Ideological prostration

....They are trying to hypnotize, or rather stun, the party with the five-year plan. We do not deny its significance. But the question is posed as if it were a matter of an abstract economic problem, of finding a dynamic proportionality between the various aspects of the economy. The political side of the matter is reduced to administrative pressure on the kulak and the struggle by the apparatus purely against the right deviation. We do not, we repeat, deny the significance of the kulak problem, and we do not underestimate the danger of the right deviation. But there is a broader question: . What is the real grouping of forces and tendencies in the country, what forces are consciously behind the five-year plan, what does that great silent force, the party, think?

Any bureaucratic dullard will reply emphatically that the whole proletariat, all the poor peasants and all the middle peasants are for the five-year plan; against the five-year plan are the kulaks, the private producers, and the right-wing renegades. This "sociological" answer may be given at any time of day or night. It is for such expositions that the Molotovs and Kaganoviches of this world exist. The unfortunate thing is only that the secretarial theory abolishes the very question of the real mood of various layers of the peasantry, of groupings within the proletariat, formed on the basis of their real life experience, and of the mood of the party itself. Or rather, the bureaucratic "sociology," following the practice of the apparatus, abolishes the party itself as a living force which from day to day orients itself in a situation, criticizes, thinks about the processes which have taken place politically in the country, warns the leadership of danger, renews the leadership, introduces necessary changes into a set course, ensures timely political maneuvers, is conscious of itself as the pivot of the country, and is always ready to take up the struggle for the positions of October. Is this first, necessary, basic condition present? No. Otherwise why would the Central Committee fear the party, and the general secretariat fear the Central Committee?

The Central Committee does not know the party, since the party does not know itself, since watching the party through secret informers in no way replaces the free expression of ideas within the party, and, finally and above all, since the Central Committee's fear of the p arty is supplemented by the party's fear of the Central Committee.

Nor is correct leadership thinkable without honest political information, just as the construction of railroads is unthinkable without knowledge of the contours of the land. Formal democracy has wide sources and possibilities of information from the point of view of the rule of the bourgeoisie and in the interests of the preservation of that rule. This is one of those strong points of bourgeois democracy which has enabled it to dispense with a regime of police absolutism. Proletarian democracy is faced with much more gigantic tasks than bourgeois democracy. The first condition for correct leadership of the Soviet republic, surrounded by very powerful and experienced foes, is the constant, daily, active information of the leadership, above all, of course, through a fully alive party. The absence of party democracy kills Soviet democracy. This is precisely the state of affairs now. Politics is being carried on with the lights out....

ON SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY AND IDEOLOGICAL PROSTRATION 

November 1929

Writings of Leon Trotsky 1929

by Leon Trotsky