Ltt the Marxist Theory of the State[1] With a new Introduction by the International Trotskyist Current 26 December 2009

8/14/2019 Ltt the Marxist Theory of the State[1] With a new Introduction by the International Trotskyist Current 26 Decembe

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THE MARXIST THEORY OF THE STATE

The International Trotskyist Committee is proud to republish this 1995 document of the WorkerInternational League. This document clarifies and develops the Marxist theory of the state and is a powerfuweapon for forging a genuine revolutionary party. It defended and clarified Trotskys defence of the USSRas a deformed workers state and it elaborated in detail both the way that Stalinism overturned thebourgeois property relations in Europe in late 1947 and early 1948 and it also spelled out in detail how thefilm was run in reverse when these deformed and degenerated workers states were returned tocapitalism between 1989 and 1991. It clarified the political problems which contributed to the decent intocentrism of the Fourth International in 1950-51.

It had real political influence beyond its own organisation. It made a significant political contribution topolitically clarifying the international opposition current in the League for a Revolutionary CommunisInternational. It is quoted extensively in the Declaration of the Proletarian Faction which was the basis othe 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 Richard Brenners motion who admitted that he wasconvinced by the Trotsky quotes in the piece. However there are a number of problems with the text whenwe come to the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. Without capitulating to the democratic counterrevolution as many of the right-centrist Trotskyist groups and the LRCI/Workers Power did, it was soft on'democracy' and did not consistently make imperialism the main enemy, which problem became worse inrelation to Izetbegovi in Bosnia and the KLA in Kosovo, as they adopted positions almost as bad asWorkers Power.

The LTT should have opposed the pro-imperialist capitalist restorationist leadership in the Baltic States anddemanded independent soviet states, as Trotsky did for the Ukraine in 1938. These movements were usedby Russian restorationist leaders like Yeltsin as a lever to begin the breakup of the USSR. Secondly theyshould 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 ofpolitical 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 surelythe main enemy of the Russian and therefore the world working class during the short period of the coupitself was Yanayev, it was he who immediately threatened their lives and organisations and so they wereentitled to make a military but not a political bloc even with Yeltsin (with the devil and his grandmotheras Trotsky said). That being said the LTT took a far better position than the LRCI and these mistakes couldeasily have been corrected, as the LCMRCI did over Yeltsin.

Workers, apart from some miners leaders who supported Yeltsin, took no action and supported neitheside. 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. Thecoup, after all, was apparently directed against Gorbachev not Yeltsin. Gorbachev had attempted somedefence of nationalised property relations up to then, although with waning conviction. When heabandoned even this with the Union Treaty breaking up the USSR Yanayev launched his coup because hesaw 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 madeclear. Had the coupists succeeded, and there was international ambiguity about who to support as theLTTs The Marxist theory of the state points out, then restoration would have taken place at a more plannedand rationalised pace which would have been better for capitalism in the former USSR and for world

Leon Trotsky, I am confident in the victory of the Fourth International, Go Forward! Page 1

New Introduction to The Marxist Theory ofthe State and the Collapse of Stalinismby the International Trotskyist Committee


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imperialism, than the unplanned and gangsterist regime imposed by Yeltsin which had such disastroueffects. Yanayev based his coup on the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June 1989 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 athe principal source of internal danger. Indeed, his view that the Bukharinite right was the main dangerand the Thermidorian wing of the party led the Left Opposition to refuse to countenance any bloc oninternal democracy. The characterisation of the Right Opposition as the masked form of counterrevolution, as the proxy for the kulaks and NEPmen, runs through many of Trotskys writings in Alma AtaWhatever the merits of this position, the ease with which Stalin crushed the Right made this too anincreasingly less likely scenario. This section does whiff slightly of Stalinophobic thirdcampism and doesuggest that Trotsky would have been correct to make a bloc with the restorationist Bukharin. A bloc of theleft and right against the centre, even on democracy would have been correctly seen internationally asopportunism and would have invalidated his attempts to fight Stalinist betrayals in Germany and Spain inparticular. This issue came up at the time of the WIL split and provoked a sharp but brief interchange in aLTT meeting between RP and GD. The document correctly quotes Trotsky in relation on the invasion oPoland, the Baltic States and Finland in 1939 as a consequence of the Hitler-Stalin pact.

The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another areahowever important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness andorganisation of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests andaccomplishing new ones. From this one, and only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as awhole, completely retains its reactionary character and remains the chief obstacle on the road to the worldrevolution.

But the right of nations to self-determination cannot be allowed to undermine the gains of the workingclass; it is in the end only a tactic (although a very important one) used to advance the class-struggle. A

Trotsky said (and the document 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 iis directed against feudal, capitalist and imperialist states. But wherever the fiction of self-determination, inthe hands of the bourgeoisie, becomes a weapon directed against the proletarian revolution, we have nooccasion to treat this fiction differently 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 takesthe priority over the fight of national self-determination. This position proceeds from the pessimistiassumption that the majority of the working class does not, and will not, defend the workers state, andthat the action of the working class must be replaced by military means. Under Lenin and Trotsky, therevolutionary prestige of the Soviet state was such that the departure from the programmatic norm inGeorgia could be justified.

This is wrong. Trotsky, in In Defence of Marxism defends the Red Armys invasion of Poland, the Balticstates and Finland in 1939, although this violated these nations right to self-determination, because of thesecurity of the USSR was threatened by Hitler and the Allies as WWII approached. Section 8 The AugusCoup and the End of the Soviet Union is also wrong in that it does not identify Yeltsin as imperialisms mainagent and so the main enemy (apart from at the time of the coup) and does not defend the nationalisedproperty relations of the USSR,



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Nevertheless as at August 19, 1991 the most important task was to defend the democratic rights of theworking class and the minority nations against the immediate threat of the coup, by mobilising for ageneral strike, and, if conditions had ripened, by organising an armed uprising. Yeltsin had not ceased to bean enemy, but in this situation he had to be fought with different methods from those which werenecessary 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 theabstract but bourgeois democracy which reflects at the level of state power and ideology, bourgeois sociarelations. Here "bourgeois right" already existing in the form of unequal relations of distribution, areextended to represent the "rights" of private property, ownership of the means of production, contract etci.e. bourgeois relations of production.

Trotsky said: "Things must be called by their right names. What is involved here is not the introduction ofsome disembodied democracy but returning Russia to the capitalist road"... "But the masses do not wanthe landowner, the official, or the boss back. One must not overlook these "trifles" in intoxicating oneselwith commonplaces about democracy". [Trotsky "Is Parliamentary Democracy Likely?" [Writings, 1929 p55] "When people counterpose democracy to the Soviets, what they usually have in mind is simply the

parliamentary system. They forget about the other side of the question, the decisive one at that - namelythat the October Revolution cleared the path for the greatest democratic revolution in human history... TheSoviet system is not simply a form of government that can be compared abstractly with the parliamentaryform. Above all it is a new form of property relations. What is involved at bottom is the ownership of landthe banks, the mines, the factories, the railroads." [p.54].

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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 1

... either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers state, will overthrowthe new forms of property and plunge the country back into capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracyand open the way to socialism.

Leon Trotsky, 1938 2

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 importandevelopment in world politics in the past half-century. It has resulted in a major shift in the international balance opower, and unleashed in its wake wars, economic crisis and upheaval throughout the region. Its tremors have been felthroughout the world in nationalist and workers organisations, which for the previous 75 years had defined themselvein one way or another by their attitude to communism and In particular, its effects have gripped all those who identifywith Marxism. But the results of much of the wave of reassessment and self-examination provoked by the collapse havein the main proved woefully inadequate. It is our contention that only by theoretically rearming the vanguard of theworking 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 sharpest struggles between those who have identifiedthemselves as Trotskyists. By origin, it turned on whether the Soviet Union remained a workers state which should bedefended against imperialism, particularly in the event of war. By extension, the Russian question came to embrace

the deformed workers states of Eastern Europe, Asia and Cuba. Each time the question was presented anewparticularly in the buffer zone debate of 1946-51 and the controversy surrounding the Cuban Revolution from 196163, it caused new crises among the descendants of Trotskys Fourth International.

From the outset, revolutionaries identified this defence of the Soviet Union primarily with the gains of the OctobeRevolution, rather than the territorial integrity of the Soviet state. Even in the final stages of the death agony of thedegenerated/deformed workers states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the question of military defence of theworkers states remained relevant in so far as imperialism continued to exert military pressure on them. But thedecisive blows of social counter-revolution were to be political rather than military. With the coming to power o

1 Samizdat, p.2072 Samizdat, p.207


THE MARXIST THEORY OF THE STATEAND THE COLLAPSE OF STALINISM


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restorationist, pro-imperialist governments, the military aspect of the Russian question has been relegated to thestatus 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 foughtboth ultra-left and right-centrist forces which abandoned the defence of the Soviet Union on the grounds that a newform of class rule had arisen. The first proponents of a state capitalist theory were the Mensheviks, and similarpositions were put forward by Karl Kautsky and some anarchists.

By 1926, the Democratic Centralism group, led by the old Bolsheviks V. M. Smirnov, T. Sapronov and N. Osinsky, hadarrived at the position that the workers state had been liquidated. Osinsky and Sapronov developed versions of statecapitalism.3 All three died in the purges; however, their political trajectories were different. Osinsky subsequentlbecame a supporter of Bukharin. It seems that surviving Democratic Centralists in the camps maintained a defencistposition in the event of war, despite their position on the nature of the state.4

Hugo Urbahns, the chief theoretician of the Leninbund in Germany, (which collaborated with the Left Opposition unt1930) also developed state capitalist views. Such positions persisted among some German Trotskyists in the mid1930s,5 and were also put forward by Yvan Craipeau in the French Trotskyist movement.6 In 1937, James Burnham andJoseph 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 heterogeneousgrouping opposed to the designation of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state.8

Both Burnham and Shachtman were influenced by the erratic Italian writer Bruno Rizzi, 9although they came to differenconclusions. 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 hisevolution into a Cold War social democrat, he came to see bureaucratic collectivism as lower rung on the ladder osocial progress than bourgeois democracy, and wound up supporting US imperialism against thdegenerated/deformed workers states. Burnham, whose managerial revolution thesis10 foreshadowed much of ColdWar sociology (convergence theory), moved far more rapidly to right-wing positions, urging imperialist interventionagainst the Soviet Union.

The expansion of Stalinism after the Second World War gave a fresh impetus to such theories. Ex-Trotskyist Tony CliffState Capitalism inRussia11and Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilass The New Class12were products of this period. Thecommon thread uniting the various new class, state capitalist, bureaucratic collectivist and managerial revolutiotheses was that the crimes of Stalinism had resulted in the overthrow of the workers state, and on this basis themilitary defence of the USSR was excluded. The defence of the Soviet Union, or the post-war Stalinist states, theyclaimed, implied political support for Stalinism. Trotsky, in contrast, had insisted that it did not mean giving uncriticasupport 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 the1940s, the vast majority of the FI refused to recognise the emerging workers states in Eastern Europe. The mechanicarepetition of Trotskyist orthodoxy proved wholly inadequate to meet the challenges of the post-war world. Worse stilorthodox Trotskyism failed even to develop those pointers within Trotskys writings which could have served as thestarting point for an analysis of the social overturns in Eastern Europe and China.

While the decision to reverse this position and extend the FIs defence of the Soviet Union to the deformed workersstates was a step in the right direction, the discussion during the buffer zone debate demonstrated a high degree omethodological confusion, which sowed the seeds of future crises. The debate surrounding the Cuban revolutiodemonstrated that none of the theoretical issues had been resolved. The United Secretariat (USFI) was formed in 1963around broad agreement that Fidel Castro had created a healthy workers state. Meanwhile, the rump of thInternational Committee around Healys SLL and Lamberts PCI refused to recognise that anything had qualitativelychanged, and clung to the untenable position that Cuba remained a bourgeois state.

3 See L. Trotsky, The Workers State, Thermidor and Bonapartism in: Writings of Leon Trotsky (1934-35), Pathfinder, 1971, pp. 166-184, and R. V. Daniels: The Conscience of the Revolution, Simon and Schuster, 1969

4 Samizdat, p.2075 M. Dewar, The Quiet Revolutionary, Bookmarks, 1989, p.166 L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38), pp.34-447 G. Breitman (ed), The Founding of the Socialist Workers Party, Monad, 1982, pp.141-5; L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-

38), pp.60-718 See L. Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, New Park, 1975, and J.P. Cannon, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, Pathfinder, 1972.9 B. Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World, Tavistock, 198510 J. Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, Penguin, 196211 T. Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, Pluto, 197412 M. Djilas, The New Class, Unwin, 1966



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Without any unified theory to explain the emergence of deformed workers states and frequently without even aadequate empirical knowledge of developments within the economies and societies under Stalinist rule it was almosinevitable that the various strands of Trotskyism would be plunged into crisis by the events of 1989-91. Having failedto comprehend the process in one direction, it was unlikely to do so in the other. The suddenness of the collapse oStalinism 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 longawaited political revolution was unfolding. The logic of their position that whatever replaced Stalinist rule was a steforward 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 democracy and capitalist restoration, abandoned classpolitics from the opposite direction, and became strategists of united fronts with the decomposing bureaucracieswhich they continued to regard 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 naturallcarried over into the theoretical plane, with the result that no consensus exists on the class nature of the ex-SovieUnion and the states of Eastern Europe. Most of the optimists continue to cling to the view that workers states stilexist, and that the counter-revolution has yet to win a decisive victory. To think otherwise would be out of keeping withtheir upbeat perspectives. Behind the optimism lurks a gloomy assumption that the fall of the workers states will seback working class struggle for decades.

For the pessimists, the failure of a Reiss faction to emerge within the bureaucracy has led them further into asectarian wilderness inhabited by fascism and world historic defeats. The absolute distinction they drew betwee

Stalinism and social democracy has been disproved by reality in so far as Stalinism has made a political comeback insome countries, it has done so by reinventing itself as a pro-market social democracy.

The largest of the Fourth Internationals, the United Secretariat (USFI), is gripped by paralysis and has no clearagreed position. In keeping with its federal structure, its last world congress in 1990 encompassed both those who sawthe reunification of Germany as a liberating event which should be toasted with champagne and others who saw it asthe greatest defeat for the working class since 1933!

Socialist Action, USFI sympathising section in the United States, puts forward the following thesis: The situation ithese countries [Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union] can be summed up roughly as degenerating workers statesin transition to capitalism under the political rule of a government based on an alliance between bureaucrats andgestating comprador capitalists.13 But, as far as a definition of the state goes, this is clearly a fudged position. On theother hand, some supporters of the USFI majority appear to be moving towards the position that bourgeois states havebeen restored.

For LO, and presumably for its international tendency, the UCI, as well, the attempted social counter-revolution aimed

at transforming Soviet society into a capitalist society ... has started in a legal sense but is in reality far from beingcompleted, although a small minority within LO holds that the state has become the instrument of the bourgeoisrestoration, in other words simply a bourgeois state.14

The debate on the class nature of the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is not a dry, academic issue. There is noChinese Wall separating theory from perspectives and programme. What is at stake is a fundamental theoreticachallenge from which definite political conclusions are drawn. For those who set out to overthrow capitalism, the abilityto understand the processes of revolution and counter-revolution is not an optional extra; it is fundamental in order tobe able to intervene in them. Five years after the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe, and three years after the endof the Soviet 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 sophistication on the continued existence of predominantlnationalised economies. Despite the existence of bourgeois restorationist governments, the state remains, they arguethe superstructural reflection of the base. Taken in isolation, some of Trotskys writings can appear to support such aposition. Those who care to look will find numerous examples of political shorthand, where Trotsky appears to equatethe existence of the workers state with the survival of nationalised property; for instance: So long as the forms ofproperty that have been created by the October Revolution are not overthrown, the proletariat remains the rulingclass.15

13 Socialist Action (US), World Political Resolution submitted to the USFI 14th World Congress, August 199414 Class Struggle, No. 51, December 199215 L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1933-34), Pathfinder, 1972, p.104



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The task of Marxists, however, is not to mindlessly repeat sacred texts, but to grasp the underlying method oMarxism. To begin to provide a definition of the class nature of the ex-Soviet Union, it is necessary to return to the mosbasic 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 oproperty in the means of production and by the character of the forms of property and productive relations which thegiven state guards and defends.16 This implies a dialectical rather than a mechanical relationship between base andsuperstructure: it is not merely a question of the existing forms of property but of those which the state defends andstrives to develop.

Underlining this approach, Lenin argued in early 1918 that: No one, I think, in studying the question of the economicsystem of Russia, has denied its transitional character. Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that the term SocialisSoviet Republic implies the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the neweconomic system is recognised as a socialist order. 17

Thus, despite the fact that between 1917 and 1918, the Bolsheviks ruled over a bourgeois economy, only economisticpedants would deny that the infant soviet regime was a workers state. Not only did workers hold state power directlythrough soviets, but the Soviet 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 ipolitically suppressed, leading to its economic expropriation as a class. This is what such apparently disparate eventsas the October Revolution of 1917 and the bureaucratic overturns in Eastern Europe, Asia and Cuba after 1945 have incommon We reject both purely economic and purely political definitions of a workers state.18

History abounds with examples of contradiction between the state and economic forms, which demonstrate that theclass character of the state cannot be defined in purely mechanical terms. For instance, feudal states continued to exisduring the formative period of merchant capital in Europe. In this century, Marxists have recognised as bourgeois stateboth countries which contain many survivals from pre-capitalist economic formations and countries in which substantiasections of the means of production have been nationalised (e.g. Algeria, Angola, Burma, Ethiopia, Libya, MozambiqueSyria, etc). Among what we previously recognised as deformed workers states were countries with numerous precapitalist survivals and/or significant private sectors within their economies. Moreover, most of the countries of EasternEurope had large state sectors prior to 1947-48 the period most Trotskyists identify as marking the emergence odeformed workers states.

The cutting edge of distinction between bourgeois states and workers states is not some decisive degree onationalisation (Militant/CWI), nor the existence of central planning (Workers Power/LRCI), nor the allegedcommitment of the state apparatus to defend 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 extensive nationalisation on the other, in and othemselves, determine the class character of the state, because the state is at least partly autonomous from theeconomy. This is why the character of the state and the economy can change at different speeds. For example, theNew Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s was a concession to private capital forced on the Bolsheviks in the difficulcircumstances of the period, which was at least initially within the overall framework of defending working classinterests. In contrast, the Chinese Stalinists policy today of encouraging private enterprise in the special economiczones is preparing the restoration of capitalism.

Militants theory of proletarian Bonapartism19 is the crassest example of vulgar materialism in awe of nationalisedproperty. The states which Militant characterises as workers states, Angola, Burma etc, were capitalist statefrom their inception. The high degree of nationalisation carried out by the nationalist petty-bourgeoisie or army officerswere the basis for the emergence of a bourgeois class, whose interests were defended by the state apparatus and thelegal 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/degenerateworkers states and defend the view that, along with the ex-Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe remaiworkers states, has come from Workers Power and the LRCI.

16 L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38), p.65, p.6117 W. l. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, Moscow, 1965, p.33518 CWG/LTT Fusion Declaration, Workers News, No. 44, Mar-Apr 199319 T. Grant, The Unbroken Thread, Fortress, 1989, pp.342-70



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According to Workers Power, the degenerate workers state is characterised by three main features: statification of thedecisive parts of the means of production; their co-ordination and functioning according to the objectives set by theruling bureaucratic caste, which necessarily involves the negation of the law of value within the state; the protection othis system from disruption by the external law of value through a state monopoly of foreign trade.20

Faithful to this economist method, Workers Power has tried to isolate a defining moment to date the emergence odeformed/degenerate workers states. Thus, by the spring of 1947, with the inauguration of the first five year plan, theprocess of the creation of a bureaucratically degenerate workers state in Yugoslavia was complete 21Similarly ChinaThe introduction of planning in 1953 on the clear basis of subordinating the operation of the law of value, marks theestablishment of a degenerate workers state in China.22And although by the summer of 1960, Castro had brokendecisively with the Cuban and US bourgeoisie, Workers Power places the formation of the Cuban workers state as1962, from the implementation of the first five year plan23 the intervening two years being occupied by abureaucratic anti-capitalist workers government, which finally resolved dual power. (Quite how dual power couldexist with the bourgeoisie already suppressed and expropriated, and the working class demobilised remains mystery!)

In its quest to discover elaborate new, watertight schema, Workers Power has only succeeded in piling up furtheproblems. If everything necessary for the functioning of the post capitalist economy must be in place before thworkers state is created, it raises the question of why the workers state is necessary, and what its function is.

History shows that the state is the pioneer of future economic relations represented by the class which controls it. Or aEngels puts it, The proletariat seizes state power and to begin with transforms the means of production into stateproperty.24 The English bourgeois revolution ofthe 1640s did notjustspring from an already developed capitalism; i

swept aside its prime achievement was to sweep aside the obstacles (or, at least many of them) which stood in itsway.

For Workers Power, the opposite is the case: the state is always the expression of pre-existing productive and propertyrelations.25This leads to the ludicrous notion of dating the formation of the deformed/degenerate workers statesfrom the day the Stalinists proclaimed five year plans. But in most Eastern European countries these were noinaugurated until 2-3 years after 1947/8 the point at which what remained of the bourgeoisie was suppressed, itsproperty 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 andtactical implications which flow from it26 doesnt hold water. Armed with its theory, it is far from clear what speciainsight revolutionary parties in Eastern Europe between 1948 and 1950 would have had. How exactly would they havetested that the law of value had been suppressed? Presumably they would have had to wait on the Stalinist planningorgans to announce their intentions before amending their programme accordingly.

Indeed, the idea of planning being the key determinant of the class character of the state places a question mark ove

the nature of the Soviet Union down to 1928. No doubt Workers Power would reply that the working class held powedirectlythrough its soviets after 1917. But the soviets, as organs of direct workers democracy, had largely decayed by1921 fully seven years before the Stalinist turn to industrialisation, collectivisation and full-scale planning with themajority of workers either mobilised in the Red Army, drawn into the administration, atomised by exhaustion, diseaseand famine, or dispersed into the countryside.

No Trotskyist would deny that a gulf exists between the revolutionary workers state of 1917 and the Stalinist regimesof already existing socialism. Nevertheless, by using two entirely different sets of criteria, Workers Power is left withthe conundrum that, according to its theory, the concepts of a healthy workers state and a degenerate workersstate have nothing at all in common.

Workers Powers model of the deformed/degenerate workers states is no more than a superficial description andwhat is more, only at a certain stage of their development. It has broken down in the face of real events. It is in anycase highly questionable whether their economies functioned according to the objectives set by the rulinbureaucratic caste. Aside from the overtones this carries of a bureaucratic mode of production, it contrasts with the

picture conveyed in much Soviet literature, not of an economy proceeding to plan, but one constantly frustrating itswould-be planners by shortages and break-downs themselves the consequence in large part of bureaucrati

20 K. Harvey, Polands Transition to Capitalism, Permanent Revolution 9,Summer/Autumn 1991

21 Workers Power/lrish Workers Group, The Degenerated Revolution: The Origins and Nature of the Stalinist States, WP/lWG, 1982,p.53

22 Ibid., p.5923 Ibid., p.7224 F. Engels, Anti-Dhring, cited in A. Richardson (ed), In Defence of the Russian Revolution: A Selection of Bolshevik Writings 1917-

1923, Porcupine, 1995, viii25 Trotskyist International, No. 11, May-Aug, 1993, p.4526 The Degenerated Revolution, p.97



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misplanning. Even at the level of formal description it is inaccurate. Yugoslavia, for example, was a deformed workersstate, which for many years lacked both central plan as a determining factor of the economy as a whole, and amonopoly 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 otransitional society down to 1989-91 ensured that the law of value never entirely disappeared, and lurked behind theapparently monolithic statified economies which, in any case, from the standpoint of distribution, had always retainedbourgeois norms.

Even under capitalism, the proposition that the value of commodities is determined by the amount of socially necessarylabour time required to produce them does not operate according to a set of ideal norms (free competition), but withinliving contradictions. What is normal, in fact, is that capitalism violates the law of value at the particular level so asto realise it at the general level. It is very common for entire branches of industry in capitalist states to be subsidised inthe 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 canhardly be said to have operated normally in Angola, with much of its economy militarised. And what about countriessuch as Ethiopia, which have experienced such acute famines that very few people are producing anything? In neithecase, 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 GDRevents seemed to provide a near economic cut-off point, with the monetary union with the Federal Republic on July 11990.

But in all other cases, the attempt to theorise a purely economic point of no return for the workers state has beendoomed to failure. In 1991 Workers Power could still write that it is the destruction of planning as the determinant othe whole of the economy which marks the destruction of the proletarian character of the property relations andtherefore, of the state which defends them.27

But the election of bourgeois restorationist governments throughout Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union has beenaccompanied by the destruction of Stalinist planning organs and the monopoly of foreign trade. Private capitalisaccumulation is actively promoted, and the legal obstacles to it removed. What remains is a substantial legacy of stateproperty, which, despite its origin, now performs approximately the same function that it does in weak semi-coloniacapitalist states.

It would seem logical, given the stress it lays on planning, for Workers Power to acknowledge that social counterrevolution at least at the level of the state has already taken place. But at this point, one strand of Workers Powerstheory collides with another. Since its conditions for retrospectively baptising a degenerate workers state include nomerely the existence of planning, but the complete elimination of the bourgeoisie 28 and since neither a numerou

bourgeoisie nor a normal functioning of the law of value exists Workers Power has decided, for the time being, thabourgeois states have not been restored.

Its addiction to formal-logical categories did not allow for the contradictions of the real world a situation in which theStalinist economic mechanisms would break down, but there would be no developed bourgeoisie to fill the voidWorkers Power has continued to fit reality around its schema, unconvincingly arguing that printing bank notes tosubsidise state enterprises constitutes a residual form of planning 29 although it must be obvious that it is impossibleto plan the economy of a country such as Russia which is experiencing hyper-inflation.

In order to prepare the evacuation from such untenable positions and to accommodate evident internal opposition, theLRCIs 3rd international congress, held in August 1994, developed a new category moribund workers states (MWS)These are defined as degenerate workers states that have restorationist governments in power which are activeldemolishing the foundations of planned economy. The objective of all governments inside the MWS is clear: thecomplete destruction of the system of command planning and the transformation of the economy into a functioningcapitalist market economy.30

But in line with Trotskys definition of the state in terms of the property it guards and defends this is clearly adescription of a bourgeois state! As a category the MWS is every bit as much of a fudge as the transitional stateposition 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 changof leading personnel within the already bourgeois-type state machine from objective to subjective restorationists isnot the qualitative moment of transition from a workers to a bourgeois state. Only a tendency that had in all essentials

27 Permanent Revolution No. 928 The Degenerated Revolution, p.4629 Trotskyist International, No. 11, p.4730

Trotskyist International, No. 16, Jan-Apr 1995, p.24



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abandoned Trotskys analysis could identify the collapse of the bureaucratic dictatorship with the collapse of theworkers state itself.31

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 question the character of the USSR as aworkers state. Socialist economy cannot be constructed without a socialist power. The fate of the USSR as a socialisstate depends upon thatpolitical regime which will arise to replace Stalinist Bonapartism:32

In the meantime, it is sobering to consider that, had Nazi Germany succeeded in conquering the Soviet Union, it mightwell have retained a substantial state sector. According to Workers Powers theory, the workers state would havesurvived albeit with a fascist government.

4. Stalinism and the Post-War Social Overturns: Problems of the Transition

The social counter-revolution in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is (despite obvious dissimilarities) a strikinmirror-image of the process which saw the formation of deformed workers states in the 1940s. Both have been thsubject of considerable, if frequently un-illuminating, dispute among Trotskyists. How we understand the developmenforwards should toa large degree inform our analysis of the regression in the opposite direction.

The capitalist states ofEastern Europe were all industrially backward and predominantly agrarian before the SeconWorld War, with the exception of Czechoslovakia. During the 1930s, they were effectively semi-colonies of German andFrench 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 othe property of the bourgeoisie was looted, and either taken over directly by the German state, or handed over toGerman companies. The influence of German capitalism also grew in the economies of its allies, Hungary, Romania andBulgaria.

The defeat of German imperialism by the Soviet army left the latter in control of all of Eastern Europe. The bourgeoisiegreatly weakened by the destruction caused by the war, and with many of its representatives having fled abroad, wasin crisis. For the Vern-Ryan tendency in the Socialist Workers Party (US), Stalinist control of the repressive apparatumeant that: From the time of the occupation onward the designation of these states as workers states is ainescapable Marxist characterisation.33

Although many ofVern-Ryans criticisms of the SWP and Fourth International leaderships in the early 1950s were acutethere are a number of objections to their theory. In general, it replaces history with hindsight; it reads the outcome of aprocess into its origins.

Vern-Ryans emphasis on the repressive apparatus is one-sided. The state does not merely consist of armed bodies omen. They are one element of the state, albeit a highly important one. Normally they are subject to political masterwho direct what property they defend. Armed with such a theory, some on the left believed that the Soviet army watied to the defence of nationalised property to the extent that it would be obliged to intervene against counterrevolution in 1989-91. Not for the firsttime history has proved that armies can transfer their class allegiance withousignificant disturbance.

Their theory also fails to explain why Stalinists exercising governmental power and/or control of the repressivapparatus failed to result in workers states in Republican Spain, Finland, Northern Iran and the Russian occupationzone in Austria after the Second World War or Afghanistan during the 1980s.

Vern-Ryan tended to see a predisposition within Stalinism to overturn capitalism, which is clearly linked to their peculiaunderstanding that our movement has always characterised Stalinism as a centrist current34.

Certainly, the Soviet bureaucracy could have finished off the Eastern European bourgeoisie without great difficulty athe end of the war. What Vern-Ryan have very little to say about is what it actually did. A serious examination of thi

demonstrates that what existed in Eastern Europe between 1944/5 and 1947/8 were weak bourgeois states, which theStalinists set about rebuilding35.

31 Trotskyist International, No. 11, p.4532 L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1934-35), p.18233 Documents of the Vern-Ryan Tendency, Communard Publishers, n.d., p.3334 Ibid., p335 Much of the empirical information, although not the argument, of the following paragraphs is drawn from T. Wohlforth and A.

Westoby, Communists Against Revolution, Folrose, 1978; C. Harman, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe 1945-48, Bookmarks,1988 and A. Westoby, Communism Since World War II, Harvester, 1981



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True, the most openly pro-fascist, unpatriotic elements of the bourgeoisie were purged, and the reins of threpressive apparatus were held by the Soviet bureaucracy and its hirelings. Unreliable (i.e. anti-Soviet) bourgeoisforces were replaced by elements which were ready to collaborate with the Stalinists to the hilt. But other openreactionaries collaborators, monarchists, clericalists and even former fascists were tolerated, and in some casesrecruited to the Communist parties.

On the other hand, workers who attempted to seize factories and estates with the arrival of the Red Army wereevicted. Bourgeois parties and parliaments were re-established, in line with the Yalta Agreement. Indeed, the termpeoples democracies was not coined merely out of cynicism. What Stalin intended was to preserve weak bourgeoisstates 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 stateownership, and recognised it was necessary, since it was in no position to fill the breach. In Czechoslovakia, foexample, the state inherited 60 per cent of industry and almost the entire banking system from the Germaoccupation, without having to expropriate the local bourgeoisie. Poland, where the devastation and loss of life were fagreater, 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. IHungary, factories and mines were restored to private ownership. Strikes were everywhere condemned as sabotagingreconstruction.

The political forces with which the Stalinists shared power in these years were far from negligible. In Romania, themonarchy was retained 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 Fatherland Front coalition, led between 1944 and 1946 bythe arch-reactionary, General Georgiev; the CP held only three ministerial portfolios in its first coalition, and otheforces, including the Agrarian Party, held significant positions. Elections in Hungary in 1945 gave the Smallholders Party57 per cent, with the Stalinists receiving only 17 per cent.

Poland saw a coalition between the Stalinists and various supporters of the London-based pro-imperialist migrs, andthe CP faced significant competition from the Polish Socialist Party and the Polish Peasant Party. The Czechoslovakiancoalition established in March 1945 included the Communist Party, Social Democrats, National Socialists, the CatholiPopular Party and the Slovak Democrats. Although the Stalinists had significant support they gained 38 per cent othe vote in the elections of May, 1946 bourgeois parties operated in relative freedom for another two years.

It must be remembered that the various Smallholders and Peasant parties were in reality bourgeois parties, whichalthough they had some radical elements, also served as a refuge for representatives of the pre-war ruling circles, whohad close links with the West.

Only in Yugoslavia and Albania, as a result of the Partisan War, were there no significant bourgeois political forces. Theshort-lived coalition between the Yugoslav Communist Party and the monarchist-reactionary Subasich only lasted from1944 to 1945.

There is no evidence to show that this was all merely a Machiavellian plot on the part of Stalin to create socialiststates. The protection of bourgeois interests albeit those prepared to play ball with the Soviet occupiers was acrucial part of Stalins strategy of peaceful co-existence with the West. Its counterpart was the faithful clascollaboration 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 inMarch 1947, which posed the reorganisation of the Eastern European bourgeoisie under imperialist leadership, didStalins alliance with imperialism break down, and the necessity to consolidate the buffer zone countries as deformedworkers states arise.

Without reference to this crucial turn in the international situation the gravity of which was clearly understood by bothsides at the time it is impossible to explain the decisive nature of the changes which took place in 1947-48. VernRyans 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 forginggrowing links with the West. Trade with the Soviet Union went into steep decline, while that with the United States grewrapidly.36 The Marshall Plan, and the willingness of the Czechoslovak and Polish governments to embrace it, threatenedto make this trend permanent. Far from acting as a defensive buffer, the Peoples Democracies threatened tobecome hostile outposts of imperialism in the Soviet Unions back yard. Taken together with the eviction of the CPfrom the post-war coalitions in France, Italy and Belgium, it marked an unmistakable breakdown in the spheres oinfluence agreement.

36 F. Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, Peregrine, 1975, p.464



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The final break with the bourgeoisie conducted bureaucratically, from above was accomplished throughouEastern Europe, with slight variations in tempo in different countries, between late 1947 and early 1948. It completedthe policy of purging bourgeois parties by outlawing them, of eliminating working class opposition by forcible fusion othe social democrat and communist parties, and of concentrating all political power in the hands of the Stalinists. Afurther nationalisation drive expropriated most remaining capitalist property. All this took place, with the partiaexception of Czechoslovakia,37 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 Marxsfamous judgement on the Paris Commune that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made statemachinery and wield it for its own purposes38 Didnt Lenin devote much of The State and Revolution to establishingthat the capitalist state could not be overturned by an aggregate of reforms, and that it had to be smashed? Andwhat of Trotskys waning that: He who asserts that the Soviet government has been gradually changed fromproletarian to bourgeois is only, so to speak, running backwards the film of reformism.?39

Firstly, let us observe that, although nothing resembling a civil war took place in 1947-48, the phenomena of politiciansmysteriously preferring windows to lifts; of mass arrests and purges; of party fusion at gun point none of these wereeither particularly peaceful or typically reformist. They all constituted elements of force. As a general rule, force isnormally applied in rough proportion to the strength of the opposition and the degree of resistance put up. In asituation in which the Stalinists already controlled the repressive apparatus, this amount of force was relatively lessthan 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 uniquesituation, which is unlikely to be repeated. The bourgeoisie sought to preserve its slender hold on life by acquiescing to

Soviet occupation, thereby surrendering much of its own sovereignty. The Soviet bureaucracy, for its part, opted topreserve this bourgeoisie out of wider international policy considerations. Such a relationship was inherentlanomalous, unstable and could only be temporary. The circumstance of a bourgeois state having much of its policydecided for it by a workers state, however, is not unique as is demonstrated by much of modern Finnish history.

The economies of these states were backward and already highly statified before 1947. The concentration of capitalistproperty in the hands of the state state capitalism is a typical reflex of the bourgeoisie in terminal crisis. Such asituation was anticipated by both Engels and Lenin.40 In this sense, the bourgeois state prepares the rule of theworkers 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, andare thereby fundamentally revising Marxism? The apparently gradual transformation of state structures was, on theface of things, closer to the gradual model of the transition from feudal to capitalist states which took place in mostcentral and Eastern European countries. The semi-feudal aristocracy was forced to industrialise in much of centraEurope during the 19th century under the threat of economic and political downfall. In these cases state apparatuses

were adapted to the needs of new relations of production, whilst partially maintaining the old institutional frameworkThese old forms finally changed their social character.

Tim Wohlforth, whose Theory of Structural Assimilation41 remains one of the few serious efforts to reopen the buffezone debate since the 1940s, attempted to get round the problem of dating the transformation by arguing that iwas managed during an extended period, by a state which assumes a hybrid, dual character: It is possible to ascertainaround when the process begins and after the process is all over it is clear that a qualitative change has taken placeHowever, during the process things are nowhere as clear. In fact in the middle of the process things are extremelycontradictory for both qualities what existed before and what is to be exist in a complex inter-relationship. For thireason there exists no one momentwhen the qualitative change takes place. That the qualitative change has takenplace becomes clear only some time afterthe change has been consummated.42

This position is echoed by Westoby,43and is the Achilles heel of the structural assimilation theory. If Marxism cannoanalyse the class nature of the state power, then a question mark must arise not only over its analysis of class societyas a whole, but its ability to advance a programme capable of outlining the tasks of the hour.

Of course, the overturn of capitalism in Eastern Europe was a process, rather than an isolated event which took place aa definite time on a definite day. However, Wohlforth and Westoby only succeed in mystifying the nature of theprocess, and rendering it incomprehensible. For all their criticisms of the FI leadership, they manage to provide it witan alibi.

37 See J. Bloomfield, Passive Revolution: Politics and the Czechoslovak Working Class 1945-48, Allison and Busby, 197938 K. Marx, The Civil War in France, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 22, Moscow, 1986, p.32839 L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1933-34), p.10340 A. Richardson, Introduction to In Defence of the Russian Revolution, vii-ix41 In Wohlforth and Westoby, Communists Against Revolution42 Ibid., pp.87-843 Communism Since World War II, p.387



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As we have earlier argued, the break with the bourgeoisie in spite of its bureaucratic method was nonetheless reaenough, and fairly abrupt. Its timing was conditioned by a fundamental shift in world politics. Having crushed theremaining centres of bourgeois political and economic power in the space of a few months, the foundations of the newstates were laid.

The ability of the Stalinist bureaucracy to effect such a fundamental change did not rest only upon a particular politicaconjuncture. It was also a by-product of the bureaucracys Bonapartist nature. But whereas for Deutscher and Pablothis implied a residual progressive mission to destroy capitalism, the real secret of Stalinist Bonapartism lay in itmanoeuvring between classes, both domestically and internationally, and its lack of an organic class base. Havinpolitically expropriated the working class in the worlds first workers state, while still being dependent upon thefoundations of that state as a source of material privilege, the Stalinist bureaucracy balanced uneasily betweeimperialism and its own masses.

Between 1944 and 1947, the Stalinists found themselves in possession of the repressive apparatus and many of theelements of government in the Eastern European states. But while these states remained bourgeois, they also werestates in a peculiar situation of dependency upon a foreign and, in the class sense, alien power. By eliminating theactive oppositional elements in both main classes from the equation, the bureaucracy enjoyed a high degree of politicaindependence. It was able to fashion the building blocks of new states from the petrified remains of the old oneswithout 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 takingover these states of Eastern Europe ready-made, the Stalinists deconstructed them, filling nominally bourgeoiinstitutions with their own creatures, performing qualitatively different functions. Far from lending theoretical suppor

to reformism as Wohlforths description of an amorphous cumulative process tends to this understandingfundamentally demarcates the transition of 1947-48 from social democratic reformism.

The bourgeois states were therefore smashed, although not in the manner anticipated by classical Marxism: not at agiven hour on a definite day, admittedly, but smashed nonetheless. The survival of some institutions of the bourgeoisstate cited by state capitalist theorists and some contributors to the buffer zone debate as evidence that noqualitative change had taken place is of little significance, except that it underlines the particularly degenerate natureof the transformation.

The fact that the same judges, who had presided at trials of communists in the 1930s, were sometimes to be foundpassing sentence upon those purged by the Stalinists in the 1940s; that all kinds of bourgeois administrativearrangements carried over; that various quasi-democratic bodies (including nominally independent bloc parties andpseudo-parliaments) were permitted by the Stalinists these things were not decisive in determining the class natureof the state. Certainly, those Trotskyists who argued that they were, had been obliged by reality to quietly drop theiobjections by the early 1950s.

The real question for Marxists is not the class origins of the functionaries but in whose interests they function. Thehistory of bourgeois revolutions showed that it was possible for opportunist elements to navigate the choppy waters oboth revolution and counter-revolution General Monck and the Vicar of Bray in England, Fouch and Talleyrand inFrance. Even the Bolsheviks were obliged to retain a good part of the old civil service for a period, and subsequently reemploy the military specialists.

As we would expect, the bureaucratic overturns in Eastern Europe were far more degenerate in their methods, andconsiderably less choosy when it came to making use of the dregs of the old society. As a result of the new socioeconomic course after 1947, the remnants of the old order were either reconciled to the new regime or systematicallypurged. State institutions and the legal system, while continuing to harbour numerous reactionaries, were similarlytransformed in line with their new function. The Stalinists ensured the loyalty of the state apparatus by establishing anddeveloping 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 tooverestimate the extent to which the adoption by the Peoples Democracies of planning and other typical features o

bureaucratic rule necessarily guaranteed their future existence. In fact, they continued to be subject to wideconsiderations of Soviet foreign policy, as was shown by the preparedness of the Soviet leadership in 1953 to barteaway the GDR: Malenkov and Beria viewed Germanys division and the presence of the armed forces of East and Weston German soil as the chief obstacles to a rationalisation of Soviet foreign policy and the chief source of internationatension. They contemplated nothing less than a withdrawal from Germany and the virtual abandonment of the EasGerman communist regime, hoping that they would be able to persuade the Western Powers to agree to a withdrawaof their forces too.44 They proposed to Eisenhower that a peace treaty with Germany giving the German people th

44 I. Deutscher, Russia, China and the West 1953-1966, Penguin, 1970, p.47. For a detailed account of twists and turns of Soviet policyon Germany see D. Dallin, Soviet Foreign Policy After Stalin, Lippincott, 1961



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possibility of a reunion in one State...should be concluded as early as possible; and following closely upon this theoccupation troops should be withdrawn.45

Although there were significant differences between what took place in Eastern Europe in 1939-40 and 1947-48Trotskys last writings in the course of the struggle against the Burnham-Shachtman opposition should have providedthe post-war Fourth International with some of the necessary analytical tools.

It is more likely, however, he wrote in 1939, that in the territories scheduled to become a part of the USSR, the

Moscow government will carry through the expropriation of the large landowners and statification of the means oproduction. This variant is most probable not because the bureaucracy remains true to the socialist programme butbecause it is neither desirous nor capable of sharing the power, and the privileges the latter entails, with the old rulingclasses in the occupied territories.46

As to whether this placed a question mark over the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism, he had this to say: Theprimary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, howeveimportant these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organisation of the worldproletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending former conquests and accomplishing new ones. From this oneand only decisive standpoint, the politics of Moscow, taken as a whole, completely retains its reactionary character andremains the chief obstacle on the road to the world revolution.47

Nor was Trotsky in favour of entrusting any historic mission to the Red Army or according it any independensignificance: We have never promised to support all the actions of the Red Army which is an instrument in the handsof the Bonapartist bureaucracy. We have promised to defend only the USSR as a workers state and solely those things

within it which belong to a workers state.

48

He also envisaged a situation in which capitalism could be overturned, not by a workers revolution, but by a civil waof a special type. ... introduced on bayonets from without ...controlled by the Moscow bureaucracy.49At the same timhe warned that these missionaries with bayonets would alienate the masses.50

The Fourth International responded to the post-war developments inadequately. Not only was the FIs timing belatedits method was defective, and prepared the political collapse which followed. It remained the prisoner of the prognosithat capitalism could only be destroyed in Eastern Europe as a result of structural assimilation into the Soviet Unionas had been the case with the eastern zone of Poland and the Baltic States in 1939-40. Once it abandoned thisperspective, 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 inthe late 1940s. North argues that the Second World Congress correctly maintained that capitalism had not beendestroyed in the buffer zone,51 while Frank claims that: Despite a few measures aimed at those members of thepropertied classes who had collaborated with the Germans, the (Soviet) army had left the bourgeois social structures o

these countries intact.52

David Rousset appears to have been one of the first members of the FI to argue that, on the basis of widespreadnationalisation, the buffer zone countries had become workers states.53 His contribution to the International ExecutiveCommittee Plenum in June, 1946 was opposed by Ernest Mandel, who insisted: The bureaucracy can definitively bringnew territories into its control only by assimilating them structurally on the economic base which issued from theOctober Revolution.54

The Fls Second World Congress met in April-May, 1948, after the decisive overturns had taken place. Its maidocument was The USSR and Stalinism, presented by Mandel. To deny the capitalist nature of these countries, iclaimed, amounts to an acceptance, in no matter what form, of this Stalinist revisionist theory, it means seriously toconsider the historic possibility of a destruction of capitalism by terror from above without the revolutionaryintervention of the masses.55

45 Russia, China and the West, p.4846 L. Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, p.2247 Ibid., p.2348 Ibid., p.36.49 Ibid., p.11350 Ibid., p.3451 D. North, The Heritage We Defend, Labor Publications, 1988, p.14552 P. Frank: The Fourth International, Ink Links, 1979, pp.72-353 S. Bornstein and A. Richardson, War and the International, Socialist Platform, 1986, p.21754 E. Germain, The Soviet Union after the War, SWP International Information Bulletin, Vol. 1, No. 2, September, 194655 Quoted in S. Bornstein and A. Richardson, The War and the International, p.217



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Amendments proposed by the RCP (Britain, led by Jock Haston and Ted Grant), arguing that the overturn ocapitalism in the buffer zone, and the control of the bourgeoisie over the government and state apparatus was eithecomplete orapproaching completion, wereheavily defeated.56

In June, 1948, immediately after the congress, the Soviet-Yugoslav split took place. Junking the congresss analysis o Yugoslavia as a capitalist state in which revolutionary defeatism should be strictly applied in time of war, the Fleadership immediately began treating it as a de facto workers state, headed by a party which had broken withStalinism.57 Three fawning open letters were sent to the YCP by the International Secretariat, one of them finishing withthe ringing words: Yugoslav communists, let us unite our efforts for a new Leninist International.58

Although a majority of the FI was in favour of characterising the buffer zone countries as capitalist, sustaining thisanalysis was becoming increasingly difficult. The resolution of the 7th plenum ofthe IEC in April, 1949 described thebuffer zone as a unique type of hybrid transitional society in the process of transformation, with features that are ayet so fluid and lacking precision that itis extremely difficult to summarise its fundamental nature.59

This unique transitional state category was in fact a basic revision of Marxism. It meant either that the state could atone and the same time be the instrument of two classes or that itwas neutral between them.

The IECs tortuous reasoning forced it first one way, and then another. The Eastern European bourgeoisie was sufferingfrom enfeeblement or virtual disappearance,60 however, the buffer zone, except for Finland and the Russianoccupied zones in Austria and Germany, are on the road toward structural assimilation with the USSR, but...thiassimilation has not yet been accomplished.61

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 reaplanning implemented, either by incorporation into the Soviet Union, or by the establishment of a Balkan-DanubeFederation.

Needless to say, none of these conditions were ever met. But the qualitative similarities between Eastern Europe andthe Soviet Union were already obvious. The FI began to divide into two camps. Those who were moving to recognise thebuffer zone as workers states argued that the economic criteria had been fulfilled; those who held the line that theywere capitalist states maintained that thepolitical criteria had not.

Bert Cochran (E. R. Frank) put forward a workers state position in March, 1949, comparing the degree of statificationwith the Soviet Union. Morris Stein, addressing the SWP Political Committee in July, 1949, put the case for ostrichMarxism: Rather than jumping to conclusions as to the social character of the states in Eastern Europe, it is far betteto await further developments.62When discussion resumed in August, the positions of the RCP were dismissed out ohand, and with little regard for the facts: I havent read their latest documents, but this is of little importance, sincetheir position 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 nationalisation.63

By September, Michel Pablo was proposing that the FI adopt Yugoslavia as a workers state a position it had implicitlyheld for over a year. Mandel counter-attacked in October, exposing the weaknesses of those who were prepared toequate nationalisation with the overthrow of capitalism, but woodenly sticking to his contention that it could only beoverturned by a genuine proletarian revolution. Revealingly, Mandel admitted that his method owed more to politicaconsiderations than to the study of objective reality: Our criterion of Stalinism from the standpoint of itineffectiveness against capitalism would lose all its meaning.64

Joe Hansen, writing in December, 1949, noted two major contradictions in the majority position. The Second WorldCongress resolution, while insisting that revolutionary action was necessary in the buffer zone, acknowledged thacapitalism had been overturned in 1939-40 in the Baltic countries, eastern Poland, Bessarabia and Karelia without themobilisation of the masses. The 7th plenum resolution had emphasised the capitalist nature of the buffer zones statesbut had paradoxically argued that this does not at all imply that the bourgeoisie is in power as the dominant class inthese countries.65

56 Ibid., p.21757 See B. Pitt, The Fourth International and Yugoslavia (1948-50), Workers News supplement, July 199158 Ibid59 Class, Party, and State and the Eastern European Revolution, SWP Education for Socialists, 1969, p.1360 Ibid., p.1161 Ibid., p.1462 Ibid., p.1963 Quote in D. North, The Heritage We Defend, pp.162-364 Quoted in ibid., p.17565 Class, Party, and State and the Eastern European Revolution, p.22



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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: theresult of a proletarian revolution in progress since 1941, (although the FI had not noticed it until 1948). The break withthe Kremlin was the summit of this process. The rest of the buffer zone, Pablo saw as only approaching assimilation tothe USSR, although he was prepared to accept that it could take place without either the abolition of borders, oformal incorporation into the Soviet Union.66

Cochran was altogether more blunt: We maintain that if the state structures and the economies of these countries aresimilar to that of the USSR, then they are of the same class type. Any other conclusion calls into question oucharacterisation of the USSR.67 He saw the buffer zone countries after 1945 as regimes of dual power and theStalinist constitutions of 1948-49 as the juridical expression of the fact that the dual power regimes had come to anend.68

It was Pablo who first coined the term deformed workers state. By origin, applied to Yugoslavia, it meant a statequantitatively, rather than qualitatively deformed by bureaucracy.69 At its 8th plenum in April, 1950, the IEC formallyaccepted Pablos position on Yugoslavia, although there were still those like John G. Wright praised by North as a farsighted and perceptive dissident!70 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 asdiplomatically as possible. Mandel meanwhile quietly dropped his objections. Matters were not finally settled until theThird World Congress in August, 1951, which extended the category of deformed workers state to the remainder of thebuffer zone countries. Even then, it did so with a face-saving formula: We still believe that up to 1949 these states stiretained a fundamentally capitalist structure.71 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 adopteoverwhelmingly. The theoretical issues at stake were left unresolved and brushed under the carpet. And the politicaconsequence was a somersault from Stalinophobia to Stalinophilia. Having clung for so long to the position that onlgenuine proletarian revolutions could overturn capitalism, the revelation that Stalinism had already done the job inhalf a continent produced a deep-going adaptation in the FI, which now saw its role as pressuring the communistparties 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 theFIs disorientation 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, couldnonetheless expropriate the bourgeoisie.

The fear Mandel had betrayed of ceding Stalinism a historic mission was turned inside out. The FIs adaptation to Titowas 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 analysisto be answered politically. In the case of classical social revolutions, such as the French bourgeois revolution of 1789 othe socialist revolution of October 1917, where state power clearly passed from one class to another, the task isstraightforward.

However, deciding the class nature of the state becomes especially difficult when a petty-bourgeois leadership hascome into conflict with both the main classes of modern capitalist society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat typicallywhere both are weak and leaderless. This was the case in both the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions at a certain pointof their development.

In such a situation, the practice of this leadership and the development of the relationship between the state, theproperty relations and the two main classes have to be carefully analysed. A qualitative change in the state would bemarked by the fact that limited collectivist interventions into the economy proved inadequate to stabilise the situationand placed more drastic measures the suppression of the bourgeoisie immediately on the agenda. The alternative is

growing paralysis, which prepares political counter-revolution.

66 M. Pablo, Yugoslavia and the rest of the Buffer Zone, SWP International Information Bulletin, May 195067 Class, Party, and Stare and the Eastern European Revolution, p.4068 Ibid., p.41-269 Pablo considered that the transition from capitalism to socialism might span an entire historic period, occupied by a whole

gamut of transitional regimes which would suffer from some degree of deformation. This unremarkable prognosis, not greatlydissimilar from Lenins conception of the transition period, became transformed by those who formed the International Committee,into the legend of centuries of deformed workers states.

70 D. North, The Heritage We Defend, p.18171 Pierre Franks report to the congress, Class, Party, and Stare and the Eastern European Revolution, p.50



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The Nicaraguan FSLN came to power in 1979 as a result of an armed struggle, which overthrew the Somozdictatorship. It was in essence a radical popular front, with a petty-bourgeois leadership, supported by workers partiesand minority anti-Somoza sections of the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie a line-up of forces similar to that led by Fidel Castroin 1959. Moreover, it undertook significant measures of nationalisation and state intervention.

But despite the subjectively socialist intentions of the FSLN, there was to be no Cuban Road in Nicaragua. The fateof such revolutions is closely linked to the nature of the political leadership at the head of the state. A revolutionaryinternationalist leadership would have combated US/Contra insurgency not only by military means, but by destroyingthe basis of the bourgeoisie at home, and by spreading socialist revolution abroad. In the absence of such a leadershipthe international balance of forces, and within that, the refusal of the Soviet and Cuban bureaucracies to countenance arerun of the Cuban revolution, determined the eventual outcome the negotiated settlement with Chamorro and theContras 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 thanto analyse reality, while using Trotskys ideas as a methodological tool. The projection in some of Trotskys writings thacivil war would be a necessary precondition for capitalist restoration became transformed in the hands of the epigonesinto a supra-historical dogma. It is small wonder that, armed with such a theory, the events of 1989-91 took themajority of would-be Trotskyists by surprise. Instead of dispensing with the reactionary notion that Marxism is a kind ofcrystal ball for gazing into the future, some despaired of their god that failed, and looked for a purer pre-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 civwar of the kind the epigones envisaged has not been required to restore bourgeois states, not least because other keyelements of Trotskys equation for instance, the contention that the social revolution, betrayed by the ruling partystill exists ... in the consciousness of the toiling masses72 had been so substantially eroded in the intervening 55years.

By reducing Trotskys thinking on the possibility ofcounter-revolution to a single sentence, the epigones have done it grave disservice, and overlooked its historical and dialectical evolution. Indeed, without falling into the trap oattempting to show that Trotsky did indeedpredictthe course of events, a rounded study of his writings shows that heconsidered a number of possible paths of counter-revolution, and that, viewed in their proper perspective, a number ohis insights can shed light on the present.

Although it is possible to cite a number of agitational manifestos and speeches in which Bolsheviks presented worldrevolution 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 fafrom the present and its short-term potential.

In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, the most likely potential for counter-revolution came from an alliance odomestic forces landlords, monarchists, capitalists and richer peasants with external imperialist intervention. Buthe Soviet victory in the civil war brought an uneasy peace with the imperialists. With this breathing space, theimmediate likelihood of a successful White Guardist uprising receded. Moreover, the peasantry, whatever it thought othe Bolsheviks, had a stake in the revolution in the shape of the agrarian revolution. This explains why themachinations of imperialist agents such as Sidney Reilly were crushed so easily. The more perceptive counterrevolutionaries, among them leading Cadets like Ustryalov, saw greater potential in the evolution of the regime itselfand 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, bureaucraticforces within the party and the state bureaucracy, which through their chauvinism and readiness to retreat, over suchcentral issues as the monopoly of foreign trade, were preparing the collapse of the proletarian dictatorship dictatorship, which in Moshe Lewinss phrase, was increasingly being exercised in a void.73

The dangers inherent in reviving private ownership were never far from the thinking of leading Bolsheviks. In his reporton production to the 12th congress in April 1923, Trotsky remarked: Petty commodity production and private tradeform a hostile bloc of forces against us.74 He went on to give the following summary of the conditions necessary for thesurvival of the workers state: If we had to explain upon what our hopes for a socialist future for Russia rested, wewould reply: I) Upon the political power of the party, supported by the Red Army; 2) Upon the nationalisation o

72 L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, New Park, 1982, p.25573 See W. I. Lenin and L. Trotsky, Lenin s Fight Against Stalinism, Pathfinder, 1975, and M. Lewin, Lenins Last Struggle, Pluto, 197574 L. Trotsky, Socialism and the Market, Workers News No. 31, May 1991



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production; 3) Upon the monopoly of foreign trade. It would be sufficient to throw down one of these pillars for thebuilding to fall.75

The threat represented by the alliance of the bureaucrat, the NEPman and the kulak is a theme running throughouTrotskys writings during the struggle of the Left Opposition from 1923-27. His veiled attack in Towards Socialism oCapitalism?76 in 1925 on the economic programme of Stalin and Bukharin centred on his demand for accurate andcomparative coefficients of world economy which, in contrast to the official legend of socialist self-sufficiency, wouldhave 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