Socialism in one country: how Stalin abandoned Marxism

Lenin always maintained that the ultimate victory of the Russian Revolution was linked to that of the world revolution. His internationalism was a direct continuation of that of Marx and Engels. But in 1924, Stalin broke with this tradition by presenting his reactionary theory of ‘socialism in one country’. In this article, Niklas Albin Svensson explains why genuine Marxists are internationalists, why Stalin came to revise Marxism, and how this would have disastrous consequences for decades to come.

[This article was originally published in issue 47 of In Defence of Marxism magazine – the quarterly theoretical journal of the Revolutionary Communist International – get your copy here]

Communists have always been internationalists. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels concluded The Communist Manifesto with the evocative words: “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” This was inscribed on the banner of the First International, the Second International and the Third (Communist) International.

This principle of internationalism was central to the ideas of Lenin and the October Revolution. But 100 years ago, in the autumn of 1924, Stalin presented his theory of ‘socialism in one country’, which represented a fundamental departure from Marxism and laid the theoretical basis for the degeneration and eventual dissolution of the Communist International in 1943.

The impact of this false theory is still felt today. As a new generation turns towards the ideas of communism, it is imperative that we understand and defend the real, internationalist tradition of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Internationalism

Marxist internationalism is not simply rhetoric, or a moral principle; it reflects objective necessity.

Marx and Engels always argued that communism is not simply a good idea that will be imposed on the world. Rather, they explained that the basis of communism is to be found in the real, material conditions that exist under capitalism.

Prime among those conditions is the fact that capitalism is a global system. Every country is connected to and dominated by the world market. This is an elementary proposition for Marxists. Through the world market, production itself becomes global. Factories in one part of the world produce commodities using raw materials from another part, and machinery produced in a third part.

The production process involves tens and even hundreds of thousands of workers, with specific expertise and skills, as well as natural resources, from all over the world. This growing interconnectedness of the world economy was something already present in an embryonic form in Marx’s day. Marx and Engels wrote the following in The Communist Manifesto:

“In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.”^[1]

The bourgeoisie established the nation-state against the parochialism and localism of the feudal order, overcoming the limitations that local fiefdoms set upon the development of the productive forces. In this it played a progressive role. But for the past 150 years, even the nation-state has been insufficient. It has become a massive barrier to the further development of the productive forces, and is holding back the development of humanity.

The rise of modern imperialism actually reflects this contradiction between the international character of production and exchange under capitalism on the one hand, and the bourgeois nation-state on the other.

In his book, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin explained how the development of capitalist production had led to the dominance of gigantic, transnational monopolies and banks, which all strive for world domination, from the extraction of raw material to the capture of markets and fields for investment. In this way, capitalism partially ‘overcomes’ the limitation of the nation-state whilst intensifying the contradictions of the system as a whole to an unbearable degree. The result is staggering inequality, deep crises, and imperialist wars.

The monopolisation of the world market and supply chains spreading across the world show that the productive forces have far outgrown national markets. They find themselves increasingly fettered by the borders that separate one nation-state from another. What they called ‘globalisation’, i.e. the expansion of free trade, was an attempt to overcome precisely this limitation.

This matters for communists because a communist society can only be achieved on the basis of the highest development of the productive forces attained under capitalism, and that can only be achieved on an international scale. Again, as Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology:

“This development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business [Scheiße] would necessarily be reproduced.” ^[2]

Only on the basis of raising the productivity of labour could the working day be shortened, and the working class have the ability to participate fully in the running of society. It is the necessary material prerequisite for the abolition of class society.

One of the primary tasks of the socialist revolution is therefore precisely to liberate the productive forces from the straitjacket of the nation-state, whether that is in regards to the sharing of science, technical knowledge, or goods. It would enable genuine cooperation among workers, scientists, and industries all across the world:

“All-around dependence, this natural form of the world-historical cooperation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these [economic] powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them.” ^[3]

They continue to explain that the development of the productive forces already achieved under capitalism “makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others”.^[4]

In other words, internationalism forms part and parcel of the role of the working class in history, and it cannot be otherwise. When Marx and Engels talked about the working class having no country, this is what they meant.

In The Communist Manifesto, the founding document of the communist movement we find:

“National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.” ^[5] (Emphasis added.)

The reason for this is not only to break the inevitable blockade and military intervention of the hostile capitalist nations, but crucially: the building of even the ‘first phase of communist society’ – commonly referred to as socialism – requires the most advanced productive forces developed under capitalism, which are inherently international. This really is in essence the position of Marxism. Today, this is a hundred times more true than it was when The Communist Manifesto was written.

The ‘permanent’ revolution

This does not in any way mean that the workers of several countries must rise up and take power at exactly the same time. The very real presence of nation-states, each with their own national class struggles at different levels of development, means that workers will not conquer power in all countries all at once, but will first defeat the ruling class in a single country.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote:

“Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.”^[6]

Marx and Engels also recognised that workers could take power in a relatively backward country, before the workers in the most advanced countries. But for the construction of socialism it was essential that the revolution spread to other countries, and above all to the most advanced capitalist centre.

In 1850, when addressing the Communist League Central Committee, Marx addressed the future revolution in Germany, where a large section of the working class still operated under the guild system, split up across dozens of petty semi-feudal states:

“While the democratic petty bourgeois wish to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible […] it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, until the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians of these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians." ^[7] (Emphasis added.)

Marx talks about making the revolution “permanent”, in the sense of the revolution moving from the bourgeois-democratic tasks (such as national unification, in the case of Germany at that time) onto the socialist tasks – expropriating the bourgeoisie and conquering state power, and then spreading it from one country to another.

The Russian Revolution

For revolutionaries in Russia, the backward conditions posed a challenge. How was this general understanding about the need for socialism to be built on the most advanced productive forces to be applied to Russia? Clearly Russia, on its own, was not ready for socialism.

In 1905, Trotsky had sketched the answer to this question, in line with the revolutionary strategy outlined by Marx. Commenting on how capitalism has developed on a world scale, transforming the world into a single economic and political organism, Trotsky explained:

“This immediately gives the events now unfolding an international character, and opens up a wide horizon. The political emancipation of Russia led by the working class will raise that class to a height as yet unknown in history, will transfer to it colossal power and resources, and will make it the initiator of the liquidation of world capitalism, for which history has created all the objective conditions.”^[8]

That is, regardless of the backwardness that existed in Russia, the preconditions for socialism existed on a worldwide scale. The Russian workers could therefore begin the world revolution, which could then be completed in Europe. Trotsky’s strategy thus unified on the one hand the ripeness of the world economy for socialism, with the differing degrees of development and different tempos of the class struggle in different countries, and Russia in particular.

Under the intolerable pressure of the First World War, capitalism broke at its weakest link: the Tsarist Empire. Revolution broke out against the war and the autocracy in February 1917, and the tsar was replaced by a bourgeois-democratic ‘Provisional Government’. At the same time, workers and soldiers set up their own revolutionary councils, under the Russian name, ‘soviets’.

The Menshevik Party, which at that time had the support of the majority of Russian workers, entered the Provisional Government, claiming that the task of the workers was now to support the creation of a democratic state, not struggle for power.

They justified this policy on the basis that Russia was too backward to build socialism. Therefore, they reasoned, only the bourgeoisie could take power. They reasoned that only then, after a long, indeterminate period of capitalist development, would Russia finally be ripe for socialist revolution. In practice, this meant defending the weak and degenerate Russian bourgeoisie, supporting the imperialist war, halting land reform, and preparing to disarm the workers. In short, the Mensheviks placed themselves in the camp of the counter-revolution.

To this betrayal of the working class Lenin counterposed the slogan, ‘All power to the soviets!’ This meant nothing other than the seizure of power by the workers and peasants, and the overthrow of the bourgeois state. In April 1917, Lenin explained:

“The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution – which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie – to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.” ^[9] (Emphasis in original.)

With this perspective, the Bolshevik Party won the majority in the soviets and the workers seized power under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky in October.

But neither Lenin or Trotsky had suddenly become idealists, thinking that by taking power in Russia they could build socialism without the necessary material preconditions. They were perfectly aware that their programme only made sense in the context of the world revolution.

In a resolution (‘Resolution on the Current Situation’) of the Bolsheviks’ crucial April Conference, Lenin placed the Russian Revolution in its international context:

“The Russian revolution is only the first stage of the first of the proletarian revolutions which are the inevitable result of war.”^[10]

It was in the spirit of internationalism that the Russian Communist Party along with delegates from 33 other countries founded the Communist International in March 1919. This was set up precisely to spread the world revolution beyond the borders of the new workers’ state.

The same year, in his polemical defence of soviet power, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Lenin posed the following as the genuine, internationalist position in relation to imperialist war:

“If the war is a reactionary, imperialist war, […] my duty as a representative of the revolutionary proletariat is to prepare for the world proletarian revolution as the only escape from the horrors of a world slaughter. I must argue, not from the point of view of ‘my’ country (for that is the argument of a wretched, stupid, petty-bourgeois nationalist who does not realise that he is only a plaything in the hands of the imperialist bourgeoisie), but from the point of view of my share in the preparation, in the propaganda, and in the acceleration of the world proletarian revolution.”^[11]

Lenin, in other words, was preparing not just revolution in Russia, but across the world. He continues:

Political meeting at the Putilov Works in Petrograd, 1917 / Image: public domain

"The Bolsheviks’ tactics were correct; they […] were based, not on the cowardly fear of a world revolution, not on a philistine ‘lack of faith’ in it […] but on a correct (and, before the war and before the apostasy of the social-chauvinists and social-pacifists, a universally accepted) estimation of the revolutionary situation in Europe. These tactics were the only internationalist tactics, because they did the utmost possible in one country for the development, support and awakening of the revolution in all countries.”^[12]

And indeed, a revolutionary wave followed the Russian Revolution, in Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and other countries. However the ruling class and the Social Democracy succeeded in either crushing the movement or directing it into safer channels.

Right up until he was incapacitated by illness, Lenin continued to insist that the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union would be impossible without the victory of the socialist revolution elsewhere, and in the advanced capitalist countries in particular. In ‘Better Fewer, But Better’ (1923), he wrote:

“The general feature of our present life is the following: we have destroyed capitalist industry and have done our best to raze to the ground the medieval institutions and landed proprietorship, and thus created a small and very small peasantry, which is following the lead of the proletariat because it believes in the results of its revolutionary work. It is not easy for us, however, to keep going until the socialist revolution is victorious in more developed countries merely with the aid of this confidence, because economic necessity, especially under NEP [New Economic Policy], keeps the productivity of labour of the small and very small peasants at an extremely low level.”^[13] (Emphasis added.)

Importantly, he added:

“... we, too, lack enough civilisation to enable us to pass straight on to socialism, although we do have the political requisites for it.”^[14]

In other words, when Lenin spoke about steps towards socialism in the Soviet Union it was always in terms of preserving the workers’ state (the political requisite of socialism) until the revolution could spread to the West. Socialist construction in the USSR and world revolution were not two distinct and competing policies; one was inherently bound up with the other.

Stalin revises Marxism

After Lenin’s death the situation was as follows: the imperialist powers had not been able to crush the USSR and restore capitalism, because their own internal crises and powerful movements of the working class had prevented them from doing so. This created a new, temporary, but inherently unstable equilibrium.

The USSR had been severely weakened by the civil war and isolation from the world market under conditions of extreme economic backwardness. The working class was reduced to an even smaller size than before the revolution, and the workers struggled to participate fully in the soviets due to their harsh conditions of life.

The economic necessity of spreading the revolution was making itself brutally felt, particularly in this backward economy. As Marx predicted, the “struggle for necessities” did indeed continue and even got worse.

The USSR had to make concessions to the market to spur production. This was called the New Economic Policy (NEP). Lenin explained that precisely because the country was so backward, it was necessary to resort to capitalist methods until the victory of the working class in more advanced countries. Both Lenin and Trotsky consistently warned about the dangers that this would entail.

The NEP accelerated the development of inequality. It meant that capitalism was allowed to spread in agriculture, benefitting the wealthiest peasants, the ‘kulaks’. In industry and commerce a small class of capitalists, who became known as the ‘NEPmen’, was created.

The inequality also strengthened the state bureaucracy who by necessity had to administer it. The bureaucracy could lean on these bourgeois layers against the working class.

Compounding this problem was the defeat of the German Revolution in the autumn of 1923, which brought the period of revolutionary advance that followed the First World War to an end.

A new weariness set in. Doubts crept in about the programme of world revolution, which corresponded to the tiredness of the workers in the Soviet Union after three years of world war, two revolutions, and three years of civil war.

At the same time, in January 1924, Lenin tragically died. This opened the opportunity for a new political tendency to come out into the open.

Alien class pressures from the wealthier peasants and the NEPmen were increasingly reflected in the ruling Communist Party, and in particular its right wing. This tendency was epitomised by Nikolai Bukharin.

He claimed that socialism could be built at a “tortoise pace” and on a “wretched technical basis”. In other words, you could build socialism on a low level of the productive forces. This was in complete contradiction to a materialist understanding of history but it perfectly suited the alliance of the bourgeois layers and the bureaucracy who shared an aversion to the working class and revolution, which they rightly saw as a threat.

According to this argument, there was no need to go through the difficulties of world revolution; no need for more upheaval; we can go back to ‘normal’. Effectively, all that remained for the victory of socialism was to let the bureaucracy get on with its work.

In the autumn of 1924, Stalin delivered a series of lectures to young party activists, which was then published as a pamphlet, entitled Foundations of Leninism.

In the original version of the pamphlet from April 1924 one can find the following:

“For the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the efforts of one country are enough – to this the history of our own revolution testifies. For the final victory of socialism, for the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially a peasant country like ours, are not enough – for this we must have the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries.” ^[15] (Emphasis added.)

Although in general, the pamphlet is an attack on Trotsky and his Left Opposition, which had been formed in 1923, it still retained the position of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

But a few months later this edition was withdrawn from circulation and a new one produced, where the above passage had been replaced:

“But the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie and establishment of the power of the proletariat in one country does not yet mean that the complete victory of socialism has been ensured. After consolidating its power and leading the peasantry in its wake the proletariat of the victorious country can and must build a socialist society. But does this mean that it will thereby achieve the complete and final victory of socialism, i.e., does it mean that with the forces of only one country it can finally consolidate socialism and fully guarantee that country against intervention and, consequently, also against restoration? No, it does not. For this the victory of the revolution in at least several countries is needed.”^[16] (Emphasis added.)

Rather than achieving socialism through world revolution, the priority for the workers in a workers’ state, in this case the USSR, had been shifted to the building of socialism by themselves. The struggle to overthrow capitalism worldwide was maintained (for now), but now merely to guarantee the socialist society against outside intervention.

Stalin explained in Concerning Questions of Leninism what he considered the defect of the former position as follows:

“Its defect is that it joins two different questions into one: it joins the question of the possibility of building socialism by the efforts of one country – which must be answered in the affirmative – with the question whether a country in which the dictatorship of the proletariat exists can consider itself fully guaranteed against intervention…”^[17] (Emphasis in original.)

The Marxist, materialist understanding of the construction of socialism was thus edited out. Stalin removed references to Russia’s backwardness and the need for the revolution to spread to the advanced countries. The organisation of a fully socialist economy was now, according to Stalin, possible within the confines of not only a single state, but one as backward and impoverished as Russia in the 1920s.

Abandoning the world revolution

Stalin even half admitted that he was revising the position, when he wrote in Foundations of Leninism:

“Formerly, the victory of the revolution in one country was considered impossible, on the assumption that it would require the combined action of the proletarians of all or at least of a majority of the advanced countries to achieve victory over the bourgeoisie. Now this point of view no longer fits in with the facts.”^[18]

Stalin’s argument is completely dishonest, and deliberately mixes up the question of the seizure of power by the working class with the question of the construction of socialism. The point was never whether the proletariat could seize power in one country. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky argued that the revolution should spread from country to country, which presumes that it starts somewhere. The question posed was whether socialism could be built on the material resources of one country alone. That was Stalin’s revision.

“Long live the World October Revolution!” (1931), from the front cover of an issue of the state magazine Bezbozhnik u Stanka / Image: public domain

This straw man argument was then used as a weapon against Trotsky and the Left Opposition after Lenin’s death. By claiming that Trotsky and the Left Opposition had the absurd idea that the workers couldn’t launch a revolution in their own country unless it happened everywhere all at once, Stalin could then argue that the Russian Revolution had disproved their argument, and in the process he could dig up various quotes where Lenin ridiculed such an idea.

This distortion of basic ideas of Marxist theory for factional purposes would become an ingrained tradition of Stalinism.

Stalin even argued at the 15th conference of the Communist Party in 1926 that Marx and Engels’ position only applied to the earlier phase of capitalist development. According to him, in the epoch of imperialism, with the sharp contradictions between imperialist powers, the victory of socialism in individual countries was possible, through a breach in the “imperialist front”.^[19] This is turning things on its head. On the contrary, the extreme interdependence of the modern world economy shows that Marx and Engels’ analysis of capitalism is even more applicable in the present day than during their own lifetimes.

In 1928, Trotsky argued that national narrowness in politics was “the precondition for inevitable national-reformist and social patriotic blunders in the future”.^[20] The course of history has proven Trotsky right.

The adoption of the revisionist theory of ‘socialism in one country’ led to the abandonment of the world revolution by the leadership of the USSR. In its hands, the Communist International became nothing more than an instrument of foreign policy conducted from Moscow. And in 1943, the International was dissolved as a gesture to the Allies. The world party of socialist revolution, founded by Lenin, had been utterly destroyed.

Today, it has never been more urgent to lay solid foundations for a new communist movement, returning to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky’s internationalism. Only by rearming the workers’ movement with these ideas will we be able to secure the victory of the world communist revolution.

References

[1] K Marx, F Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, Classics of Marxism, Vol. 1, Wellred Books, 2013, pg 6

[2] K Marx et al., ‘From The German Ideology’, The Revolutionary Philosophy of Marxism, Wellred Books, 2018, pg 260-261

[3] ibid., pg 260

[4] ibid., pg. 261

[5] K Marx, F Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, Classics of Marxism, Vol. 1, Wellred Books, 2013, pg 20, emphasis added

[6] ibid. pg 13

[7] K Marx, F Engels, ‘Address of the Central Authority to the League’, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 10, Progress Publishers, 1978, pg 277-278, emphasis added

[8] L Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects, Wellred Books, 2020, pg 256

[9] V I Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’, Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 24, 1974, pg 22, emphasis in original

[10] V I Lenin, ‘Resolution on the Current Situation’, Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 24, 1974, pg 310

[11] V I Lenin, ‘The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky’, Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 28, 1965, pg 286-287

[12] ibid. pg 292

[13] V I Lenin, ‘Better Fewer but Better’, Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 33, 1966, pg 498, emphasis added

[14] ibid. pg 501

[15] Quoted in L Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Wellred Books, 2015, pg 211, emphasis added

[16] J Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, International Publishers, 1970, pg 45, emphasis added

[17] J Stalin, ‘Concerning Questions of Leninism’, Works, Vol. 8, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954, pg 66, emphasis in original

[18] J Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, International Publishers, 1970, pg 44

[19] J Stalin, ‘The Social-Democratic Deviation in our Party’, Report Delivered at the Fifteenth All-Union Conference of the C.P.S.U.(B.), Works, Vol. 8, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954, pg 261

[20] L Trotsky, The Third International after Lenin, Pathfinder Press, 1970, pg 212