The Marxist Theory of the State and the Collapse of Stalinism With a New Introduction by the...

8/3/2019 The Marxist Theory of the State and the Collapse of Stalinism With a New Introduction by the Socialist Fight Group

1/21

Socialist Fight Page

Leon Trotsky: I am confident of the victory of the Fourth International; Go Forward!

The Marxist Theory of the State and the Collapse of Stalinism By the LTT

New introduction by the International Trotskyist

Current

The International Trotskyist Current (a forerunner ofthe Socialist Fight Group) is proud to republish this

1995 document of the Workers International

League. This document clarifies and develops the

Marxist theory of the state and is a powerful weapon for

forging a genuine revolutionary party. It defended and clari-

fied Trotskys defence of the USSR as a deformed workers

state and it elaborated in detail both the way that Stalinism

overturned the bourgeois property relations in Europe in late

1947 and early 1948 and it also spelled out in detail how the

film was run in reverse when these deformed and degener-

ated workers states were returned to capitalism between

1989 and 1991. It clarified the political problems which con-tributed to the decent into centrism of the Fourth Interna-

tional in 1950-51.

It had real political influence beyond its own organisation. It

made a significant political contribution to politically clarify-

ing the international opposition current in the League for a

Revolutionary Communist International. It is quoted exten-

sively in the Declaration of the Proletarian Faction which was

the basis of the international opposition and produced by

the Communist Workers Group (CWG) of New Zealand,

which went on to form the Liaison Committee of Militants

for a Revolutionary Communist International (LCMRCI).

Workers Power adopted the LTT line in 2000 on RichardBrenners motion who admitted that he was convinced by

the Trotsky quotes in the piece. However there are a number

of problems with the text when we come to the restoration

of capitalism in the USSR. Without capitulating to the

democratic counter-revolution as many of the right-centrist

Trotskyist groups and the LRCI/Workers Power did, it was

soft on 'democracy' and did not consistently make imperial-

ism the main enemy, which problem became worse in rela-

tion to Izetbegovi in Bosnia and the KLA in Kosovo, as they

adopted positions almost as bad as Workers Power.

The LTT should have opposed the pro-imperialist capitalist

restorationist leadership in the Baltic States and demanded

independent soviet states, as Trotsky did for the Ukraine in

1938. These movements were used by Russian restorationist

leaders like Yeltsin as a lever to begin the breakup of the

USSR. Secondly they should not have condoned any form of

political bloc with Yeltsin apart from one in defence of life

and limb. Saying that workers should have supported the

general strike, briefly mooted by Yeltsin, was a form of politi-

cal support as was rallying with Yeltsin at the White House.

But, whilst Yeltsin was the preferred agent of a section of the

imperialist before and after the coup surely the main enemy

of the Russian and therefore the world working class duringthe short period of the coup itself was Yanayev, it was he

who immediately threatened their lives and organisations

and so they were entitled to make a military but not a politi-

cal bloc even with Yeltsin (with the devil and his grand-

mother as Trotsky said). That being said the LTT took a far

better position than the LRCI and these mistakes could easily

have been corrected, as the LCMRCI did over Yeltsin.

Workers, apart from some miners leaders who supported

Yeltsin, took no action and supported neither side. As both

the coupists and Yeltsin were restorationists the matter at

issue was the pace of restoration and which sections of the

bureaucratic apparatus would retain which privileges after

that restoration. The coup, after all, was apparently directed

against Gorbachev not Yeltsin. Gorbachev had attempted

some defence of nationalised property relations up to then,

although with waning conviction. When he abandoned even

this with the Union Treaty breaking up the USSR Yanayevlaunched his coup because he saw the impending demise of

that section of the bureaucracy on which he was based.

But the coup clearly had as its prime target the working class

and its organisations, as its statements made clear. Had the

coupists succeeded, and there was international ambiguity

about who to support as the LTTs The Marxist theory of the

state points out, then restoration would have taken place at

a more planned and rationalised pace which would have

been better for capitalism in the former USSR and for world

imperialism, than the unplanned and gangsterist regime im-

posed by Yeltsin which had such disastrous effects. Yanayev

based his coup on the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June1989 and the follow up.

Stalinophobic thirdcampism

In Section 5 Trotsky and the Possible Paths of Counter-

Revolution we find,

Trotskys thinking underwent a corresponding evolution,

and increasingly saw the bureaucracy itself as the principal

source of internal danger. Indeed, his view that the Buk-

harinite right was the main danger and the Thermidorian

wing of the party led the Left Opposition to refuse to coun-

tenance any bloc on internal democracy. The characterisa-tion of the Right Opposition as the masked form of counter-

revolution, as the proxy for the kulaks and NEPmen, runs

through many of Trotskys writings in Alma Ata. Whatever

the merits of this position, the ease with which Stalin

crushed the Right made this too an increasingly less likely

scenario. This section does whiff slightly of Stalinophobic

thirdcampism and does suggest that Trotsky would have

been correct to make a bloc with the restorationist Bukharin.

A bloc of the left and right against the centre, even on

democracy would have been correctly seen internationally

as opportunism and would have invalidated his attempts to

fight Stalinist betrayals in Germany and Spain in particular.This issue came up at the time of the WIL split and provoked


2/21

Socialist Fight Page 2


The primary political criterion for us is not the transforma-

tion of property relations in this or another area, however

important these may be in themselves, but rather the

change in the consciousness and organisation of the world

proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former

conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this one, and

only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as a

whole, completely retains its reactionary character and re-

mains the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolu-

tion.

But the right of nations to self-determination cannot be al-

lowed to undermine the gains of the working class; it is in

the end only a tactic (although a very important one) used to

advance the class-struggle. As Trotsky said (and the docu-

ment acknowledges this) in relation to Georgia during the

Civil War,

We do not only recognize, but we also give full support to

the principle of self-determination, wherever it is directedagainst feudal, capitalist and imperialist states. But wherever

the fiction of self-determination, in the hands of the bour-

geoisie, becomes a weapon directed against the proletarian

revolution, we have no occasion to treat this fiction differ-

ently from the other principles of democracy perverted by

capitalism. The LTT document says,

Todays sectarians uphold a new programmatic norm: that

the defence of a workers state always takes the priority over

the fight of national self-determination. This position pro-

ceeds from the pessimistic assumption that the majority of

the working class does not, and will not, defend the workers

state, and that the action of the working class must be re-

placed by military means. Under Lenin and Trotsky, the revo-

lutionary prestige of the Soviet state was such that the de-

parture from the programmatic norm in Georgia could be

justified.

This is wrong. Trotsky, in In Defence of Marxism defends the

Red Armys invasion of Poland, the Baltic states and Finland

in 1939, although this violated these nations right to self-

determination, because of the security of the USSR was

threatened by Hitler and the Allies as WWII approached.

Section 8 The August Coup and the End of the Soviet Union is

also wrong in that it does not identify Yeltsin as imperialismsmain agent and so the main enemy (apart from at the time

of the coup) and does not defend the nationalised property

relations of the USSR,

Nevertheless as at August 19, 1991 the most important

task was to defend the democratic rights of the working class

and the minority nations against the immediate threat of the

coup, by mobilising for a general strike, and, if conditions

had ripened, by organising an armed uprising. Yeltsin had

not ceased to be an enemy, but in this situation he had to be

fought with different methods from those which were neces-

sary against the putschists.

Not democracy in the abstract but bourgeois democracy

As the Declaration of the Proletarian Faction pointed out,

The problem is that is it not democracy in the abstract but

bourgeois democracy which reflects at the level of state

power and ideology, bourgeois social relations. Here

"bourgeois right" already existing in the form of unequal

relations of distribution, are extended to represent the

"rights" of private property, ownership of the means of pro-

duction, contract etc. i.e. bourgeois relations of production.

Trotsky said: "Things must be called by their right names.

What is involved here is not the introduction of some disem-

bodied democracy but returning Russia to the capitalist

road"... "But the masses do not want the landowner, the

official, or the boss back. One must not overlook these

"trifles" in intoxicating oneself with commonplaces about

democracy". [Trotsky "Is Parliamentary Democracy

Likely?" [Writings, 1929 p. 55] "When people counterpose

democracy to the Soviets, what they usually have in mind is

simply the parliamentary system. They forget about theother side of the question, the decisive one at that - namely

that the October Revolution cleared the path for the greatest

democratic revolution in human history... The Soviet system

is not simply a form of government that can be compared

abstractly with the parliamentary form. Above all it is a new

form of property relations. What is involved at bottom is the

ownership of land, the banks, the mines, the factories, the

railroads." [p.54].

26 December 2009


3/21



In Russia the reactionary idea of national socialism in one country

is winning out. In the last analysis this could lead to the restoration

of capitalist relations in the country

Leon Trotsky at the funeral of Adolf Joffe, 1927

... either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the

world bourgeoisie in the workers state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into capitalism; or

the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to

socialism.

Leon Trotsky, 1938

1. The defence of the Soviet Union and its historical

significance

The collapse of Stalinism throughout Eastern Europe and

the ex-Soviet Union between 1989-1991 is the most impor-

tant development in world politics in the past half-century.

It has resulted in a major shift in the international balance

of power, and unleashed in its wake wars, economic crisis and up-

heaval throughout the region. Its tremors have been felt through-

out the world in nationalist and workers organisations, which for

the previous 75 years had defined themselves in one way or an-

other by their attitude to communism and In particular, its effects

have gripped all those who identify with Marxism. But the results of

much of the wave of reassessment and self-examination provoked

by the collapse have in the main proved woefully inadequate. It is

our contention that only by theoretically rearming the vanguard of

the working class in relation to this watershed experience can there

be a revolutionary future for Marxism.

The Russian question has been at the heart of many of the sharp-

est struggles between those who have identified themselves as

Trotskyists. By origin, it turned on whether the Soviet Union re-

mained a workers state which should be defended against imperi-

alism, particularly in the event of war. By extension, the Russian

question came to embrace the deformed workers states of East-

ern Europe, Asia and Cuba. Each time the question was presented

anew, particularly in the buffer zone debate of 1946-51 and the

controversy surrounding the Cuban Revolution from 1961-63, it

caused new crises among the descendants of Trotskys Fourth Inter-

national.

From the outset, revolutionaries identified this defence of the

Soviet Union primarily with the gains of the October Revolution,

rather than the territorial integrity of the Soviet state. Even in the

final stages of the death agony of the degenerated/deformed work-

ers states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the question of

military defence of the workers states remained relevant in so far

as imperialism continued to exert military pressure on them. But

the decisive blows of social counter-revolution were to be political

rather than military. With the coming to power of restorationist,

pro-imperialist governments, the military aspect of the Russian

question has been relegated to the status of a historical dispute.

But the controversy surrounding the class nature of these states

remains.

From the early 1920s, with the beginning of the New Economic

Policy (NEP), Trotsky and the Left Opposition fought both ultra-left

and right-centrist forces which abandoned the defence of the So-

viet Union on the grounds that a new form of class rule had arisen.

The first proponents of a state capitalist theory were the Menshe-

viks, and similar positions were put forward by Karl Kautsky and

some anarchists.

By 1926, the Democratic Centralism group, led by the old Bolshe-

viks V. M. Smirnov, T. Sapronov and N. Osinsky, had arrived at the

position that the workers state had been liquidated. Osinsky and

Sapronov developed versions of state capitalism. All three died in

the purges; however, their political trajectories were different.

Osinsky subsequently became a supporter of Bukharin. It seems

that surviving Democratic Centralists in the camps maintained adefencist position in the event of war, despite their position on the

nature of the state.

Hugo Urbahns, the chief theoretician of the Leninbund in Germany,

(which collaborated with the Left Opposition until 1930) also devel-

oped state capitalist views. Such positions persisted among some

German Trotskyists in the mid-1930s, and were also put forward by

Yvan Craipeau in the French Trotskyist movement. In 1937, James

Burnham and Joseph Carter of the SWP (US) advanced the thesis

that the Soviet Union was neither a workers nor a bourgeois state.

Within two years, they had been joined by SWP leaders Max

Shachtman and Martin Abern, and formed a heterogeneous group-

ing opposed to the designation of the Soviet Union as a degener-

ated workers state.Both Burnham and Shachtman were influenced by the erratic Italian

writer Bruno Rizzi, although they came to different conclusions.

Shachtman, who developed the theory of bureaucratic collectivism,

initially hedged his bets on the defence of the Soviet Union, and

held that it represented a higher stage than capitalism. However, in

the course of his evolution into a Cold War social democrat, he

came to see bureaucratic collectivism as lower rung on the ladder

of social progress than bourgeois democracy, and wound up sup-

porting US imperialism against the degenerated/deformed workers

states. Burnham, whose managerial revolution thesis foreshadowed

much of Cold War sociology (convergence theory), moved far more

rapidly to right-wing positions, urging imperialist intervention

against the Soviet Union.

The expansion of Stalinism after the Second World War gave a fresh

impetus to such theories. Ex-Trotskyist Tony Cliffs State Capitalism

in Russia and Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilass The New Class

were products of this period. The common thread uniting the vari-

ous new class, state capitalist, bureaucratic collectivist and manage-

rial revolution theses was that the crimes of Stalinism had resulted

in the overthrow of the workers state, and on this basis the military

defence of the USSR was excluded. The defence of the Soviet Un-

ion, or the post-war Stalinist states, they claimed, implied political

support for Stalinism. Trotsky, in contrast, had insisted that it did

not mean giving uncritical support to any of the variants of Stalinist

policy.

Although such currents were small and uninfluential in the workers

movement in the 1950s, and represented an adaptation to the Cold

War, they were also the result in part of the theoretical impasse

among the Trotskyists. In the 1940s, the vast majority of the FI re-

fused to recognise the emerging workers states in Eastern Europe.

The mechanical repetition of Trotskyist orthodoxy proved wholly

inadequate to meet the challenges of the post-war world. Worse

still, orthodox Trotskyism failed even to develop those pointers

within Trotskys writings which could have served as the starting

point for an analysis of the social overturns in Eastern Europe and

China.

While the decision to reverse this position and extend the FIs de-

fence of the Soviet Union to the deformed workers states was a

step in the right direction, the discussion during the buffer zone

debate demonstrated a high degree of methodological confusion,


4/21



which sowed the seeds of future crises. The debate surrounding the

Cuban revolution demonstrated that none of the theoretical issues

had been resolved. The United Secretariat (USFI) was formed in

1963 around broad agreement that Fidel Castro had created a

healthy workers state. Meanwhile, the rump of the International

Committee around Healys SLL and Lamberts PCI refused to recog-

nise that anything had qualitatively changed, and clung to the un-tenable position that Cuba remained a bourgeois state.

Without any unified theory to explain the emergence of deformed

workers states and frequently without even an adequate empiri-

cal knowledge of developments within the economies and societies

under Stalinist rule it was almost inevitable that the various

strands of Trotskyism would be plunged into crisis by the events

of 1989-91. Having failed to comprehend the process in one direc-

tion, it was unlikely to do so in the other. The suddenness of the

collapse of Stalinism only served to deepen the confusion. Chronic

theoretical crisis became acute political disorientation.

Optimists uncritically tail-ended the anti-Stalinist opposition

movements which emerged, in the belief that the long-awaited

political revolution was unfolding. The logic of their position thatwhatever replaced Stalinist rule was a step forward led them to

cheer the fall of the Berlin Wall and support the democratic

counter-revolution.

Pessimists, in the face of widespread illusions in bourgeois de-

mocracy and capitalist restoration, abandoned class politics from

the opposite direction, and became strategists of united fronts

with the decomposing bureaucracies, which they continued to re-

gard as having an intrinsic interest in the defence of the workers

states.

The programmatic divisions which existed between the various

revolutionary currents in 1989-91 have naturally carried over into

the theoretical plane, with the result that no consensus exists onthe class nature of the ex-Soviet Union and the states of Eastern

Europe. Most of the optimists continue to cling to the view that

workers states still exist, and that the counter-revolution has yet to

win a decisive victory. To think otherwise would be out of keeping

with their upbeat perspectives. Behind the optimism lurks a gloomy

assumptionthat the fall of the workers states will set back work-

ing class struggle for decades.

For the pessimists, the failure of a Reiss faction to emerge within

the bureaucracy has led them further into a sectarian wilderness

inhabited by fascism and world historic defeats. The absolute dis-

tinction they drew between Stalinism and social democracy has

been disproved by reality in so far as Stalinism has made a politi-

cal comeback in some countries, it has done so by reinventing itselfas a pro-market social democracy.

The largest of the Fourth Internationals, the United Secretariat

(USFI), is gripped by paralysis and has no clear, agreed position. In

keeping with its federal structure, its last world congress in 1990

encompassed both those who saw the reunification of Germany as

a liberating event which should be toasted with champagne and

others who saw it as the greatest defeat for the working class since

1933!

Socialist Action, USFI sympathising section in the United States,

puts forward the following thesis: The situation in these countries

[Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union] can be summed up

roughly as degenerating workers states in transition to capitalism

under the political rule of a government based on an alliance be-

tween bureaucrats and gestating comprador capitalists. But, as far

as a definition of the state goes, this is clearly a fudged position. On

the other hand, some supporters of the USFI majority appear to be

moving towards the position that bourgeois states have been re-

stored.

For LO, and presumably for its international tendency, the UCI, as

well, the attempted social counter-revolution aimed at transform-

ing Soviet society into a capitalist society ... has started in a legalsense but is in reality far from being completed, although a small

minority within LO holds that the state has become the instrument

of the bourgeois restoration, in other words simply a bourgeois

state.

The debate on the class nature of the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern

Europe is not a dry, academic issue. There is no Chinese Wall

separating theory from perspectives and programme. What is at

stake is a fundamental theoretical challenge from which definite

political conclusions are drawn. For those who set out to overthrow

capitalism, the ability to understand the processes of revolution

and counter-revolution is not an optional extra; it is fundamental in

order to be able to intervene in them. Five years after the collapse

of Stalinism in Eastern Europe, and three years after the end of theSoviet Union, it is high time that Marxists stopped whistling to keep

up their spirits and took up this challenge.

2. Mechanical Materialism and the Theory of the State

Those who still regard the countries of Eastern Europe and

the ex-Soviet Union as deformed/degenerated workers

states rest their case with varying degrees of sophistica-

tion on the continued existence of predominantly nation-

alised economies. Despite the existence of bourgeois restorationist

governments, the state remains, they argue, the superstructural

reflection of the base. Taken in isolation, some of Trotskys writings

can appear to support such a position. Those who care to look will

find numerous examples of political shorthand, where Trotskyappears to equate the existence of the workers state with the sur-

vival of nationalised property; for instance: So long as the forms of

property that have been created by the October Revolution are not

overthrown, the proletariat remains the ruling class.

The task of Marxists, however, is not to mindlessly repeat sacred

texts, but to grasp the underlying method of Marxism. To begin to

provide a definition of the class nature of the ex-Soviet Union, it is

necessary to return to the most basic question what is a workers

state?

According to Trotskys succinct definition, The class character of

the state is determined by its relation to the forms of property in

the means of production and by the character of the forms ofproperty and productive relations which the given state guards and

defends. This implies a dialectical rather than a mechanical rela-

tionship between base and superstructure: it is not merely a ques-

tion of the existing forms of property but of those which the state

defends and strives to develop.

Underlining this approach, Lenin argued in early 1918 that: No

one, I think, in studying the question of the economic system of

Russia, has denied its transitional character. Nor, I think, has any

Communist denied that the term Socialist Soviet Republic implies

the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to so-

cialism, and not that the new economic system is recognised as a

socialist order.

Thus, despite the fact that between 1917 and 1918, the Bolsheviksruled over a bourgeois economy, only economistic pedants would


5/21



deny that the infant soviet regime was a workers state. Not only

did workers hold state power directly through soviets, but the So-

viet regime was committed to expropriating the bourgeoisie.

Elsewhere, we have attempted the following definition: At root, a

workers state is one in which the bourgeoisie is politically sup-

pressed, leading to its economic expropriation as a class. This is

what such apparently disparate events as the October Revolution of1917 and the bureaucratic overturns in Eastern Europe, Asia and

Cuba after 1945 have in common We reject both purely

economic and purely political definitions of a workers state.

History abounds with examples of contradiction between the state

and economic forms, which demonstrate that the class character of

the state cannot be defined in purely mechanical terms. For in-

stance, feudal states continued to exist during the formative period

of merchant capital in Europe. In this century, Marxists have recog-

nised as bourgeois states both countries which contain many sur-

vivals from pre-capitalist economic formations and countries in

which substantial sections of the means of production have been

nationalised (e.g. Algeria, Angola, Burma, Ethiopia, Libya, Mozam-

bique, Syria, etc). Among what we previously recognised as de-formed workers states were countries with numerous pre-

capitalist survivals and/or significant private sectors within their

economies. Moreover, most of the countries of Eastern Europe had

large state sectors prior to 1947-48 the period most Trotskyists

identify as marking the emergence of deformed workers states.

The cutting edge of distinction between bourgeois states and work-

ers states is not some decisive degree of nationalisation (Militant/

CWI), nor the existence of central planning (Workers Power/

LRCI), nor the alleged commitment of the state apparatus to de-

fend the socialised forces of production (ICL and IBT), but which

class interests the economy and the state apparatus ultimately

serve.

Neither elements of private ownership on the one hand, nor exten-

sive nationalisation on the other, in and of themselves, determine

the class character of the state, because the state is at least partly

autonomous from the economy. This is why the character of the

state and the economy can change at different speeds. For exam-

ple, the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s was a concession

to private capital forced on the Bolsheviks in the difficult circum-

stances of the period, which was at least initially within the

overall framework of defending working class interests. In contrast,

the Chinese Stalinists policy today of encouraging private enter-

prise in the special economic zones is preparing the restoration of

capitalism.

Militants theory of proletarian Bonapartism is the crassest exam-ple of vulgar materialism in awe of nationalised property. The

states which Militant characterises as workers states , Angola,

Burma etc, were capitalist states from their inception. The high

degree of nationalisation carried out by the nationalist petty-

bourgeoisie or army officers were the basis for the emergence of a

bourgeois class, whose interests were defended by the state appa-

ratus and the legal system.

3. Workers Power: Economism and the State

On the face of things, the most sophisticated economist

attempt to theorise the origin of the deformed/

degenerate workers states and defend the view that,along with the ex-Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern

Europe remain workers states, has come from Workers Power and

the LRCI.

According to Workers Power, the degenerate workers state is char-

acterised by three main features: statification of the decisive parts

of the means of production; their co-ordination and functioning

according to the objectives set by the ruling bureaucratic caste,

which necessarily involves the negation of the law of value withinthe state; the protection of this system from disruption by the ex-

ternal law of value through a state monopoly of foreign trade.

Faithful to this economist method, Workers Power has tried to

isolate a defining moment to date the emergence of deformed/

degenerate workers states. Thus, by the spring of 1947, with the

inauguration of the first five year plan, the process of the creation

of a bureaucratically degenerate workers state in Yugoslavia was

complete Similarly China: The introduction of planning in 1953 on

the clear basis of subordinating the operation of the law of value,

marks the establishment of a degenerate workers state in China.

And although by the summer of 1960, Castro had broken deci-

sively with the Cuban and US bourgeoisie, Workers Power places

the formation of the Cuban workers state as 1962, from the im-plementation of the first five year plan the intervening two years

being occupied by a bureaucratic anti-capitalist workers govern-

ment, which finally resolved dual power. (Quite how dual power

could exist with the bourgeoisie already suppressed and expropri-

ated, and the working class demobilised remains a mystery!)

In its quest to discover elaborate new, watertight schema, Workers

Power has only succeeded in piling up further problems. If every-

thing necessary for the functioning of the post capitalist economy

must be in place before the workers state is created, it raises the

question of why the workers state is necessary, and what its func-

tion is.

History shows that the state is the pioneer of future economic rela-tions represented by the class which controls it. Or as Engels puts it,

The proletariat seizes state power and to begin with transforms

the means of production into state property. The English bour-

geois revolution of the 1640s did not just spring from an already

developed capitalism; it swept aside its prime achievement was to

sweep aside the obstacles (or, at least many of them) which stood

in its way.

For Workers Power, the opposite is the case: the state is always

the expression of pre-existing productive and property relations.

This leads to the ludicrous notion of dating the formation of the

deformed/degenerate workers states from the day the Stalinists

proclaimed fiveyear plans. But in most Eastern European countries

these were not inaugurated until 2-3 years after 1947/8 the pointat which what remained of the bourgeoisie was suppressed, its

property largely expropriated and its political parties outlawed.

Workers Powers claim to be able to analyse at every stage the class

nature of the state and the programmatic and tactical implications

which flow from it doesnt hold water. Armed with its theory, it is

far from clear what special insight revolutionary parties in Eastern

Europe between 1948 and 1950 would have had. How exactly

would they have tested that the law of value had been suppressed?

Presumably they would have had to wait on the Stalinist planning

organs to announce their intentions before amending their pro-

gramme accordingly.

Indeed, the idea of planning being the key determinant of the class

character of the state places a question mark over the nature of the

Soviet Union down to 1928. No doubt Workers Power would reply


6/21



that the working class held power directlythrough its soviets after

1917. But the soviets, as organs of direct workers democracy, had

largely decayed by 1921 fully seven years before the Stalinist turn

to industrialisation, collectivisation and full-scale planning with

the majority of workers either mobilised in the Red Army, drawn

into the administration, atomised by exhaustion, disease and fam-

ine, or dispersed into the countryside.No Trotskyist would deny that a gulf exists between the revolution-

ary workers state of 1917 and the Stalinist regimes of already

existing socialism. Nevertheless, by using two entirely different

sets of criteria, Workers Power is left with the conundrum that,

according to its theory, the concepts of a healthy workers state

and a degenerate workers state have nothing at all in common.

Workers Powers model of the deformed/degenerate workers

states is no more than a superficial description and, what is more,

only at a certain stage of their development. It has broken down in

the face of real events. It is in any case highly questionable whether

their economies functioned according to the objectives set by the

ruling bureaucratic caste. Aside from the overtones this carries of

a bureaucratic mode of production, it contrasts with the pictureconveyed in much Soviet literature, not of an economy proceeding

to plan, but one constantly frustrating its would-be planners by

shortages and break-downs themselves the consequence in large

part of bureaucratic misplanning. Even at the level of formal de-

scription it is inaccurate. Yugoslavia, for example, was a deformed

workers state, which for many years lacked both central plan as a

determining factor of the economy as a whole, and a monopoly of

foreign trade.

As for the suppression of the law of value, it too is defective as a

determinant of the workers state. The very nature of transitional

society down to 1989-91 ensured that the law of value never en-

tirely disappeared, and lurked behind the apparently monolithic

statified economies which, in any case, from the standpoint of

distribution, had always retained bourgeois norms.

Even under capitalism, the proposition that the value of commodi-

ties is determined by the amount of socially necessary labour time

required to produce them does not operate according to a set of

ideal norms (free competition), but within living contradictions.

What is normal, in fact, is that capitalism violates the law of

value at the particular level so as to realise it at the general level. It

is very common for entire branches of industry in capitalist states to

be subsidised in the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole.

In countries in which the bourgeoisie is weak, it frequently resorts

to state capitalist methods. The law of value can hardly be said to

have operated normally in Angola, with much of its economymilitarised. And what about countries, such as Ethiopia, which have

experienced such acute famines that very few people are producing

anything? In neither case, we suspect, would any Marxists seriously

propose that the bourgeois state had ceased to exist.

How has Workers Powers theory of the degenerate workers state

held up since 1989? Initially, in the case of the GDR, events seemed

to provide a near economic cut-off point, with the monetary un-

ion with the Federal Republic on July 1, 1990.

But in all other cases, the attempt to theorise a purely economic

point of no return for the workers state has been doomed to fail-

ure. In 1991 Workers Power could still write that it is the destruc-

tion of planning as the determinant of the whole of the economy

which marks the destruction of the proletarian character of the

property relations and, therefore, of the state which defends

them.

But the election of bourgeois restorationist governments through-

out Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union has been accompanied

by the destruction of Stalinist planning organs and the monopoly of

foreign trade. Private capitalist accumulation is actively promoted,

and the legal obstacles to it removed. What remains is a substantiallegacy of state property, which, despite its origin, now performs

approximately the same function that it does in weak semi-colonial

capitalist states.

It would seem logical, given the stress it lays on planning, for

Workers Power to acknowledge that social counter-revolution at

least at the level of the state has already taken place. But at this

point, one strand of Workers Powers theory collides with another.

Since its conditions for retrospectively baptising a degenerate work-

ers state include not merely the existence of planning, but the

complete elimination of the bourgeoisie and since neither a nu-

merous bourgeoisie nor a normal functioning of the law of value

exists Workers Power has decided, for the time being, that bour-

geois states have not been restored.

Its addiction to formal-logical categories did not allow for the con-

tradictions of the real world a situation in which the Stalinist eco-

nomic mechanisms would break down, but there would be no de-

veloped bourgeoisie to fill the void. Workers Power has continued

to fit reality around its schema, unconvincingly arguing that printing

bank notes to subsidise state enterprises constitutes a residual

form of planning although it must be obvious that it is impossible

to plan the economy of a country such as Russia which is experi-

encing hyper-inflation.

In order to prepare the evacuation from such untenable positions

and to accommodate evident internal opposition, the LRCIs 3rd

international congress, held in August 1994, developed a new cate-gory moribund workers states (MWS). These are defined as

degenerate workers states that have restorationist governments

in power which are actively demolishing the foundations of planned

economy. The objective of all governments inside the MWS is clear:

the complete destruction of the system of command planning and

the transformation of the economy into a functioning capitalist

market economy.

But in line with Trotskys definition of the state in terms of the

property it guards and defends this is clearly a description of a

bourgeois state! As a category the MWS is every bit as much of a

fudge as the transitional state position of the FI in 1948 it is a

bourgeois state form whose social content remains undecided.

The attempt to define the state in purely economic terms leads

Workers Power to the following conclusion: A change of leading

personnel within the already bourgeois-type state machine from

objective to subjective restorationists is not the qualitative mo-

ment of transition from a workers to a bourgeois state. Only a ten-

dency that had in all essentials abandoned Trotskys analysis could

identify the collapse of the bureaucratic dictatorship with the col-

lapse of the workers state itself.

In which case, among those who have in all essentials abandoned

Trotskys analysis, we must include ...Trotsky! : The inevitable

collapse of Stalinist Bonapartism would immediately call into ques-

tion the character of the USSR as a workers state. Socialist econ-

omy cannot be constructed without a socialist power. The fate of

the USSR as a socialist state depends upon that political regime

which will arise to replace Stalinist Bonapartism:


7/21



In the meantime, it is sobering to consider that, had Nazi Germany

succeeded in conquering the Soviet Union, it might well have re-

tained a substantial state sector. According to Workers Powers

theory, the workers state would have survived albeit with a fas-

cist government.

4. Stalinism and the Post-War Social Overturns: Prob-

lems of the Transition

The social counter-revolution in Eastern Europe and the

Soviet Union is (despite obvious dissimilarities) a striking

mirror-image of the process which saw the formation of

deformed workers states in the 1940s. Both have been

the subject of considerable, if frequently un-illuminating, dispute

among Trotskyists. How we understand the development

forwards should toa large degree inform our analysis of the re-

gression in the opposite direction.

The capitalist states of Eastern Europe were all industrially back-

ward and predominantly agrarian before the Second World War,with the exception of Czechoslovakia. During the 1930s, they were

effectively semi-colonies of German and French imperialism. In

Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, state intervention played an

important role in industry.

The Nazi occupation of Poland and Czechoslovakia converted them

into direct colonies of German imperialism. Much of the property of

the bourgeoisie was looted, and either taken over directly by the

German state, or handed over to German companies. The influence

of German capitalism also grew in the economies of its allies, Hun-

gary, Romania and Bulgaria.

The defeat of German imperialism by the Soviet army left the latter

in control of all of Eastern Europe. The bourgeoisie, greatly weak-

ened by the destruction caused by the war, and with many of its

representatives having fled abroad, was in crisis. For the Vern-Ryan

tendency in the Socialist Workers Party (US), Stalinist control of the

repressive apparatus meant that: From the time of the occupation

onward the designation of these states as workers states is an ines-

capable Marxist characterisation.

Although many of Vern-Ryans criticisms of the SWP and Fourth

International leaderships in the early 1950s were acute, there are a

number of objections to their theory. In general, it replaces history

with hindsight; it reads the outcome of a process into its origins.

Vern-Ryans emphasis on the repressive apparatus is one-sided. The

state does not merely consist of armed bodies ofmen. They are

one element of the state, albeit a highly important one. Normallythey are subject to political masters who direct what property they

defend. Armed with such a theory, some on the left believed that

the Soviet army was tied to the defence of nationalised property to

the extent that it would be obliged to intervene against counter-

revolution in 1989-91. Not for the firsttime history has proved that

armies can transfer their class allegiance without significant distur-

bance.

Their theory also fails to explain why Stalinists exercising govern-

mental power and/or control of the repressive apparatus failed to

result in workers states in Republican Spain, Finland, Northern Iran

and the Russian occupation zone in Austria after the Second World

War or Afghanistan during the 1980s.

Vern-Ryan tended to see a predisposition within Stalinism to over-

turn capitalism, which is clearly linked to their peculiar understand-

ing that our movement has always characterised Stalinism as a

centrist current.

Certainly, the Soviet bureaucracy could have finished off the East-

ern European bourgeoisie without great difficulty at the end of the

war. What Vern-Ryan have very little to say about is what it actually

did. A serious examination of this demonstrates that what existed

in Eastern Europe between 1944/5 and 1947/8 were weak bour-geois states, which the Stalinists set about rebuilding.

True, the most openly pro-fascist, unpatriotic elements of the

bourgeoisie were purged, and the reins of the repressive apparatus

were held by the Soviet bureaucracy and its hirelings.

Unreliable (i.e. anti-Soviet) bourgeois forces were replaced by

elements which were ready to collaborate with the Stalinists to the

hilt. But other open reactionaries collaborators, monarchists,

clericalists and even former fascists were tolerated, and in some

cases recruited to the Communist parties.

On the other hand, workers who attempted to seize factories and

estates with the arrival of the Red Army were evicted. Bourgeois

parties and parliaments were re-established, in line with the YaltaAgreement. Indeed, the term peoples democracies was not

coined merely out of cynicism. What Stalin intended was to pre-

serve weak bourgeois states with popular front governments under

Soviet tutelage, similar to Finland.

The high degree of nationalisation was a consequence of the war. In

many cases the bourgeoisie welcomed state ownership, and recog-

nised it was necessary, since it was in no position to fill the breach.

In Czechoslovakia, for example, the state inherited 60 per cent of

industry and almost the entire banking system from the German

occupation, without having to expropriate the local bourgeoisie.

Poland, where the devastation and loss of life were far greater, had

nationalised nearly 90 per cent of industry within the first year of

liberation.

This didnt, however, mean an attack upon bourgeois property as

such, as the Stalinists were at pains to stress. In Hungary, factories

and mines were restored to private ownership. Strikes were every-

where condemned as sabotaging reconstruction.

The political forces with which the Stalinists shared power in these

years were far from negligible. In Romania, the monarchy was re-

tained and a CP/Liberal Party coalition established headed by the

anti-semitic reactionary, Radescu, and including supporters of the

fascist Iron Guard.

Bulgaria also kept its monarchy under the Stalinist-initiated Father-

land Front coalition, led between 1944 and 1946 by the arch-

reactionary, General Georgiev; the CP held only three ministerialportfolios in its first coalition, and other forces, including the Agrar-

ian Party, held significant positions. Elections in Hungary in 1945

gave the Smallholders Party 57 per cent, with the Stalinists receiv-

ing only 17 per cent.

Poland saw a coalition between the Stalinists and various support-

ers of the London-based pro-imperialist migrs, and the CP faced

significant competition from the Polish Socialist Party and the Polish

Peasant Party. The Czechoslovakian coalition established in March

1945 included the Communist Party, Social Democrats, National

Socialists, the Catholic Popular Party and the Slovak Democrats.

Although the Stalinists had significant support they gained 38 per

cent of the vote in the elections of May, 1946 bourgeois parties

operated in relative freedom for another two years.


8/21



It must be remembered that the various Smallholders and Peasant

parties were in reality bourgeois parties, which, although they had

some radical elements, also served as a refuge for representatives

of the pre-war ruling circles, who had close links with the West.

Only in Yugoslavia and Albania, as a result of the Partisan War, were

there no significant bourgeois political forces. The short-lived coali-

tion between the Yugoslav Communist Party and the monarchist-reactionary Subasich only lasted from 1944 to 1945.

There is no evidence to show that this was all merely a Machiavel-

lian plot on the part of Stalin to create socialist states. The protec-

tion of bourgeois interests albeit those prepared to play ball with

the Soviet occupiers was a crucial part of Stalins strategy of

peaceful co-existence with the West. Its counterpart was the faith-

ful class collaboration practised by the Western Stalinist parties in

the same period.

Only with the onset of the Cold War in late 1946, and particularly

with the announcement of the Marshall Aid Plan in March 1947,

which posed the reorganisation of the Eastern European bourgeoi-

sie under imperialist leadership, did Stalins alliance with imperial-ism break down, and the necessity to consolidate the buffer zone

countries as deformed workers states arise.

Without reference to this crucial turn in the international situation

the gravity of which was clearly understood by both sides at the

time it is impossible to explain the decisive nature of the changes

which took place in 1947-48. Vern-Ryans theory does not ascribe

any particular significance to this shift in international relations.

Historical evidence suggests otherwise. In the course of 1946 and

1947, the reviving eastern economies were forging growing links

with the West. Trade with the Soviet Union went into steep decline,

while that with the United States grew rapidly. The Marshall Plan,

and the willingness of the Czechoslovak and Polish governments to

embrace it, threatened to make this trend permanent. Far from

acting as a defensive buffer, the Peoples Democracies threat-

ened to become hostile outposts of imperialism in the Soviet Un-

ions back yard. Taken together with the eviction of the CPs from

the post-war coalitions in France, Italy and Belgium, it marked an

unmistakable breakdown in the spheres of influence agreement.

The final break with the bourgeoisie conducted bureaucratically,

from above was accomplished throughout Eastern Europe, with

slight variations in tempo in different countries, between late 1947

and early 1948. It completed the policy of purging bourgeois parties

by outlawing them, of eliminating working class opposition by forci-

ble fusion of the social democrat and communist parties, and of

concentrating all political power in the hands of the Stalinists. A

further nationalisation drive expropriated most remaining capitalist

property. All this took place, with the partial exception of Czecho-

slovakia, without the working class being mobilised.

How is this apparently peaceful process to be understood in

terms of the Marxist theory of the state? What of Marxs famous

judgement on the Paris Commune that the working class cannot

simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for

its own purposes Didnt Lenin devote much ofThe State and Revo-

lution to establishing that the capitalist state could not be over-

turned by an aggregate of reforms, and that it had to be

smashed? And what of Trotskys waning that: He who asserts

that the Soviet government has been graduallychanged from prole-

tarian to bourgeois is only, so to speak, running backwards the film

of reformism.?

Firstly, let us observe that, although nothing resembling a civil war

took place in 1947-48, the phenomena of politicians mysteriously

preferring windows to lifts; of mass arrests and purges; of party

fusion at gun point none of these were either particularly

peaceful or typically reformist. They all constituted elements of

force. As a general rule, force is normally applied in rough propor-

tion to the strength of the opposition and the degree of resistanceput up. In a situation in which the Stalinists already controlled the

repressive apparatus, this amount of force was relatively less than

in, say, an imperialist state with a large standing army.

Secondly, it is necessary to remember that these were far from

normal bourgeois states. They existed in a unique situation,

which is unlikely to be repeated. The bourgeoisie sought to pre-

serve its slender hold on life by acquiescing to Soviet occupation,

thereby surrendering much of its own sovereignty. The Soviet bu-

reaucracy, for its part, opted to preserve this bourgeoisie out of

wider international policy considerations. Such a relationship was

inherently anomalous, unstable and could only be temporary. The

circumstance of a bourgeois state having much of its policy decided

for it by a workers state, however, is not unique as is demon-strated by much of modern Finnish history.

The economies of these states were backward and already highly

statified before 1947. The concentration of capitalist property in

the hands of the state state capitalism is a typical reflex of the

bourgeoisie in terminal crisis. Such a situation was anticipated by

both Engels and Lenin. In this sense, the bourgeois state prepares

the rule of the workers state as a bourgeois state without the

bourgeoisie.

Does this mean that we are arguing that a bourgeois state can be

used as a platform to create a workers state, and are thereby fun-

damentally revising Marxism? The apparently gradual transforma-

tion of state structures was, on the face of things, closer to the

gradual model of the transition from feudal to capitalist states

which took place in most central and Eastern European countries.

The semi-feudal aristocracy was forced to industrialise in much of

central Europe during the 19th century under the threat of eco-

nomic and political downfall. In these cases state apparatuses were

adapted to the needs of new relations of production, whilst par-

tially maintaining the old institutional framework. These old forms

finally changed their social character.

Tim Wohlforth, whose Theory of Structural Assimilation remains

one of the few serious efforts to reopen the buffer zone debate

since the 1940s, attempted to get round the problem of dating

the transformation by arguing that it was managed during an ex-

tended period, by a state which assumes a hybrid, dual character:

It is possible to ascertain around when the process begins and

after the process is all over it is clear that a qualitative change has

taken place. However, during the process things are nowhere as

clear. In fact in the middle of the process things are extremely con-

tradictory for both qualities what existed before and what is to be

exist in a complex inter-relationship. For this reason there exists

no one momentwhen the qualitative change takes place. That the

qualitative change has taken place becomes clear only some time

afterthe change has been consummated.

This position is echoed by Westoby, and is the Achilles heel of the

structural assimilation theory. If Marxism cannot analyse the class

nature of the state power, then a question mark must arise not only

over its analysis of class society as a whole, but its ability to advance

a programme capable of outlining the tasks of the hour.


9/21



Of course, the overturn of capitalism in Eastern Europe was a proc-

ess, rather than an isolated event which took place at a definite

time on a definite day. However, Wohlforth and Westoby only suc-

ceed in mystifying the nature of the process, and rendering it in-

comprehensible. For all their criticisms of the FI leadership, they

manage to provide it with an alibi.

As we have earlier argued, the break with the bourgeoisie in spiteof its bureaucratic method was nonetheless real enough, and

fairly abrupt. Its timing was conditioned by a fundamental shift in

world politics. Having crushed the remaining centres of bourgeois

political and economic power in the space of a few months, the

foundations of the new states were laid.

The ability of the Stalinist bureaucracy to effect such a fundamental

change did not rest only upon a particular political conjuncture. It

was also a by-product of the bureaucracys Bonapartist nature. But

whereas for Deutscher and Pablo, this implied a residual progres-

sive mission to destroy capitalism, the real secret of Stalinist

Bonapartism lay in its manoeuvring between classes, both domesti-

cally and internationally, and its lack of an organic class base.

Having politically expropriated the working class in the worlds firstworkers state, while still being dependent upon the foundations of

that state as a source of material privilege, the Stalinist bureaucracy

balanced uneasily between imperialism and its own masses.

Between 1944 and 1947, the Stalinists found themselves in posses-

sion of the repressive apparatus and many of the elements of gov-

ernment in the Eastern European states. But while these states

remained bourgeois, they also were states in a peculiar situation of

dependency upon a foreign and, in the class sense, alien power.

By eliminating the active oppositional elements in both main

classes from the equation, the bureaucracy enjoyed a high degree

of political independence. It was able to fashion the building blocks

of new states from the petrified remains of the old ones, without

facing the direct challenge of either bourgeois counter-revolution

or proletarian, anti-bureaucratic revolution.

There were therefore also significant differences with the hybrid

state formations of early capitalism. Far from taking over these

states of Eastern Europe ready-made, the Stalinists deconstructed

them, filling nominally bourgeois institutions with their own crea-

tures, performing qualitatively different functions. Far from lending

theoretical support to reformism as Wohlforths description of an

amorphous cumulative process tends to this understanding fun-

damentally demarcates the transition of 1947-48 from social de-

mocratic reformism.

The bourgeois states were therefore smashed, although not in

the manner anticipated by classical Marxism: not at a given hour ona definite day, admittedly, but smashed nonetheless. The survival of

some institutions of the bourgeois state cited by state capitalist

theorists and some contributors to the buffer zone debate as

evidence that no qualitative change had taken place is of little

significance, except that it underlines the particularly degenerate

nature of the transformation.

The fact that the same judges, who had presided at trials of com-

munists in the 1930s, were sometimes to be found passing sen-

tence upon those purged by the Stalinists in the 1940s; that all

kinds of bourgeois administrative arrangements carried over; that

various quasi-democratic bodies (including nominally independent

bloc parties and pseudo-parliaments) were permitted by the Sta-

linists these things were not decisive in determining the classnature of the state. Certainly, those Trotskyists who argued that

they were, had been obliged by reality to quietly drop their objec-

tions by the early 1950s.

The real question for Marxists is not the class origins of the func-

tionaries but in whose interests they function. The history of bour-

geois revolutions showed that it was possible for opportunist ele-

ments to navigate the choppy waters of both revolution and

counter-revolution General Monck and the Vicar of Bray in Eng-land, Fouch and Talleyrand in France. Even the Bolsheviks were

obliged to retain a good part of the old civil service for a period, and

subsequently re-employ the military specialists.

As we would expect, the bureaucratic overturns in Eastern Europe

werefar more degenerate in their methods, and considerably less

choosy when it came to making use of the dregs of the old society.

As a result of the new socio-economic course after 1947, the rem-

nants of the old order were either reconciled to the new regime or

systematically purged. State institutions and the legal system, while

continuing to harbour numerous reactionaries, were similarly trans-

formed in line with their new function. The Stalinists ensured the

loyalty of the state apparatus by establishing and developing links

between it and the nationalised sectors of the economy.

Even with the emergence of deformed workers states, matters

were far from settled. Trotskyists have tended to overestimate the

extent to which the adoption by the Peoples Democracies of plan-

ning and other typical features of bureaucratic rule necessarily

guaranteed their future existence. In fact, they continued to be

subject to wider considerations of Soviet foreign policy, as was

shown by the preparedness of the Soviet leadership in 1953 to bar-

ter away the GDR: Malenkov and Beria viewed Germanys division

and the presence of the armed forces of East and West on German

soil as the chief obstacles to a rationalisation of Soviet foreign pol-

icy and the chief source of international tension. They contem-

plated nothing less than a withdrawal from Germany and the virtual

abandonment of the East German communist regime, hoping that

they would be able to persuade the Western Powers to agree to a

withdrawal of their forces too. They proposed to Eisenhower that

a peace treaty with Germany giving the German people the possi-

bility of a reunion in one State...should be concluded as early as

possible; and following closely upon this the occupation troops

should be withdrawn.

Although there were significant differences between what took

place in Eastern Europe in 1939-40 and 1947-48, Trotskys last writ-

ings in the course of the struggle against the Burnham-Shachtman

opposition should have provided the post-war Fourth International

with some of the necessary analytical tools.

It is more likely, however, he wrote in 1939, that in the territo-ries scheduled to become a part of the USSR, the Moscow govern-

ment will carry through the expropriation of the large landowners

and statification of the means of production. This variant is most

probable not because the bureaucracy remains true to the socialist

programme but because it is neither desirous nor capable of shar-

ing the power, and the privileges the latter entails, with the old

ruling classes in the occupied territories.

As to whether this placed a question mark over the counter-

revolutionary nature of Stalinism, he had this to say: The primary

political criterion for us is not the transformation of property rela-

tions in this or another area, however important these may be in

themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organi-

sation of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for de-fending former conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this


10/21



one, and only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as

a whole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains

the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution.

Nor was Trotsky in favour of entrusting any historic mission to the

Red Army or according it any independent significance: We have

never promised to support allthe actions of the Red Army which is

an instrument in the hands of the Bonapartist bureaucracy. Wehave promised to defend only the USSR as a workers state and

solely those things within it which belong to a workers state.

He also envisaged a situation in which capitalism could be over-

turned, not by a workers revolution, but by a civil war of a special

type. ... introduced on bayonets from without ...controlled by the

Moscow bureaucracy. At the same time he warned that these

missionaries with bayonets would alienate the masses.

The Fourth International responded to the post-war developments

inadequately. Not only was the FIs timing belated; its method was

defective, and prepared the political collapse which followed. It

remained the prisoner of the prognosis that capitalism could only

be destroyed in Eastern Europe as a result of structural assimila-tion into the Soviet Union, as had been the case with the eastern

zone of Poland and the Baltic States in 1939-40. Once it abandoned

this perspective, it readily accepted that Stalinism could after all

project a revolutionary orientation.

It is ironic therefore to find both anti-Pabloite David North and

Pabloite Pierre Frank defending the line of the FI in the late

1940s. North argues that the Second World Congress correctly

maintained that capitalism had not been destroyed in the buffer

zone, while Frank claims that: Despite a few measures aimed at

those members of the propertied classes who had collaborated

with the Germans, the (Soviet) army had left the bourgeois social

structures of these countries intact.

David Rousset appears to have been one of the first members of

the FI to argue that, on the basis of widespread nationalisation, the

buffer zone countries had become workers states. His contribution

to the International Executive Committee Plenum in June, 1946 was

opposed by Ernest Mandel, who insisted: The bureaucracy can

definitively bring new territories into itscontrol only by assimilating

them structurally on the economic base which issued from the Oc-

tober Revolution.

The Fls Second World Congress met in April-May, 1948, after the

decisive overturns had taken place. Its main document was The

USSR and Stalinism, presented by Mandel. To deny the capitalist

nature of these countries, itclaimed, amounts to an acceptance,

in no matter what form, of this Stalinist revisionist theory, it means

seriously to consider the historic possibility of a destruction of capi-

talism by terror from above without the revolutionary interven-

tion of the masses.

Amendments proposed by the RCP (Britain, led by Jock Haston and

Ted Grant), arguing that the overturn of capitalism in the buffer

zone, and the control of the bourgeoisie over the government and

state apparatus was either complete or approaching completion,

wereheavily defeated.

In June, 1948, immediately after the congress, the Soviet-Yugoslav

split took place. Junking the congresss analysis of Yugoslavia as a

capitalist state in which revolutionary defeatism should be strictly

applied in time of war, the Fl leadership immediately began treating

it as a de facto workers state, headed by a party which had brokenwith Stalinism. Three fawning open letters were sent to the YCP by

the International Secretariat, one of them finishing with the ringing

words: Yugoslav communists, let us unite our efforts for a new

Leninist International.

Although a majority of the FI was in favour of characterising the

buffer zone countries as capitalist, sustaining this analysis was be-

coming increasingly difficult. The resolution of the 7th plenum of

the IEC in April, 1949 described the buffer zone as a unique type ofhybrid transitional society in the process of transformation, with

features that are as yet so fluid and lacking precision that it is ex-

tremely difficult to summarise its fundamental nature.

This unique transitional state category was in fact a basic revision

of Marxism. It meant either that the state could at one and the

same time be the instrument of two classes orthat itwas neutral

between them.

The IECs tortuous reasoning forced it first one way, and then an-

other. The Eastern European bourgeoisie was suffering from

enfeeblement or virtual disappearance, however, the buffer

zone, except for Finland and the Russian-occupied zones in Austria

and Germany, are on the road toward structural assimilation withthe USSR, but...this assimilation has not yet been accomplished.

In order to justify this conclusion, the IEC had to come up with a

range ofsecondary criteria which the buffer zone countries would

have to fulfil before becoming workers states. National borders

would have to be abolished and real planning implemented, ei-

ther by incorporation into the Soviet Union, or by the establishment

of a Balkan-Danube Federation.

Needless to say, none of these conditions were ever met. But the

qualitative similarities between Eastern Europe and the Soviet Un-

ion were already obvious. The FI began to divide into two camps.

Those who were moving to recognise the buffer zone as workers

states argued that the economic criteria had been fulfilled; those

who held the line that they were capitalist states maintained that

thepoliticalcriteria had not.

Bert Cochran (E. R. Frank) put forward a workers state position in

March, 1949, comparing the degree of statification with the Soviet

Union. Morris Stein, addressing the SWP Political Committee in July,

1949, put the case for ostrich Marxism: Rather than jumping to

conclusions as to the social character of the states in Eastern

Europe, it is far better to await further developments. When dis-

cussion resumed in August, the positions of the RCP were dismissed

out of hand, and with little regard for the facts: I havent read their

latest documents, but this is of little importance, since their posi-

tion dates back some sixteen months...When they first took their

position that the buffer countries were workers states, *i.e. April,

1948] these countries had not yet undergone any extensive nation-

alisation.

By September, Michel Pablo was proposing that the FI adopt Yugo-

slavia as a workers state a position it had implicitly held for over a

year. Mandel counter-attacked in October, exposing the weak-

nesses of those who were prepared to equate nationalisation with

the overthrow of capitalism, but woodenly sticking to his conten-

tion that it could only be overturned by a genuine proletarian revo-

lution. Revealingly, Mandel admitted that his method owed more

to political considerations than to the study of objective reality:

Our criterion of Stalinism from the standpoint of its ineffectiveness

against capitalism would lose all its meaning.

Joe Hansen, writing in December, 1949, noted two major contradic-tions in the majority position. The Second World Congress resolu-


11/21



tion, while insisting that revolutionary action was necessary in the

buffer zone, acknowledged that capitalism had been overturned in

1939-40 in the Baltic countries, eastern Poland, Bessarabia and

Karelia without the mobilisation of the masses. The 7th plenum

resolution had emphasised the capitalist nature of the buffer zones

states, but had paradoxically argued that this does not at all imply

that the bourgeoisie is in power as the dominant class in thesecountries.

Although this method was similar to Hansens that a sufficient

degree of nationalisation resulted in a workers state Pablo was

not yet ready in February, 1950, to go beyond admitting Yugoslavia

to the fold. It was a special case: the result of a proletarian revo-

lution in progress since 1941, (although the FI had not noticed it

until 1948). The break with the Kremlin was the summit of this

process. The rest of the buffer zone, Pablo saw as only

approaching assimilation to the USSR, although he was prepared

to accept that it could take place without either the abolition of

borders, or formal incorporation into the Soviet Union.

Cochran was altogether more blunt: We maintain that if the state

structures and the economies of these countries are similar to thatof the USSR, then they are of the same class type. Any other conclu-

sion calls into question our characterisation of the USSR. He saw

the buffer zone countries after 1945 as regimes of dual power

and the Stalinist constitutions of 1948-49 as the juridical expres-

sion of the fact that the dual power regimes had come to an end.

It was Pablo who first coined the term deformed workers state.

By origin, applied to Yugoslavia, it meant a state quantitatively,

rather than qualitatively deformed by bureaucracy. At its 8th ple-

num in April, 1950, the IEC formally accepted Pablos position on

Yugoslavia, although there were still those like John G. Wright

praised by North as a far-sighted and perceptive dissident! who

held out.

If a semblance of political unity was to be maintained, there was

little to do except wrap the discussion up in the Fl as diplomatically

as possible. Mandel meanwhile quietly dropped his objections.

Matters were not finally settled until the Third World Congress in

August, 1951, which extended the category of deformed workers

state to the remainder of the buffer zone countries. Even then, it

did so with a face-saving formula: We still believe that up to 1949

these states still retained a fundamentally capitalist structure. This

meant that the 7th plenum resolution had been correct, and that

somehow the qualitative changes in Eastern Europe had taken

place since 1949.

The Trotskyist movement paid a heavy price for this display of unity

the congresss resolutions were adopted overwhelmingly. Thetheoretical issues at stake were left unresolved and brushed under

the carpet. And the political consequence was a somersault from

Stalinophobia to Stalinophilia. Having clung for so long to the posi-

tion that only genuine proletarian revolutions could overturn capi-

talism, the revelation that Stalinism had already done the job in

half a continent produced a deep-going adaptation in the FI, which

now saw its role as pressuring the communist parties from the left.

This political collapse cannot simply be put down to bad men or

bad politics in the formal sense. At the root of the FIs disorienta-

tion was its failure to develop the Marxist theory of the state, and

in particular, to grasp how a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy,

which had acted as the gravedigger of the worlds first workers

revolution, could nonetheless expropriate the bourgeoisie.

The fear Mandel had betrayed of ceding Stalinism a historic mission

was turned inside out. The FIs adaptation to Tito was repeated in

relation to Mao, Castro and Ho Chi Minh; each was portrayed as a

revolutionary leader who had broken from Stalinism under the

impact of mass pressure.

The task of determining which property relations the state defends

and/or strives to develop has, in the final analysis, to be answeredpolitically. In the case of classical social revolutions, such as the

French bourgeois revolution of 1789 or the socialist revolution of

October 1917, where state power clearly passed from one class to

another, the task is straightforward.

However, deciding the class nature of the state becomes especially

difficult when a petty-bourgeois leadership has come into conflict

with both the main classes of modern capitalist society, the bour-

geoisie and the proletariat typically where both are weak and

leaderless. This was the case in both the Cuban and Nicaraguan

revolutions at a certain point of their development.

In such a situation, the practice of this leadership and the develop-

ment of the relationship between the state, the property relationsand the two main classes have to be carefully analysed. A qualita-

tive change in the state would be marked by the fact that limited

collectivist interventions into the economy proved inadequate to

stabilise the situation, and placed more drastic measures the sup-

pression of the bourgeoisie immediately on the agenda. The alter-

native is growing paralysis, which prepares political counter-

revolution.

The Nicaraguan FSLN came to power in 1979 as a result of an armed

struggle, which overthrew the Somoza dictatorship. It was in es-

sence a radical popular front, with a petty-bourgeois leadership,

supported by workers parties, and minority anti-Somoza sections

of the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie a line-up of forces similar to that

led by Fidel Castro in 1959. Moreover, it undertook significantmeasures of nationalisation and state intervention.

But despite the subjectively socialist intentions of the FSLN, there

was to be no Cuban Road in Nicaragua. The fate of such revolu-

tions is closely linked to the nature of the political leadership at the

head of the state. A revolutionary-internationalist leadership would

have combated US/Contra insurgency not only by military means,

but by destroying the basis of the bourgeoisie at home, and by

spreading socialist revolution abroad. In the absence of such a lead-

ership, the international balance of forces, and within that, the

refusal of the Soviet and Cuban bureaucracies to countenance a

rerun of the Cuban revolution, determined the eventual outcome

the negotiated settlement with Chamorro and the Contras in 1989.

5. Trotsky and the Possible Paths of Counter-

Revolution

In its most dogmatic versions, orthodox Trotskyism has

sought to fit reality around Trotskys prognoses, rather than to

analyse reality, while using Trotskys ideas as a methodological

tool. The projection in some of Trotskys writings that civil war

would be a necessary precondition for capitalist restoration became

transformed in the hands of the epigones into a supra-historical

dogma. It is small wonder that, armed with such a theory, the

events of 1989-91 took the majority of would-be Trotskyists by

surprise. Instead of dispensing with the reactionary notion that

Marxism is a kind of crystal ball for gazing into the future, some

despaired of their god that failed, and looked for a purer pre -


12/21



Bolshevik Marxism. Others pretended that the counter-revolution

had yet to happen; the civil war still lay in front.

Without underestimating the potential for civil wars of various

kinds in Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, the civil war of the

kind the epigones envisaged has not been required to restore bour-

geois states, not least because other key elements of Trotskys

equationfor instance, the contention that the social revolution,betrayed by the ruling party, still exists ... in the consciousness of

the toiling masses had been so substantially eroded in the inter-

vening 55 years.

By reducing Trotskys thinking on the possibility of counter-

revolution to a single sentence, the epigones have done it a grave

disservice, and overlooked its historical and dialectical evolution.

Indeed, without falling into the trap of attempting to show that

Trotsky did indeedpredictthe course of events, a rounded study of

his writings shows that he considered a number of possible paths of

counter-revolution, and that, viewed in their proper perspective, a

number of his insights can shed light on the present.

Although it is possible to cite a number of agitational manifestosand speeches in which Bolsheviks presented world revolution as

inevitable, in their mature output, Lenin and Trotsky viewed both

revolution and counter-revolution as living struggles of social

forces. Their prognoses were therefore historically conditional, and

they rarely strayed too far from the present and its short-term po-

tential.

In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the most likely po-

tential for counter-revolution came from an alliance of domestic

forces landlords, monarchists, capitalists and richer peasants

with external imperialist intervention. But the Soviet victory in the

civil war brought an uneasy peace with the imperialists. With this

breathing space, the immediate likelihood of a successful White

Guardist uprising receded. Moreover, the peasantry, whatever itthought of the Bolsheviks, had a stake in the revolution in the shape

of the agrarian revolution. This explains why the machinations of

imperialist agents such as Sidney Reilly were crushed so easily. The

more perceptive counter-revolutionaries, among them leading Ca-

dets like Ustryalov, saw greater potential in the evolution of the

regime itself, and thought that the NEP would naturally evolve back

towards capitalism.

In the course of his last struggle of 1922-3, Lenin became acutely

aware of the growth of conservative, bureaucratic forces within the

party and the state bureaucracy, which through their chauvinism

and readiness to retreat, over such central issues as the monopoly

of foreign trade, were preparing the collapse of the proletarian

dictatorshipa dictatorship, which in Moshe Lewinss phrase, wasincreasingly being exercised in a void.

The dangers inherent in reviving private ownership were never far

from the thinking of leading Bolsheviks. In his report on production

to the 12th congress in April 1923, Trotsky remarked: Petty com-

modity production and private trade form a hostile bloc of forces

against us. He went on to give the following summary of the condi-

tions necessary for the survival of the workers state: If we had to

explain upon what our hopes for a socialist future for Russia rested,

we would reply: I) Upon the political power of the party, supported

by the Red Army; 2) Upon the nationalisation of production; 3)

Upon the monopoly of foreign trade. It would be sufficient to throw

down one of these pillars for the building to fall.

The threat represented by the alliance of the bureaucrat, the NEP-

man and the kulak is a theme running throughout Trotskys writings

during the struggle of the Left Opposition from 1923-27. His veiled

attack in Towards Socialism or Capitalism?in 1925 on the economic

programme of Stalin and Bukharin centred on his demand for accu-

rate and comparative coefficients of world economy which, in

contrast to the official legend of socialist self-sufficiency, would

have revealed the backward nature of Russian development and its

far lower level of labour productivity.By 1927, during the last period of the Oppositions public struggle,

this threat had become a growing reality. ThePlatform of the Joint

Oppositiondrew explicit attention to the link between the stabili-

sation of world capitalism, the counter-revolutionary and chauvinist

elements which had flooded the bureaucracy and the discontent of

the peasantry in t

The Marxist Theory of the State and the Collapse of Stalinism With a New Introduction by the...

Documents

Transcript of The Marxist Theory of the State and the Collapse of Stalinism With a New Introduction by the...