A century ago, from December 18-31 of 1925, the 14th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — the first congress following Vladimir Lenin’s death — endorsed the policy known as “Socialism in One Country.” The policy argued that a single country could construct an advanced socialist economy within its national borders.
This policy was a complete reversal of the Party’s previous internationalist position. However, it didn’t come as a surprise to the Congress. It had already been presented a year and a half earlier, as part of the struggle between the rising Stalinist bureaucracy and the Left Opposition.
The notion that socialism could be built in a single country was completely alien to Marxism. From Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to the leading Marxist figures in the early 20th century, including Lenin, the struggle for socialism always required an internationalist outlook.
In his 1847 piece The Principles of Communism, which was essentially the draft of The Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote:
“Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone? No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.”
And in 1918, immediately after the Russian Revolution, Lenin clarified:
“All this [the Russian Revolution] is not enough for the complete victory of socialism, you say? Of course it is not enough. One country alone cannot do more. But…it would still be found that Bolshevik tactics have brought enormous benefit to socialism and have assisted the growth of the invincible world revolution.”
A Scientific Impossibility
Socialism — a society based on meeting human need, devoid of class divisions and exploitation for the sake of profit — requires a high level of economic development sufficient to eliminate all scarcity in society. This means productive levels and techniques far surpassing those offered by the decaying capitalist system. The only way to achieve such high levels of production requires thorough democratic structures throughout the entire society. This definitional requirement for socialism was erased, mischaracterized, and distorted by a series of so-called “socialist” bureaucratic regimes from the Soviet Union to China to Vietnam, who saw their role as competing with capitalism on a level playing field. In truth, these countries never reached a sufficient level of development (or democracy) to have achieved socialism.
Capitalism embodies an inherent contradiction. On the one hand it is a system of constant expansion and therefore requires global spread. On the other hand, it is organized on a national basis and cannot overcome the limitations of the nation state. The imperialist stage of capitalism, during which the productive forces of capitalism decisively broke through national boundaries, began in the late 19th century, and was necessary to achieve ever higher levels of productivity in society.
Socialism, due to its necessity to expand production far beyond capitalism in order to provide for the basic needs of every person around the world, could not possibly go backwards, driving the productive forces back into national boundaries. It must therefore leap beyond the national boundaries and introduce global collaboration, a concept foreign to competitive and war-torn capitalism.
The neoliberal era of capitalism, beginning in the mid-late 1970s, caused some to believe that capitalism had overcome its reliance on the nation state. The rise of nationalism and militarism in the US and globally over the last decade, alongside the end of neoliberalism, has now proved this as sorely false. Capitalism is incapable of truly “globalizing” the international market.
In addition, the attempt to construct socialism in a single country while imperialism still rules the earth means that the threat of capitalist restoration by economic or military means remains ever-present. However, even if peaceful coexistence with capitalism could somehow miraculously be achieved, as Stalin and Khrushchev later attempted, foreign trade means that trade, pricing, and other conditions in the workers’ state still rely on the capitalist mode of production, i.e. on exploitation for the sake of profit. These conditions are an impossible ground for socialism to develop in.
In other words, socialism cannot exist as islands surrounded by a capitalist ocean.
Revolutionary Defeats & Change Of Course
Leading up to and during the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks understood that the revolution couldn’t succeed in one country, especially in an underdeveloped, war-torn, semi-feudal country like Russia. They were counting on the revolution to spread internationally. They even launched the Communist International in 1919 for this task. And indeed, workers across the world took inspiration from 1917 and rose up against their oppressors in a series of revolutions.
Possibly the most important of them was the German Revolution, a series of attempts by the working class to seize power from the exploiters and militarists of Europe’s powerhouse.
Despite having the power to change world history and establish a new world based on workers’ democracy and solidarity, these revolutions failed due to a series of mistakes by their leaders. The main responsibility for these defeats lay with the reformist leaders of the Social Democratic parties but, over time, bad advice and directives from the rising Soviet bureaucracy itself played a role. Without successful revolutions in Europe’s economically advanced countries, the Soviet Union was further isolated.
Conditions in the early 1920s were ripe for Stalin’s bureaucracy to seize power. Industrial workers, employed in big, concentrated workplaces — advanced industries where goods were produced — are key for democratic control of a planned economy because they are organized and have habits of cooperation and collective decision-making. But the majority of the population were not workers but peasants, scattered throughout the countryside and living in semi-feudal conditions. The death of millions on the battlefields of both World War I and the following three years of civil war caused mass devastation. The Russian Civil War especially decimated many of the most politically advanced, class-conscious workers, who volunteered for the Red Army in the tens of thousands to defend their revolution. The war also played a central role in tearing down the economy.
A defining event was the defeat of the 1923 revolution in Germany, casting a decisive blow to the immediate prospects of the Russian Revolution spreading to the advanced capitalist economies. These conditions led to the conservative right wing of the Communist Party to pivot away from expanding the workers’ revolution and formulate the theory of “Socialism in One Country.”
Peace With Capitalism
Following the Congress’s endorsement of “Socialism in One Country” and making it the government’s main focus in foreign policy, the bureaucracy turned the fight for international revolution into its opposite. This meant a new policy of peace with the oppressor nations in order to buy time until socialism could be achieved in Russia. Hailed as a necessary tactic, this policy was in fact a result of a deep theoretical mistake. If the option to construct socialism in a single country were possible, this policy could be debated and maybe even justified as a tactical and temporary maneuver. However, as we explained, the very idea itself is scientifically an impossibility.
What occurred, in reality, was that Stalin and his collaborators had challenged the Marxist understanding of what socialism actually is. The only way to achieve economic and technological advancement sufficient to answer everyone’s needs is not only a planned economy, but a democratically planned economy, and one based on an international level. This was, in fact, opposite from the direction the Soviet Union was heading.
The Soviet Union in 1925 was still in the midst of the “New Economic Policy” (NEP) — a policy launched a few years prior in order to restart the wheels of economic development through limited private ownership after the devastation of the civil war. This was seen as a necessary temporary concession without which a socialist economy could not develop. Initially successful, the NEP led to the doubling of production in 1922-23 and by 1926 production grew back to pre-war levels. By that time, the rising bureaucracy saw the NEP as a more fundamental policy, to develop hand-in-hand with the “socialist economy.” This was a complete distortion of the theory of socialist development.
In reality, grain and raw materials arrived from the countryside faster than industry could develop in the cities, leading peasants to not receive payments in industrial machinery or loans. This turned many peasants away from producing for the cities, instead returning to subsistence production, trading on the black market, or going on strikes, causing shortages. Additionally, as Trotsky pointed out in his masterpiece The Revolution Betrayed: “A small commodity economy inevitably produces exploiters. In proportion as the villages recovered, the differentiation within the peasant mass began to grow…The growth of the kulak (rich peasant, employing labor) far outstripped the general growth of agriculture. The policy of the government under the slogan “face to the country” was actually a turning of its face to the kulak.”
Only a couple of years later, fearing the growing power and wealth of the kulaks, the bureaucracy made a 180-degree turn calling to completely eliminate private ownership in the country and concentrate all agricultural production in the state’s hands. The NEP gave way to a five-year plan of production. Seeing no contradiction in their zigzagging policies, the new five-year plan was also seen as part of building socialism in one country.
The five-year plan was heavily top-down and required the labor of all of Soviet society, including hundreds of thousands of prisoners, many of whom were Marxists who had fought Stalin’s regime. Far from an internationally democratic plan, Soviet development was based on the narrow wishes of its leading figures. In spite of that, the Soviet economy grew to levels surpassing all advanced capitalist countries aside from the US. This rapid growth was due to the planned nature of the economy, even if it was administered in a top-down way, rather than democratically.
From here on, following the new policy and the need to protect the Soviet economy from foreign intervention, the bureaucracy argued that the role of Communist Parties around the world should be to appease, or collaborate, with what they saw as the “progressive” wings of the ruling capitalist classes while focusing their struggle on the reactionary elements. The Communist International shifted from being an instrument of world revolution to being an instrument of the foreign policy of the Soviet bureaucracy.
The Chinese Working Class—First Victim of the Policy
At the same time, earth-shaking events were taking place in China. The Chinese working class rose up against the imperialist powers which maintained warlordism and semi-feudal relations: the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27.
Seeking allies for its survival, the rising Soviet bureaucracy argued that the Chinese Communists should align with the main nationalist and capitalist Kuomintang party of the reactionary Chiang Kai-shek, rather than wage an independent political fight. This was far from a temporary tactical alliance between the working class and the national capitalists. As part of their joint venture, the Kuomintang was financed and militarily trained by the Soviet Union, Chiang Kai-shek was invited as a guest of honor in Russia, and the Kuomintang was admitted as a sympathizing member of the Communist International! Members of the Chinese Communist Party were instructed to join the Kuomintang and follow their orders. The revolution was concluded by the Kuomintang’s machine guns massacring tens of thousands of workers, including many members of the Communist Party.
The policy of collaboration was also on full display when, in 1926, due to the Soviet bureaucracy’s peace with the British labor leadership, the potentially revolutionary general strike in Britain was brought to a premature end.
With the instructions of the Soviet bureaucracy to the Communists to align with progressive capitalist forces, a series of “Popular Front” governments were constructed globally, leading to disastrous and bloody end without fail—from 1930s France to 1960s Indonesia to 1970s Chile. In the US, the Communist Party buried itself within the Democratic Party, failing to advance an independent party of the working class, and in 1948 the Palestinian Communist Party was instructed to support the newly founded Israeli state as it was expelling 750,000 Arab Palestinians from their homes.
The Stages Theory
“Socialism in One Country” was a theoretical error meant to explain the failed revolutions and justify the bureaucracy’s turn away from internationalism. From one theoretical error was born a historic strategic disaster. No longer a question of buying time, the theory of “Socialism in One Country” was developed into a foundational theory of stages. This theory was originally developed in Russia by the Mensheviks in the early 1900s, who dogmatically tried to fit Russia into the mold of the French Revolution, meaning that the working class should do everything in its power to help the capitalist class come to power and eliminate feudalism, and that only later in the future, long after a capitalist liberal democracy was established, could the struggle for socialism begin. This was of course in complete contradiction to the experience of the Russian Revolution itself, which overthrew the autocracy and established a workers’ state.
The Mensheviks had used the theory to oppose the Russian Revolution itself as premature, failing to understand the reactionary nature of the capitalist class in the 20th century. The theory’s adoption by the Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the party that had led the Russian Revolution, finalized the death of the world revolution for years to come.
By the time World War II broke out, the Stalinists had aligned themselves with the likes of British and US imperialism under the pretense that they were the “progressive” capitalists in the fight against fascism. All pretense of one day expanding the revolution was thrown out of the window. Seeing no reason to upset the new friends of the Soviet Union, the Communist International was finally dissolved in 1943.
The Left Opposition
These historic betrayals and world-shaking events are examples of how big the decisions taken by the 14th Congress of the Communist Party were. By the time of this Congress, Leon Trotsky, one of the main leaders of the Russian Revolution, had been defeated by Stalin’s maneuvers and dictatorial regime. He was already removed from any important position, despite having previously been the founder and head of the Red Army which defeated the imperialist armies during the Russian Civil War. A year later, he was expelled from the party, then exiled from the Soviet Union. He escaped Stalin’s agents until he was finally murdered in Mexico in 1940.
By the time of the Congress, Trotsky and his supporters had been organized for several years as the Left Opposition, arguing against the rising Stalinist bureaucracy, for working-class independence, and for the international struggle for socialism.
In contrast to the deeply mistaken idea of building socialism in a single country, which Trotsky at one time characterized as a “sort of a Monroe Doctrine for the building of Socialism in Russia,” the Opposition put forward the theory of permanent (or “uninterrupted”) revolution, an idea actually rooted in Marxist thought and a scientific analysis of society. One key aspect of it explains that it’s not enough for the working class to fight for socialism, but that to succeed, the struggle must inevitably grow from the national into the international. Without such development, socialism can simply not be built. A “midway” scenario of attempting to contain socialist development under bureaucratic rule in a single country will always lead either to the working class taking political power away from the leadership or the capitalist class taking power back. The latter eventually took place in the early 90s in the Soviet Union and remains a real danger today in countries such as Cuba.
The Left Opposition also argued against the destructive policy of the popular front with capitalist forces and in favor of a working-class united front—striving for a common struggle with other working-class organizations, such as trade unions and other socialist parties, while maintaining the independent right to debate different ideas. The Opposition used the united front approach to argue against both the popular front, as well as the ultra-sectarian “Third Period” approach taken at different times by the Stalinists, when they falsely characterized the Social Democratic parties as a form of fascism and therefore disqualified any common work with other organizations. The united front, if it had been implemented, could have defeated fascism and blocked Hitler’s road to power in the following decade, forever changing world history.
By that time, tens of thousands of members of the Left Opposition were languishing in Stalin’s dungeons, expelled from the country, worked to death in labor camps, or executed. Millions more suffered the same consequences. Mass executions and the wiping out of every Bolshevik leader of the 1917 revolution left Stalin’s bureaucracy with no real opposition to its distorted ideas.
Fight For International Socialism Today
The leadership of the Communist Party began its degeneration around 1923 (although Lenin and Trotsky had already raised alarms earlier), accelerated by the defeat of the German Revolution and the Stalinist bureaucracy stifling debates on the real causes of that defeat. This was accompanied by debates on the internal economic policies that developed from the dire situation the new workers’ state found itself in. Based on continuous misreading of world events, the leadership zigzagged frantically under Stalin’s rule from aligning itself with “progressive” capitalist powers (1924-1928), to a complete break with and denunciation of all non-Communist parties (the “Third Period,” 1928-1934), to then a complete turn towards forming friendships with imperialism under the Popular Front policy. It follows that as a result of these policies, most Communist Parties would later inevitably abandon altogether the idea of revolution and become reformers of the capitalist system as well as overseers of neoliberal austerity.
During his exile in the 1930s, Trotsky identified 1925 as the year that Stalin’s counterrevolution won. A century later, following a hundred years of revolutions and defeats, the world is again rocked by mass protests and uprisings, often bringing down corrupt and repressive capitalist governments—from Nepal to Madagascar to Serbia.
The lessons of the Russian Revolution and the conditions that followed it are absolutely necessary for today’s revolutionaries. This is especially the case in the advanced imperialist countries, where the drive for nationalism and war is an increasingly defining character, but also in those neocolonial countries that imperialism sees as its playground. These lessons include the historic debates of 1923-25. Just like the masses in the neocolonial countries today, the Russian workers were fighting the grip of imperialism in a country hammered down by decades of exploitation, debt, corruption, and unimaginable inequality.
Before Stalin acted to effectively strangle the prospect of world revolution, genuine Bolsheviks were reaching out to workers in the advanced capitalist countries to fight together and build a new, socialist society, based on workers’ control, prosperity, and peace for all. With new imperialist wars and exploitation, the task of rebuilding a genuine international movement is as important as ever.
