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The struggle against bureaucracy
Trotsky invented the infamous term `Stalinist bureaucracy'. While Lenin was still living, late in 1923, he was already maneuvering to seize power within the Party:
`[B]ureaucratization threatens to ... provoke a more or less opportunistic degeneration of the Old Guard'.
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Trotsky, The New Course, p. 72.
In his opposition platform, written in July 1926, his foremost attack was against `unbridled bureaucratism'.
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Trotsky, The New Course, p. 85.
And once the Second World War had begun, Trotsky spent his time provoking the Soviet people in `acting against the Stalinist bureaucracy as it did previously against the Tsarist bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie.'
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Trotsky, Lettres aux travailleurs d'URSS (May 1940). La lutte antibureaucratique en URSS II: La révolution nécessaire 1933--1940 (Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1975), pp. 301--302.
Trotsky always used the word `bureaucracy' to denigrate socialism.
Given this context, it might come as some surprise that throughout the thirties, the Party leaders, principally Stalin, Kirov and Zhdanov, devoted a lot of energy to the struggle against the bureaucratic elements within the Party and State apparatus.
How did the struggle against bureaucratization and bureaucracy define itself in the thirties?
- Anti-Communists against `bureaucracy'
- Bolsheviks against bureaucratization
- Reinforce public education
- Regularly purge the Party
- The struggle for revolutionary democracy
- The Party elections in 1937: a `revolution'
Fri Aug 25 09:03:42 PDT 1995