSR, even by civil war, did not predispose them to dismiss
Finnish self-determination.
Undoubtedly they were in recoil against the whole orientation to defence of the USSR in the new situation. Most likely
Trotsky's response was shaped by awareness that it was so. He spoke of them as "adventurists of defeatism". What was
happening here was in fact the breakdown of the contradiction-ridden system that Trotsky had built up. He had, within
the theoretical framework of the USSR as a degenerating workers' state, scrupulously recorded the realities of Stalinist
rule. He had, step by step from 1922, elaborated a programme of working-class self-defence and latterly of working-class
revolutionary offensive against Stalinism. The nationalised property would be "preserved", but subjected to the rule of the
working class. In substance, he advocated a full-scale revolution against the autocracy. He had, on the eve of the HitlerStalin pact, added to that programme advocacy of a national liberation struggle, including war if necessary, for one and
by implication for all other oppressed peoples of the USSR.
To those who challenged the theoretical adequacy of his theoretical framework - degenerated workers' state - he had
justly replied: what do you want to add to our programme? In everything, there was sharp counterposition of workingclass politics to the bureaucracy. Stalin's conquests and attempted conquests introduced a new element. The
contradictions grew directly out of "defence of the USSR". Opposition to the bureaucracy and to its expansion continued
to be central to Trotsky's politics and, less clearly, to the politics of his prominent allies, in the first place Cannon.
<quote Trotsky>
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Outrage at Stalin's extension of "bureaucratic enslavement" was expressed by none of the participants so forcefully
and so fully as by Trotsky. But could opposition to the bureaucracy here mean the wish for the USSR's military defeat? In
conditions where the conflict with Finland would most likely merge into conflict with France and Britain? Trotsky did not
think so. And so, reluctantly and with much ambiguity and confusion, he was hauled by the logic of "defencism" in the
wake of the autocracy's foreign policy.
Events had produced out of the exigencies of "defending the USSR" politics that involved "defending" the USSR's
army against the Finnish people. With the beginnings of USSR imperialist expansion, defence of the USSR against
imperialism was becoming defence of USSR imperialism against its victims.
Trotsky did not choose to trumpet "defencism" in his public writings before the full heat of the faction fight, or even
afterwards. If it is there, it is very deeply buried, implicit or perfunctory, and not proud of itself. "Defencism" became
prominent in polemic against proposals to back up Trotsky's commentaries with the political position that they implied
(and if they did not imply it, what did they imply? The point is that Trotsky's politics were now at odds with themselves).
The opposition wanted to come out explicitly against the USSR in the Russo-Finnish war (not to take sides with Finland,
but explicitly and demonstratively to come out against USSR victory). The weight of condemnation of the USSR in
Trotsky's articles indicates the direction of his internal pressures. The USSR was an active part of an imperialist bloc, and
was itself behaving, as yet only on its own borders, as an imperialist power. The contradictions now unfolding with the
concrete requirements of "defending the USSR" induced in Trotsky political contortions and convulsions.
He wound up savagely jeering at the opposition for putting forward positions that he himself had advocated only
months earlier. He derided the programme of simultaneous struggle by a "Third Camp" against both Hitler and Stalin,
savagely caricaturing it as a plan for "simultaneous uprisings". The very recent - and current - advocate of Ukrainian
national liberation struggle against the Kremlin now dismissed the Finnish struggle to maintain national rights against the
Kremlin, and refused to advocate the defeat of the army he had recently indicted for imposing "bureaucratic
enslavement" on the people of Eastern Poland and Western Ukraine.
Possibly the pressure of the unfolding contradictions produced in Trotsky efforts to see "positive" things in the
invasions. If nationalised property in the USSR was progressive (in fact by 1939 Trotsky had enormously qualified that
judgment:
<quote>)
then it was a matter of crossing political t's and dotting i's to say that, whatever else needed to be said, nationalised
property was also progressive in the annexed territories, and that the act of nationalising it was progressive. Trotsky said
that - and he qualified it severely and sufficiently. But he went way beyond that.
Basing himself, it seems, on reports in a Menshevik paper published in Paris, he wrote of the advance of the "Red"
Army giving "an impulse" to revolution in eastern Poland, and being likely to deliver a similar "impulse" in Finland. In
reality, the USSR's appeals to the workers and peasants to act against their rulers and to support the invaders were only
cynical blows against the old rulers; once in control, the USSR would strangle any working-class or peasant
independence, while simultaneously selecting prominent worker or peasant leaders for inclusion in a new bureaucratic
apparatus. Trotsky knew this, and said it.
<quote>
Yet he gave much credence to the "impulse", and gave it weight that objectively it could not have had under the
carapace of the occupying army of the totalitarian state. When his opponents accused him of suggesting that workingclass revolution could now be bureaucratic-Stalinist revolution from above, he bitterly accused them of bad faith, insisting
that he had written only of the Russian army giving an "impulse" to mass action, or creating a short-lived opening for it.
Discussing a possible invasion of India, he had recently written that the Fourth International would "fraternise" with
the Russian army, which in his terminology meant attempting to influence Russian soldiers politically, subvert discipline,
and ultimately destroy the army. Most likely he had hoped for such things in the areas where mass action would be
triggered by the Russian army advance against the old state powers and in the gap before the autocracy could "strangle"
the mass action. Even so, the emphasis he placed on this was surely unrealistic, and, I think, flowed from his need to
find something in the situation other than brutal, flat USSR expansion, reducing the population to semi-slaves, which
"defencism" nonetheless forbade the Fourth International to oppose in the only way it could be opposed, by defeat of the
Russian army by the Finns.
Trotsky proclaimed that the bureaucracy's statification of industry in the occupied territory was proof that the October
Revolution still lived. But in September 1939 Trotsky had for the first time argued that the USSR as it was might some
day (though not yet) have to be conceptualised afresh as a new form of exploitative class society. If within "orthodox"x of
making this enormous adjustment in his entire conception of the USSR...
[sentence incomplete]
In fact it could mean only that the bureaucracy could not tolerate competing bourgeois propertyu now any more than
it could, a decade earlier in the USSR itself, tolerate commercial and rich farmer (kulak) competition. He said that too:
[quote]
It meant that October lived only if one could say for other reasons that October lived. Trotsky said it lived; he also said
that it might be necessary to conclude that it had long been dead. It was typical of the thrashing-around character of the
discussion.

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With the Russian invasion of Finland, the factional struggle within the SWP (and the International Executive
Committee of the Fourth International) took on a savage character. The factional heat is partly separable from the
political questions in discussion. Much of it was generated by the opposition's charges that the regime of James P
Cannon was mechanical and bureaucratic. Certainly, Cannon had attempted to stop the discussion triggered by the
events after 22 August; Trotsky had had to insist on a less oppressive, less mechanical, approach. Now Trotsky seems to
have adopted Cannon's approach. On ?? December he threw a savage polemical assault at the opposition.
They showed all the signs of being a "petty-bourgeois" opposition, he wrote. Importantly, here, he was not only
talking about the sociological composition of the opposition, but about its politics. He drew together various political
questions of the previous three years to show that the leaders of the opposition represented a petty bourgeois tendency.
For Trotsky himself, the historical perspective - the origins of the statified economy, the place of the USSR in history
according to the scheme of historical succession from capitalism to socialism which Trotsky held to - was central to how
he understood the USSR, whose immediate empirical reality he saw more or less as it truly was. He now chose to see
the fact that one of the opposition leaders, James Burnham, had never accepted the Marxist dialectic as central to the
degeneracy of the opposition. (Yet he had not long before proposed to put the same non-dialectician Burnham in charge
of the party's "scientific" education).
[quote]
The move towards split accelerated. At the SWP convention of April 1940, about 40% of the organisation and 80% of
the youth movement supported the opposition. After that, the opposition was suspended by the Political Committee for
voting against
[quote motion]
<did they vote against? I thought they abstained>
Whether the opposition would have proceeded to establish their own press and the split would have happened
anyway, I do not know. The fact is, it happened as it did.
Summarise what it was all about: division of Trotskyism, breakdown of untenable system.
In political terms, the discussion on the USSR was aborted. The opposition was in utter disarray on the question.
With the exception perhaps of one or two people, notably Joseph Carter, who were silent in the discussion, none of them
had a bureaucratic collectivist position. For a certainty none of them had a worked-out bureaucratic collectivist position of
the sort the Workers' Party would develop. C L R James said the USSR was a fascist state capitalism.
<Did he, before April 1940? I don't think so>
James Burnham believed that the USSR was no longer a workers' state, but did not polemicise for his alternative
view, which seemed to be as much that the USSR had made decisive steps towards bourgeois restoration as that it had
stabilised as a new non-bourgeois form of class exploitation. In so far as a generalised alternative conception of the
USSR to Trotsky's was put forward, it was put forward by Trotsky himself. This was, but was also enormously more than
Trotsky,
[garbled????]
who could not find an opponent in the Fourth International to define and defend what he plainly now thought of as the
alternative to the "degenerated workers' state" position.
[Craipeau?]
Trotsky did not put forward the idea that the USSR was a statified exploitative class society, "bureaucratic
collectivism", in order to knock it down - as he had done in the past, most notably in 1933 - by showing that this thesis
contradicted the facts of the USSR, or by arguing that such a system was impossible according to the Marxist conception
of the stages of historical development. He himself had established the facts too fully and too conscientiously for any
such argument to be available, even should he want to use it. In fact, he had not used such arguments even six years
before;
[true, but it makes the text seem self-contradictory]
and in the USSR they had been six eventful years, and not of events that told against the idea that this was an
exploitative class society. He had in the past argued that such a society was inconceivable:
[did he ever do that, as flatly as that? I don't think so]
that the existing USSR was by its very nature an unstable freak formation of history. He still, in 1939, considered it
radically unstable. But now did not rule out that it might be stable enough to require definition in its own right, as a distinct
system. What he ruled out was the idea that it could prove minimally stable and still be considered a degenerated
workers' state.
He put forward not only the theoretical possibility of a bureaucratic collectivist stage, unforeseen by Marxism, in
historical succession, but also the theoretical possibility that the USSR, as it was, would have to be seen as such a
formation. When some of his allies protested, he insisted that such a notion was not "revisionist", but fully Marxist.
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This was an enormous shift for Trotsky. Just as he had first elaborated and then in practice denounced "conjunctural
defeatism", so he here elaborated a new conception of the USSR, and then said it was too early to conclude that it was
valid. But he did put a short time limit on the "degenerated workers' state" position.
[quote]
True, Trotsky wrapped this enormous shift on the USSR, the actually existing candidate as "bureaucratic collectivist",
by amalgamating with vast extrapolations and speculations about a possible "bureaucratic collectivist" future for the
world, seemingly making a conclusion about the USSR dependent on the same "bureaucratic collectivist" conclusion
being reached about the world. Nonetheless, what he wrote amounted to the idea that if what existed in the USSR were
to stabilise, and if it were to become the dominant mode of production in the world, then that world system would be
"bureaucratic collectivist". He elaborated a broad political perspective for what socialists should do in relation to that
regressive, reactionary society [quote]
- one which characterised it very clearly. But - and there is no getting away from it - if that would be true of a "world
USSR", then it was already true of the USSR that covered only one sixth of the world.
Trotsky's hope against such developments was that the working class would overthrow capitalism in or after the war.
He had no hope for capitalist revival. In fact that capitalist revival would be what destroyed the nightmare scenario of a
"world USSR". In practice, what Trotsky's sinking of the question of the USSR into that of a "world USSR" did was to
allow Trotsky to postpone what was by then only too evidently his own conclusion. The conclusion was fended off by
scepticism that such a thing could really be possible, and faith in the proletarian revolution that would, he believed,
destroy Stalinism before the time-scale he sketched could run out and an answer to the questions he poses fall due.
When, in June
[July??]
1940, Stalin "sovietised" the three Baltic states, assimilating them to the USSR, Socialist Appeal would carry a piece
by Albert Goldman continuing the flat, bland, "this-is-progressive" politics he and others had had at the beginning of the
discussion, in stark contrast with Trotsky. Trotsky did not comment on the "sovietisation" of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia,
nor on his followers' comments. He was killed soon afterwards.
In 1940-1, the Workers' Party, the ex-SWP opposition, developed variations of bureaucratic collectivist - and statecapitalist - theory. When the Nazis invaded the USSR, the Workers' Party majority rejected a stance of "defending the
USSR" on the grounds that the USSR was inseparable from the imperialist bloc it was now in. The Cannonites supported
the USSR (though rather oddly: see The Fate of the Russian Revolution, volume 1).
After 18 months in which the collapse of the USSR seemed imminent, the tide of the war was turned at Stalingrad in
late 1942, and the "Red" Army began a westward drive that would take it into the heart of Germany. It would remain there
for half a century, until shortly before the USSR itself collapsed.
Thus events answered the tests Trotsky had set at the end, and the negative answer was unmistakeable: this was a
system capable of surviving the test of war, capable of enormous imperialist expansion. It could not be reasonably
conceived of as Trotsky had conceived of it until September 1939.
At that stage, Trotsky's supporters in 1939-40, or more precisely those whose organisational positions Trotsky had
chosen to back, had to decide where they stood. Things were vastly clearer than they had been in 1939-40. It was not
possible to say, with Trotsky, that it would be irresponsible to reach a new position by calculation in one's head on the
eve of the decisive test in life that the war would pose. The outcome of that test was known.
[Then - introduction to In Defence of Marxism]

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