intensification of the class struggle under socialism

Origins and Formulation

The doctrine was first broached on 9 July 1928, when Stalin addressed the Central Committee plenum in his speech 'Industrialisation and the Grain Problem', arguing that the grain-procurement crisis and kulak resistance signalled an intensifying class struggle. It received its definitive theoretical form at the joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission held 16–23 April 1929, in Stalin's speech 'The Right Deviation in the C.P.S.U.(B.)'.

In section IV(b), 'The Intensification of the Class Struggle', Stalin refuted Nikolai Bukharin's theory of the kulaks 'growing into' socialism and declared:

The dying classes are resisting, not because they have become stronger than we are, but because socialism is growing faster than they are, and they are becoming weaker than we are. And precisely because they are becoming weaker, they feel that their last days are approaching and are compelled to resist with all the forces and all the means in their power. Such is the mechanics of the intensification of the class struggle and of the resistance of the capitalists at the present moment of history.

Ideological Function

According to historian Timothy Snyder, the theory served the Stalinist regime in two ways: as self-justification for the failures of collectivisation (blame fell on 'saboteurs' rather than on the programme itself) and as an ideological tool converting any problem into evidence of enemy action, and enemy action into evidence of socialist progress. Failure thus became proof of success.

Beginning with the Shakhty trial (1928), the doctrine was turned against the technical intelligentsia, old specialists, kulaks, and eventually the 'Right deviation' inside the Party itself. Stalin argued that the class enemy could infiltrate the Bolshevik Party, and called tolerance of internal dissent 'rotten liberalism', insisting that purges were periodically necessary.

Criticism and Repudiation

Even at the time, Martemyan Ryutin, in his secretly circulated manuscript 'Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship', denounced the theory as groundless and designed to justify the political repression of the Russian peasantry. Bukharin and Leon Trotsky argued that no bourgeoisie remained in the Soviet Union to struggle against and that the very definition of socialism precluded antagonistic classes.

Nikita Khrushchev, in his Secret Speech at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, condemned the doctrine as 'a theoretical justification of the mass terror policy' and formally repudiated it. György Lukács, writing in 1968, criticised the theory as non-Marxist, arguing that it served Stalin's tactical manoeuvres by casting the USSR as being in a state of permanent civil war, thereby excluding every factual theoretical discussion.

In China, Mao Zedong initially criticised Stalin's theory in 1956, but after China entered the primary stage of socialism (1956–58), he adopted a variant, the theory of Continuous Revolution, under the slogan 'Never forget class struggle!', which later underpinned the Cultural Revolution.