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The Degenerated Revolut ion

t he origin and nature of theStalinist states

by Workers Power Brit ain andthe Ir ish Workers Group

published by the

League for t he Fif th Internat ional

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Preface

Fifty years ago Stalinism was in crisis following the death of its world leader. Yet, the system he brutally forged lived on

in the USSR and East Europe until 1989-91. Then, a combi-nation of deep systemic crisis and democratic mass protestsshattered the degenerate workers’ states one after anotherand, finally, the USSR itself.

The Degenerated Revolution was published 22 years ago,shortly after the brutal attempt by Polish Stalinists to main-tain themselves by crushing Solidarnosc, and shortly beforeMikhail Gorbachev tried to revive bureaucratic rule in theSoviet Union by introducing glasnost.

This book was written in the conviction that Stalinism’sdays as a ruli ng force were numbered. This was rooted inTrotsky’s revolutionary analysis of the degeneration of theRussian Revolution and the Left Opposition’s alternative pro-gramme which are presented in the opening chapters.

But its novel contribution lay in its explanation of thecreation of Stalinist states, in Eastern Europe and China,laterin Cuba and South-east Asia. The contradiction that capital-ism had been overthrown but by counter-revo lut i on arymethods which excluded the working class from power and,

therefore, prevented any progress towards socialism, had dis-oriented the Trotskyist movement since the 1940’s.Within i t,currents accommodated to one wing or another of Stalinism,seeing them as relatively progressive opponents of capitalism,rather than collective opponents of socialism.

The left’s reaction to the events of 1989-91 only served toconfirm the validi ty of the book’s critique of centr ism. TheUSFI’s programme of reform led it to back Gorbachev anddeny any danger of capitalist restoration. More grotesquely,the iSt believed the bureaucratic regimes themselves were adefence against capitalism and so sided with them againstmass working class mobilisations.

In contrast, the LRCI was able to develop the programmeof polit ical revolution amid the fast changing situation,

defending the socialist programme against bureaucrat andcapitalist alike.

Despite these strengths, however, there were flaws in thiswork, in part icular in the chapter dealing with the “post waroverturns” and the Marxist theory of the state. The bookargued that the capitalist states were “smashed” prior to thebureaucratic overthrows of capitalism after 1945. In fact, theStalinists were able to “take over”, or reconstruct, the bour-geois apparatus,and use it to destroy capitalism whilst main-taining the repression of the working class. In an appendix tothis re-publication we set out the corrections needed to the Degen erat ed Revolu tion on this issue published in 1998.

In addit ion, 1989-91 revealed weaknesses in our pro-

gramme of polit ical revolution itself. Although anti-bureau-cratic demands, including calls for democratic economicplanning were raised, as expected, they were rapidly replacedby support for restoration of capitalism as the best guaranteeof freedom and economic advance. We underestimated thedegree to which Stalinist dictatorship had alienated the massof workers from the idea of collective ownership and social lyplanned production. Worse, it had denied the working classany opportunity to develop its own organisations or leaders,and leadership was quickly provided by pro-Western forces.

The tran sition to capitalism, however, has massivelyincreased poverty and social inequality in the former degen-erate workers’ states. Already, a new generation of youngadults – with no l iving experience of Stalinist rule – resists.

This edit ion is dedicated to them, that they may learnfrom their parents’ and grandparents’ history so that they donot have to relive it.

London, 2003

2 The Degenerated Revolut ion

Contents

Int roduct ion 3

Th e t r an si t io n f r om cap it al ism t o co m mu ni sm 5

From soviet po w er to soviet Bonapart ism

– t he deg en er at ion o f t he Russi an Revolut io n 9

The survival and expansion o f Stal ini sm

af t er t he second w orld w ar 45

Bureaucrati c social revolut ions and the

M arxist t heory o f t he st at e 57

Tit o and M ao: disobedient St al inist s 62

Indo-China’s long revolution – a history

of w ar, compromise and bet rayal 72

Cast ro ’s “ Cuban road” - f rom popul ism

t o St al inism 82

The permanent revo lut ion abor t ed 89

St al inism and t he w orld w ork ing class 92

The programme of po l i t ical revolut ion 95

The defence of the USSR and of the

degenerat e w orkers’ st at es 100

Centri sm and Stal ini sm – t he

falsi f icat ion o f Trot sky’s analysis 103

Appendix: Marx ism. Stal in ism and the theory of the

state (reprinted from Trotskyist Internat ional 23,

January-June 1998 122

The DegeneratedRevolution:t he origin andnature of theStalinist statesby Workers Pow er and t he

Irish Work ers Grou p

First publi shed by the League for a Revolut ionary Communist

Internat ional in September 1982

Reprinted by the League for t he Fif th Internat ional January 2004

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Int roduct ion

Mill ions of working people now live under regimeswhose official title is “Socialist”. The world’s first

workers’ state, the Soviet Union, is no longer the world’sonly workers’ state.

From Cuba to Kampuchea, the workers of a wholeseries of countries have witnessed the overthrow of cap-

italism.“Witnessed” is indeed the right word, for while the

property relations in these countries resemble those of the USSR, the manner of their establishment does not.In Russia in October 1917 the Bolsheviks led a genuineproletarian revolution which re su lted in the establish-ment of Soviet, i.e.workers’ council power. The workingclass, through its own organisations, and led by revolu-tionary communists, was the direct agent of the estab-lishment of the world’s first workers’ state. No otherworkers’ state has been established in this way.

The purpose of this book is to explain how and why

a series of post-capitalist societies came into being in away distinct from October 1917, and in a way unfore-seen by the foremost revolutionary thinkers of theMarxist tradition. Our starting point is the analysis of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution carried outby L. D. Trotsky in the 1930s. The section of this workdealing with the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia isbased on the theoretical insights that Trotsky made,par-ticularly in his book The Revolut ion Betrayed . His char-acterisation of the USSR as a “counter-revolutionaryworkers’ state” and, as such, one prone to chronic insta-bility,retains all of its validity today, as we seek to prove.

However, Trotsky predicted the imminent collapse of Stalin’s regime in 1940. Now, 42 years later, that mon-strous mockery of sociali sm is sti ll with us, even thoughits principal architect – J. V. Stalin – is long since dead.Does the clear incorrectness of Trotsky’s perspectiveinvalidate the fundamental elements of his analysis?

In analysing the survival and expansion of Stalinismafter the Second World War, we seek to show that it doesnot. Even though the route to the creation of workers’states may differ, ranging from guerrilla warfare inChina and Cuba, to administrative decree in Poland andthe German Democratic Republic, the essential aspects

of these states remain identical. Like the USSR,a work-ers’ state which has degenerated from genuine sovietpower to Stalinist dictatorship, all of the workers’ statesexclude the working class from real political power.

Nowhere – neither in the self-management councilsin Yugoslavia, nor the People’s Committees of Cuba dogenuine workers’ councils exercise state power.Capitalism has been overthrown. The economies of allof these countries are both nationalised and plannified.In everyone, however, the agency of this overturn waseither the Soviet bureaucracy itself (as in the Balticstates,before the war),or a national Stalinist party – that

is, a monolithic party, led by bureaucrats, not a revolu-tionary workers’ party based on democratic centralism.

The bureaucratic parties, while not extensions of theSoviet bureaucracy are, nevertheless, its replicas. Asprivileged bureaucratic castes their interests are basedon the contradictory reality of the existence of workers’states in which the working class have no political voiceand therefore no control over the economies.

Like the Soviet Union, these states are counter-revo-lutionary.However,where the USSR degenerated from ahealthy workers’ state, these other states have never beenhealthy. Brought into being by Stalinist part ies, they areall degenerate from birth. This work looks at the forma-tion of these states and the implications that this has forMarxist theory on questions such as the state and therole of the working class.

For this reason this work is also polemical. We rejectthe various theories of the USSR that have so faremerged from the so-called Trotskyist movement. Theplain truth is that the elements of the shattered Trotskyisttradition have never fully understood the real nature of the Stalinist regimes. While holding onto the title thatTrotsky gave to the first Stalinist regime, they haverobbed his analysis of its revolutionary content.

Leading spokesmen for “official” Trotskyism havedutifully denounced Stalinism in the abstract, only toprostrate themselves before it in practice (Pablo andYu go s l avi a, Mandel and Ch i na , the SWP(US) andCuba). Or else, elements have strayed from Trotsky’sanalysis to seek refuge in the world of ideal norms inwhich everything is either perfect or rotten, and nevershall there be a permutation (Tony Cliff ’s theory of theUSSR as State Capitalist is but one example of thisschool of thought).

Our analysis differs from “official” – that is to say,degenerate, Trotskyism – and from those who haverejected Trotsky ism altogether. We firmly believe that itis necessary to start with Trotsky’s basic analysis, but todevelop and extend it, not merely with regards to devel-opments after his death, but also with regard to theUSSR itself.

By developing his analysis and basing that develop-ment on the fundamental elements of his own method,we believe we have gone some way to explaining one of the most perplexing problems of this century – how hascapitalism been overthrown in a whole series of coun-tries without the independent action of the workingclass playing the decisive role, and what are the impl ica-

tions of this for revolutionary strategy?

The answers we have developed to this question haveenabled us to elaborate an understanding of Stalinism’srole within the world labour movement, and a strategyfor fighting against it.

These programmatic conclusions are summarised inthis work in the sections on Politi cal Revolution andDefence of the Workers’ States.

While this document deals with the origin andnature of the Stalinist states, it does not deal with theirdevelopment as degenerate workers’ states. Within the

left there is much controversy over the dynamics of theStalinist economies. Do they follow cyclical patterns?

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What is the nature of their crises?What is the relation-ship between the plan and the law of value in theseeconomies?What is the exact nature of the bureaucracy;what are its contradictions, layers etc? What is wrongwith “n ew cla s s” / “s ta te capitalist” t h eories of t h ebureaucracies?

These questions are vital ones to answer. Vitalbecause they lay the basis for developing concrete strate-gies for politi cal revolution based on realistic, not mere-ly general, perspectives.

We have not yet carried out the vast amount of workrequ i red before su ch qu e s ti ons can be properlyanswered. However, we recognise these gaps in ouranalysis and intend to carry on the work in order to fillthem.We are convinced that our analysis of the creationof these states gives us a firm foundation to conduct thiswork from.

A final word should be added about the origin of this work. Workers Power and the Irish Workers Groupboth emerged in the 1970s from organisations with ast ate capitalist analysis of the USSR (the Social ist

Workers Pa rt y (GB), and the Socialist WorkersMovement (Ireland)).As factions inside these organisa-tions, we had begun to challenge many of the theoreti-cal touchstones that these groups were based on.

After our expulsions we committed ourselves to athoroughgoing re-assessment of the “Russian question”.In the case of Workers Power, this re-assessment tookplace within the framework of a “holding” position of defining the USSR as state capitalist. It was only in 1980,during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan that wedecided such a holding position was wrong, and thatTrotsky’s analysis provided a correct alternative.

Correct, but not fully developed and certainly, asrepresented by the United Secretariat of the Fo urthInternational, the then Organising Committee for theReconstruction of the Fourth International, and theinternational Spartacist tendency, open to completeabuse. As organisations we committed ourselves to pro-ducing theses that could both develop Trotsky’s analysisand apply it to the post-war world, thereby serving as analternative to the bankrupt versions of Trotskyism onoffer.

These theses went through a series of conferencesand were finally adopted by a joint National Committee

of the two organisations in March 1982.After the adop-tion of these theses,an editorial team of Workers Powerm embers set about elaborating and developing theminto the present work.

We submit this book to the reader and request thathe or she bear the following objective in mind. WorkersPower and the Irish Workers Group believe that no rev-olutionary international exists. We believe that Trotsky’sFourth International has been destroyed by his followers’inability to explain the survival and expansion of bothStalinism and imperialism after the war.

The task for revolutionaries is to rebuild a TrotskyistInternational and the first step in doing this is by re-elaborating the revolutionary programme. What wemean by that is concretely demonstrated by this work.Stalinism, a cardinal question, responsible for endlesssplits and confusion amongst Trotskyists has to be fullyunderstood.

As the recent events in Poland have shown, anunderstanding of Stalinism is vital in developing andimplementing a revolutionary communist strategy. Are-elaboration of the Trotskyist position on Stalinism iswhat this work aims to be.We would justify the necessi-ty for such a re-elaboration in the words of Trotskywhen he was planning to “re-elaborate” The Communist

Manifesto :

“Revolutionary thought has nothing in common with

idol worship. Programmes and prognoses are tested

and corrected in the light of experien ce which is the

supreme criterion of human reason ... However, as is

evidenced by historical experience itself, these correc-

tions and additions can be successfully made only by

proceeding in accord with the method lodged in the

foundation of theManifesto itself ”.

And so with our own analyses and programmes. Wehave developed Trotsky’s position by using his method.We invite wide-ranging debate on our conclusions. Forour part, we will seek to use them in the class struggle.Our theory is revolutionary theory. Above all it is aguide to action. It is theory as described by Marx :

“Clearly the weapon of criticism cannot replace the

criticism of weapons,and material force must be over-

thrown by material force. But theory also becomes a

material force once it has gripped the masses”.

Such theory can and must play its role in the strug-gle to rid the planet of all the Stalinist bureaucracieswho have debased socialism, slaughtered millions, andtoday extend their doomed life only by accumulatingendless contradictions, which they are incapable of

resolving,and which will inevitably devour them.

London, September 1982


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Against those who asserted the eternity of the statemachine and those who made the first act of the

revolution its “abolition”,Marx and Engels argued thatthe proletariat could neither inaugurate a classless andstateless society at one blow nor use the existing statemachine,but that:

“Between capitalist and communist society lies the

period of revolutionary transformation of the one

into the other. Corresponding to this is also a poli ti -

cal transition period in which the state can be noth-

ing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the prole-

tariat . . . The proletarian revolution therefore inau-

gurates a new epoch in human history – the attempt

to consciously construct a society which can ‘inscribe

on its banners: From each according his abil ity, toeach according to his needs’”.2

The central task facing the proletariat in the transi-tion period is to transform property relations,social l ifeand political power so as to make possible the final con-solidation of a communist society. In this period notonly are the productive forces themselves to be mas-sively expanded, not only are the social relations of pro-duction to be revolutionised but the proletariat as aclass, and i ts proletarian state, will themselves witheraway. This was one of the earl iest insights of Marx andEngels,one from which they never wavered.

“ The working class, in the course of its development,will substitute for the old civil society an association

which wil l exclude classes and their antagonisms,and

there will be no more political power properly so

called, since“poli tical power is precisely the offi cial

expression of antagonism-in civil society”.3

And again:

“When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means

becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victori -

ous only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then

the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite

which determines it , private property.” 4

The dictatorship of the proletariat i s thus a tempo-rary though indispensable, agency in the final eradica-tion of capitalism and its social and economic laws. It isthe means to the full realisation of the Marxist pro-gramme – communism.

Poli t ics in t he t ransit ion period

The proletarian dictatorship has a double function. Itmust ensure the repression and destruction of the for-mer ruling class and the defence of the workers stateagainst internal and external counter-revolution. But i t

also inaugurates the construction of a planned econo-my which will allow the proletariat to progressively

eradicate the laws of motion of capitalist economy and,on the basis of material abundance, replace all its

repressive social norms and insti tutions. Marx andEngels were clear that the first prerequisite for theopening of the transit ion was the seizure of polit icalpower by the proletariat and the forcible retention of that power:

“But before such a change can be accomplished it is

necessary to establish the dictatorship of the prole-

tariat, whose prime condition is a proletarian army.

The working classes have to win the right to emanci-

pation in the battlefield.” 5

The purpose of the possession of state power – “theorganised power of one class for oppressing another” –

is to “sweep away by force, the old conditions of pro-duction” and thereby lay the basis for the abolition of its own supremacy as a class.The function of the prole-tarian dictatorship as the repressive agent against thebourgeoisie necessitates its dictatorial aspect. It is inLenin’s terms “unfettered by any law” in its dealingswith the bourgeoisie and their agents.

The attainment of communism via socialist con-struction imperatively demands the widest dem ocracyfor the toilers. To this end not only must the armedpower of the bourgeoisie be taken f rom its hands but thewhole military-bureaucratic machinery of the bour-

geois state must be smashed and replaced wi th a state of a new type representing the power of the proletariansthemselves.

Marx and Engels in their observations on the ParisCommune, Lenin and Trotsky in their concrete assess-ment of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputiesin Russia, all isolated the distinct features of the stateform the proletariat must construct if it is to organiseitself to rule as a class. Most vitally, this state form mustbe based on: the abolition of the standing army and itsreplacement by a popular milit ia; and the recallability of all officials who shall be in receipt of no material privi-

leges bar those of skilled workers. Lenin described thefeatures of this semi-state thus:

“The workers after winning poli tical power, will

smash the old bureaucratic apparatus,shatter it to its

very foundations,and raze it to the ground; the work-

ing class will replace it by a new one, consisting of the

very same workers and other employees, aga ins t

whose transformation into bureaucrats the measures

will at once be taken which were specified in detail by

Marx and Engels: 1) Not only election, but also recall

at any time; 2) pay I not to exceed that of a workman;

3) immediate introduction of control and supervi-

sion by all, so that all may become “bureaucrats” for atime and that therefore, nobody may be able to

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become a “bureaucrat’ ”.6

The bui lding of a classless and stateless society can-not be victorious in one country or group of countries.So long as capitalism retains its essential grip on theworld’s productive forces and its arsenal of destruction,the successful revolution of the proletariat, can onlyprove ultimately victorious through the world-widedefeat of the bourgeoisie.The transit ional period there-fore must also be a period of the internationalisation of the proletarian revolution.

Econom ics in t he t ransit ion per iod

The immediate task of the proletarian state is to com-plete the polit ical destruction of the bourgeoisie, toex propria te the capitali sts and thus cen tralise themeans of production in the hands of the state repre-senting the toilers themselves. But the expropriation of the capitalist class does not of itself eradicate the oper-ation of the laws or norms of capitalist production anddistribut ion. The Marxist programme aims to replacethe capitalist system of production with production

planned consciously to meet human need. This, of necessity,wil l entail a period of transition within whichthe working class fights to eradicate the norms of capi-talist production, distr ibut ion and exchange.

Marx and Engels presumed that in the early stagesof the transit ion considerable remnants of capitalistsociety would remain in operation. “What we have todeal with here is a communist society, not as it hasdeveloped on its own foundations, but, on the contrary,

just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thusin every respect, economically,morally and intellectual-ly, sti ll stamped with the birth marks of the old society

from whose womb it emerged”.7

Marx presumed, for example, that in the initialstages of transition, remuneration for labour wouldtake place on the basis of a system whereby:

“The individual producer receives back from society

– after the deductions have been made exactly what

he gives to it. The same amount of labour which he

has given to society in one form he receives back in

another”. 8

But he pointed out that such a system would neces-sari ly involve the perpetuation of bourgeois right.

“But one man is superior to another physically or

mentally, and so supplies more labour in the same

time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to

serve as a measure, must be defined by i ts duration or

intensity,otherwise it ceases to be a standard of mea-

surement” ;9 “ it i s, therefore, a right of inequalit y, in i ts

content, like every right”.10

He goes on:

“But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of

communist society as it is when it has just emerged

after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society.

Right can never be higher than the economic struc-

ture of society and its cultural development condi-tioned thereby”.11

The economy in the transition period is charac-terised by the continuation of the class struggle, butunder di fferent circumstances. Class conflict within theboundaries of a workers’ state is not principally deter-mined by the opposition between wage labour and cap-ital in the workplace.

However the proletariat remains a definite socialclass. It is not abolished by the revolution but is ratherobliged to struggle against the remnants of capitalismwithin the workers’ state and against the continueddomination of capitalism on a world scale.

In this struggle the proletariat in a workers’ state isno longer simply a class of wage slaves, but rather toi l-ers consciously eradicating the material foundations of their slavery from the advantageous posit ion of beingorganised as a ruling class. By continuing the classstruggle, by raising the productivity of labour and elim-inating scarcity the proletariat does not merely negatethe bourgeoisie, it also progressively negates its ownexistence as a defini te social class. This goal is complet-ed by means of the transit ion, but the existence of atransit ion period implies the continuation of aspects of the “old society” – the proletariat, bourgeois methodsof distribution and remnants of the operation of thelaw of value.

The task of the proletarian state is to progressivelysubordinate the operation of the laws of capitalist soci-ety and economy to the principles of conscious plan-ning. It was E. Preobrazhensky,at the time a supporterof Tro t s ky ’s Left Oppo s i ti on , wh o, in The New

Economics most sharply characterised the essence of thepolitical economy of the transit ion period as a struggleto subordinate the law of value to the laws of planning.

While the bo u r geois revo luti on is it sel f on ly anep i s ode in the devel opment and em a n ci p a ti on of bo ur geois mode of produ cti on , the task of cons tru ct-ing a socialist econ omy on ly:

“begins it s chronol ogy with the sei z u re of power by

the pro l et a ri a t .Nei t h er does that economy grow and

devel op autom a ti c a lly as the result of expropri ati on

of the capitalists, it has to be con s c i o u s ly constru ct-

ed by the prol eta rian state .” 12

The devel opm ent of a ny economic form means itso us ting of o t h er economic form s, the su bord i n a ti onof these forms to the new form , and their gradu al

“el i m i n a ti on”.

13

Statified property in the hands of even a healthyproletarian state does not have, in the immediate after-math of the proletarian revolution, an automaticallysocialist character.

The socialist, or otherwise, character of this postcapitalist property is determined by whether or not thedirection of those property relations is towards the tri-umph of conscious planning for the purpose of con-structing a society based on the principle of “from eachaccording to his abili ty, to each according to his needs”.We know of no better short description of the specific

characteristics of socialist property than that advancedby Trotsky himself:


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“The latter has as its premise the dying away of the

state as the guardian of property, the mitigation of

inequality and the gradual dissolution of the property

concept even in the morals and customs of society.”14

There can be no progressive mitigation of inequali -ty,no final triumph of the conscious planning principleover the law of value, no withering away of the stateexcept at the hands of the proletariat democraticallyorganised to exercise its own power.“The emancipationof the working class” remains “the task of the workersthemselves”.

Without direct control by the proletariat, the guar-antee against the emergence of a distinct stratum of bureaucrats ceases to exist and the vital force that canrevolutionise the productive forces in a rounded anddynamic way in order to meet human need – the cre-ative energy of the proletariat i tself – is excluded fromthe planning process.

But what happens in a state where capitalism hasbeen abolished but where the working class has lost ornever gained the power to exercise direct political

power? It is precisely this question that has faced theMarxist movement ever since the final triumph of Stalin in the USSR.

The tr ansit ion blo cked

Can the working class be said to be a ruling class whereits political power is not expressed by a revolutionaryvanguard linked to the mass of the class by organs of proletarian democracy?Can the dictatorship, the classrule of the workers exist where a bureaucratic dictator-ship over the working class has been established?

The history of the development of the capitalist

mode of production shows us many instances wherethe capitalist class either did not exercise, or lost theabil ity to exercise, direct poli tical power by and foritself. In France, the Napoleonic era, the Restorationperiod, and the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon allexcluded the bourgeoisie from direct access to politicalpower. But such is the nature of the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist class that this in no wayhampered the development of the capitalist economyand capitalist relations of production.

In deed Bonap artism is an inherent tendency of capitalism's po li tical li fe – one wh ich becomes domi-

nant in the imperialist epoch. The bo urgeoisie’s fear of the pro l et a ri at , the fact that i ts posi ti on as ruling cl asswas assured by economic laws over whi ch it had noconscious po li tical control made it possible for thebourgeoisie to to lerate, and even desire in certain cir-cu mst ances, a form of state that had a tendency toauton omy from direct con trol by the bo urgeoisie itsel f.This is no way altered the class ch aracter of that stateas long as it pres ided over and protected capitalistpropert y relati on s.

But, as we have seen, the Marxist movement hadalways seen the proletariat’s direct control over its own

state as an indispensable element without which thetransit ion to communism cannot be effected. Trotsky,

for example, in 1931 continued to express the view thatthe very designation of a state as a workers’ state – inthis case the USSR – signified that the bourgeoisiewould need an armed uprising in order to take powerwhile the workers could revive the party and regime“with the methods and on the road to reform”.

The history of the rise of the bourgeoisie evidencesa series of “polit ical revolutions” where the polit icallyexpropriated bourgeoisie struggled to overthrow theirpolitical expropriators (after having already sealed thehegemony of capitalist relations of production). Thiswas the case with the overthrow of the Bourbons in1830 and the Orleanists at the hands of the FrenchRevolution of 1848.

While the bourgeoisie resorted to revolutionaryaction and attempted to dress up its actions as a socialrevolution, these events did not signify the passing of social and economic power from one ruling class toanother.

Before the work of Trotsky in the 1930s, based onthe concrete experience of the political degeneration of

the Soviet Union, the Marxist tradition had made noattempt to study the potential situation of a workingclass that had succeeded in crushing capitalist powerand property but failed to prevent the emergence of adistinct bureaucracy strong enough to deprive the pro-letariat itself of political power.

Trotsky was the first Marxist to develop an analogybetween the bourgeois “poli tical revolution” and thetasks of the proletariat should it itself be polit icallyexpropriated without capitalist property relations hav-ing been restored in a social counter-revolution.

In Trotsky’s view the loss of direct political power by

the proletariat and its vanguard does not lead immedi-ately or automatically to the re-establishment of thecapitalist mode of production. The experience of theUSSR shows this to be the case. But should the prole-tariat and its conscious organised vanguard lose politi-cal power then the transition to socialism will beblocked because the only force with a material interestin that transit ion, and the abili ty to effect it, will havebeen prevented from doing so.

The result will be that “the state” wil l continue inprecisely the form Marxists seek to abolish – set aboveand against the toilers. Far from a tendency to ever

greater equali ty, inequali ties will continue and solidify.The capitalist norms of distribut ion and exchange thatMarxists seek to destroy and replace with consciousplanning at the hands of the mass of toilers wil l contin-ue and even strengthen. Family li fe, sexual oppression,the deadening cultural void of human relations undercapitalism will not be transformed, but wil l live on inthe post-capitalist society.

Such societies – although no longer dominated anddetermined by the laws of the capitalist system of pro-duction – can only advance to communism after thepro l et a r iat has sei zed po l i ti cal power aga i n . Th eoppre s s ive mach i n ery in the hands of the ru l i n gbureaucracies in the so-called sociali st states, the jeal-


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ously guarded material privi leges of the bureaucratsmean that the proletariat cannot seize that powerthrough reform. It will of necessity be forced on theroad of political revolution.

Thus the monstrous bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Revolut ion and the duplication of its essen-tial features ab initi o in a whole series of revolut ions,does not introduce a que sti on unfore s een by thefounders of communism. It does not require a quali ta-tive alteration of the Marxist programme but the devel-opment of the anti-bureaucratic content present fromits creation.

A vital element of the Marxist programme for con-structing communism – the expropriation of the capi-talist class and the centralisation of production on thebasis of a plan – has been implemented in the USSRand the other degenerate workers’ states.

For this reason we recognise these states to be a his-toric gain for the working class – states based on post-capitalist property form s . But wi t h o ut pro l et a ri a npolitical power the potential of that property form to

revolut ionise the producti ve forces and lay the basis fora communist society cannot be realised. The politicalpower of the bureaucracy and the state forms whichdefend i t remain therefore an obstacle to the realisationof the historic interests of the working class.

Footnotes

1. Karl M arx, “Cri tique of the Gotha Programme", Marx and Engels Selected

Works, (Moscow, 1970), 3 vol., vol.3, p.26.

2. ibid., p.19.

3. Karl Marx,Marx and EngelsCollected W orks, (London,1976), voI.6,pp.211-2.

4. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, (London, 1975), voI.4,p.36.

5.Marx, “Rede auf der Feier zum seibenten Jahrestag der I nternationalen

Arbeiter assoziation am 25. September 1871”, cited in K. Marx, F. Engels, V.I.

Lenin: On Scientific Comm unism , (Moscow, 1976),p.244.

6. V.I.Lenin, Collected Works, (Moscow,1964), vol.25,p.481 (our emphasis.)

7. Marx, “Cri tique of the Gotha Programme” op.cit ., p.17.

8. ibid.,p.17.

9. ibid.,p.18.10.lbid.,p.18.11.lbid.,p.19.

12. E.Preobrazhensky, The N ew Economics, (Oxford, 1965),p.79.

13.ibid.,p.77.

14. L. Trotsky, “The Fourth I nternational and the Soviet Union”,Writings 1935-

36 , (NewYork, 1977),p.354.

15. L. Trotsky,“ Problems of the Development of the USSR",Writings 1930-31

(New York) ,p.225.

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In October 1917 state power in Russia was seized byforces intent on using that state power to effect the

transition from capitalism to communism.Never beforein world history had conscious revolutionary commu-nists taken state power. The October revolution inaugu-rated the first attempt to implement and develop theprogramme of revolutionary communism in the after-math of a proletarian seizure of power.

State power in Russia lay in the hands of the workersand soldiers organised in workers’ councils – the Soviets– and a workers’ militia. The politically conscious van-guard of the workers was organised in the Bolshevikparty – 250,000 strong at the time of the October revo-lution. That party commanded a majority at the Second

All-Russian Congress of Soviets that assumed powerafter the overthrow of the old Provisional Government.In the first Council of People’s Commissars – itself responsible to the Soviet Congress – the Bolsheviks hada majority of posts but shared governmental power witha section of the populist Social Revolutionary party –the Left SRs – who supported the creation of Sovietpower.

Enormous material obstacles confronted the SovietGovernment’s attempt to begin creating the socialistorder. The Tsarist regime had developed industr ial cap-italism in Russia in con junction with the major imperi-

alist powers and to a large extent economically subordi-nate to them. As a result Russia experienced extremeunevenness in the development of h er productiveforces. Developed capitalist industry fostered by imperi-alism coexisted with under-development and pre-capi-talist relations, particularly in agricultural production.On the eve of the first imperialist war the nationalincome per capita in Tsarist Russia was 8 to 10 times lessthan in the United States.1

Four-fi fths of the population earned their miserablelivelihoods from agriculture. Although Tsarist Russiawas a net exporter of grain, her wheat yield was on alevel with that of India and well below that of theEuropean states. Consequently the vast majority of thepopulation eked out a pitiful living in conditions of extreme material and cultural backwardness.

Imperialist capital did however develop pockets of heavy industry amidst the rural squalor of Tsa ristRussia. Over half the capital invested in the Donetz coalfield in 1914 was foreign, as was over 80 per cent of thecapital in iron mining, metallurgy and the oil industry.2

It was in these industries that the Russian proletariatwas formed and grew to political maturity. The Russianworking class was small but highly concentrated. In1914 between two and three million were employed as

factory workers, three-quarters of a mill ion in the minesand one mill ion on the railways.3

But the concentration of that proletariat in giantplants – enterprises employing over 1,000 workers

employed 17.8 per cent of the American proletariat,but41.4 per cent in Russia – gave it enormous social wei gh tand political strength.4

Taken in isolation the material backwardness of rev-olutionary Russia was striking.Tsarist Russia had reliedon western capitalism for both capital and key manu-factured goods – chemicals in particular. Hence theunquestioned unanimity in the ranks of the Bolshevikparty that the construction of the material base for aclassless, stateless society could not be achieved in onecountry alone, let alone in one as backward as Russia.

The key planks of the Bolshevik Party’s programme

for transition attempted to relate the programme devel-oped by Marx and Engels to the particular circum-stances of Russia and the part to be played by its revolu-tion in the world proletarian revolution.

All the Bolshevik leaders saw their revolution as butan initial act in the world revolution. They saw the fateof their revolution as being tied indissolubly to that of the world proletarian revolution. This was stated clearlyand unambiguously by Bukharin and Preobrazhenskyin their commentary on the programme of the RussianCommunist Party (Bolsheviks):

“The Communist movement can be victorious only as

a world revolution. If the state of affairs arose in whichone country was ruled by the working class, while in

other countries the working class not from fear but

from conviction, remained submissive to capital, in

the end the great robber states would crush the work-

ers’ state of the first country.”5

At the heart of the Bolshevik programme for transi-tion, therefore, was the struggle to internationalise therevolution. The Russian revolution was but one gain inthe struggle for international revolution. The commu-nist programme is a programme for the eventual aboli-tion of classes and the state. Having smashed the armed

power and executive bureaucracy of the old regime,Bolshevism was committed to the struggle to replace theold type of administrative and coercive apparatus withone that mobilised and actively engaged the toilersthemselves.

In Russia this meant taking sovereign power into thehands of the working class organised in soviets. But italso meant the struggle to ensure that working class rulewas not simply formal. A struggle had to be waged toenable the workers themselves to gain the experienceand culture (in the first place) to be able to directly holdthe administrative apparatus to account. This was a nec-

essary staging post to being able to directly manage theeconomy and dissolve the administrative apparatus as a

From soviet power to sovietbonapartism

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form separate from the working class.

In this struggle cultural obstacles as well as materialones confronted the Bolsheviks,not least the problem of illiteracy. The pre-revolutionary census of 1897 foundthat only 21.1 per cent of the population of the Russianempire (excluding Finland) were able to read and write.6

As a result the programme for transition in Russiarequired an increase not only in the social and politicalweight of the industrial proletarians but also a con-scious struggle to raise the cultural level of the masses of Russian society to one commensurate with the tasksconfronting them.

The Russian revolution was not,however, simply thework of the industrial proletariat.The proletarian insur-rection took place alongside the seizure of land and thebreakup of the old estates by the peasantry. It combinedelements of a land war against the remnants of feudal-ism with a working class seizure of power.

As a result Russia’s arable land was divided into 25million peasant farms. Not only did the size of theseunits present an obstacle to re-building agricultural

production on a scale and with a technological level suf-ficient to ensure a qualitative transformation of agricul-tural production. It also served to strengthen petty -commodity production and primitive capitalist rela-tions in the countryside.

The programme of transition therefore, had to winthose peasants who had gained least f rom the revolutionon the land the poor and middle peasants-to an alliancewith the proletarian state against the rural capitalistsand for cooperative large scale agricultural production,utilising developed technology. The Soviet Governmentreferred to transition proceeding “gradually with theconsent and confirmation of the majority of peasantsfollowing the teachings of their practical experience andof the workers.” 7

These then were the broad outlines of the Bolshevikprogramme for effecting a transition to socialism in theaftermath of the Russian revolution. The initial periodafter the revolution saw an enormous extension of thesovereignty of the masses and,as a result, the break up of the authority and jurisdiction of the apparatus the olds ta te mach ine.The October revolution immed ia telydecreed that authority in the factories should reside withthe workers’ committees therefore legitimising “workers’control” over the capitalists. In December 1917 full

power in the army was transferred to soldiers’ commit-tees with the right to elect and dismiss officers.

The initial perspective for transition was thereforeone of prioritising measures to break the power of theremnants of the old state apparatus, the employers andindustrial managers and the officer caste, by subjectingthem directly to the sovereignty of the Soviets and fac-tory and soldiers’ committees. In February 1918 the oldcourts were abolished and a decree promulgated toensure the election of judges.

The July 1918 constitution of the young Sovietrepublic systematised the achievements of Soviet power.Sovereign power formally resided with the All-Russian

Congress of Soviet s , whose constitution ensured thepredominance of the proletariat’s voice within it. Ruraland urban bourgeois were not granted the right to vote.

The franchise was weigh ted so as to give one seat inthe Congress for every 25,000 urban voters and 125,000provincial voters. In the provincial Soviets the vote wasweighted to one seat for 2000 city voters and one for10,000 rural voters. The Bolshevik programme aimed atcombining democracy for the proletariat with proletari-at’s dictatorship over the old exploiting classes andhegemony over the peasantry.

The for mat ion of t he Red Army

The tempo and nature of the transition was of necessitydetermined by both the material problems confrontingthe fledgling Soviet regime and the military /politicalstruggle waged by its internal and external enemies.German imperialism resumed its advance against SovietRussia until the regime signed the March 1918 BrestLitovsk treaty, ceding the majori ty of the Ukraine toGermany. Later in 1918, and during 1919, the armies of

14 capitalist states waged a war to overthrow the work-ers’ republic. The Social Revolutionaries and a majorityof the Menshevik leaders sided with the White Armiesof Yudenich, Denikin and Kolchak in the civil war thatensued. In White-dominated areas, with the backing of the SRs, the Soviets were dissolved and the power of thei nstitutions of the Ts arist state – the Dumas andZemstvos – was reinstated.

In the face of counter-revo luti ona ry attack theBolsheviks were compelled to make specific tacticalretreats in order to ensure the survival of the workers’d i ct a tors h i p. The Red Terror exerc i s ed by the

Extraordinary Commission (Cheka) was an indispens-able weapon of the proletarian dictatorship. In order toeffectively defend the revolution a standing army was re-created,but now to defend the gains of the working classand therefore in an important sense an army of a “newtype”.

The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army was createdon 23 February 1918 and grew to be 5 mil lion strong by1920.30,000 of the old Tsarist officers were enrolled intothat army so that the workers’ state could take advantageof their military expertise.8 While political supervisionof these officers by the workers’ state continued, the

form that it now took was the appointment of politicalcommissars to oversee their work.

In the middle of 1918 the right to elect officers in t heRed Army was abolished. Such actions were necessaryand justified because the military threat against theyoung workers’ state precluded the peaceful and gradualevolution of a group of capable commanders by way of the elective method. The needs of war in defence of theworkers’ state demanded military expertise immediate-ly. Appointment of officers and the Commissar systemalone could achieve this.

The refusal of the Mensheviks and SRs to recognise

the authority of the Soviet regime led to their expulsionfrom the Soviets in July 1918.They continued to legally


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opera te out s i de the Sovi et s . A left shift by theMensheviks in October 1918 led to their readmission tothe Soviets in November of that year. After an armedattempt to destroy the Bolshevik-led regime, the LeftSRs were expelled from the Soviets in July. In the facto-ries the move towards workers’ management was haltedand reversed in favour of the single authority of thedirector appointed by the workers' state. By the start of 1921 some 2,183 out of 2,483 enterprises were managedin this fashion. All of these measures marked a decisive

shift towards the centralisation of political power in thehands of the party that organised the conscious layer of the Russian proletariat. These layers were rightly com-mitted to holding state power for the working class asthe prerequisite for the transition to socialism. The pro-letarian dictatorship in Russia took on the form of thedictatorship of the proletariat’s political part y.

Anarchists denounced the dictatorship of the partywithout explaining how else counter-revolution couldhave been defeated.

On the other hand, by the early 1920s leading mem-ber of the Communist Party Gregori Zinoviev was lay-ing down theoretical foundations for Stalinism. He ide-alised the dictatorship of the party, and made it synony-mous with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Neither position in any way serves the proletariat inthe long term. Revolutionaries recognise that exception-al circumstances demand exceptional measures. Thedictatorship of the party was such a measure, entirely

justified and utilised correctly by Lenin, as a temporaryand emergency method of defending the proletariat’sgains against a vicious counter-revolution.

The Civil War had a devastating effect on the indus-tr ial base of the Soviet Republic and therefore on the sizeand morale of the working class. In the proletariancitadel of Petrograd, for example, industrial productionin early 1921 stood at only one-eighth of its 1913 level.9

In 1920 and 1921 the giant Putilov works, the sym-bolic heart of the Petrograd working class was workingat only 3 per cent capacity.10 As a result the industrialworkforce of Petrograd dropped from a registered230,000 in January 1918 to only 79,500 in September1920.11

Those workers most committed to the transition tosocialism were drawn into the Red Army and the state

apparatus, those least conscious were either forced backinto the villages or forced to survive in appalling anddemoralising material circumstances in the beleagueredand economically stagnant cities. By January 1921 therewere only 3,462 members of the Russian CommunistParty employed in Petrograd’s factories – comprisingonly 3.2 per cent of the city’s industrial workers.12 Nowonder then that the factory committees and Sovietswi t h ered as ef fecti ve , repre s en t a ti ve and dy n a m i cinstruments of the proletarian dictatorship.

In order to deploy and mobilise scarce resources forthe batt le front of the class struggle, the workers’ statemade decisive revisions in the schedule for expropriat-ing private property. On 28 June 1918 every important

category of industry was nationalised. From the springof 1918 “food detachments” from the towns were sentinto the countryside to forcibly requisition grain fromthe peasants. The system of War Communism wasdeployed to ensure the survival of a regime that, at theheight of the Civil War, controlled less than one-quarterof the terr itory of the old Russian Empire. It meant thevirtual abolition of money as a means of exchange andthe market as a means of distribution.

It also necessitated temporary measures to militarisethe workforce so as to deploy them in the interests of theRed War effort. In November 1919 a decree was issuedwhich placed the employees of state enterprises undermilitary discipline.13

The eventual victory of the Red Army in the CivilWar therefore had a contradictory character.On the onehand it marked a victory for forces still committed tothe transition to communism.

On the other it was achieved at the expense of retarding both the material and political prerequisites of that transition. This retardation was compounded by

the defeat of the post-war revolutionary movement of the European working class. The savage betrayal of theGerman revolution by the social democratic leaders – abetrayal paid for with the blood of Rosa Luxemburg andKarl Liebknecht – and the defeat of the HungarianSoviet Republic left the victorious workers’ republic iso-lated in backward and ravaged Russia.

War Communism and international isolation gavebirth to several alien and unscientific views of the transi-tion, and false estimates of the relations between presentpolitical forms and those required of the workers’ state atits existing stage in the transition. Some, like Strumilin,who attempted to draw up a plan of production in amoneyless system,and Bukharin, who hailed the collapseof money and the de facto barter economy as advancedforms of the transition to communism, hopelessly over-estimated the potential of the regime to effect measures tocreate an advanced transitional society.

Similarly utopian, and ultimately therefore reac-tionary, views were in evidence in the struggle of theWorkers’ Opposition against the party majority in 1920and 1921. This grouping around Shlyapnikov, Luovinovand Kollontai urged that the party should relinquish itshold over the battered economy and place it in thehands of a Congress of Producers. The reality of the

morale, size and organisation of the Russian workingclass at this time made such proposals utopian in theo-ry and potentially disruptive of the political power of the advanced layers of communists organised in theparty.

At the same time however there was a definite ten-dency towards bureaucratism within the proletariat’sparty and in the relation between that party and thestate apparatu s. At the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 theSecretarial triumvirate of Krestinsky, Preobrazhenskyand Serebriakov who urged a relatively tolerant andopen regime within the party were ousted and replaced

by Molotov. The party also agreed to a temporary banon the right to form factions within the party.While the


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party at the same time set out to purge indisciplined andcareerist elements – 24 per cent of the party wasexpelled during 1921-4 – these measures served tostrengthen the potential for the exercise of bureaucraticpower in the party itself.

By the end of the Civil War the possibility of contin-uing the transition to socialism depended on the van-guard and its ability to comprehend the scale of defor-mation and retreat in the workers’ state, so as to be ableto advance. In essence it depended on the commitmentof the Bolsheviks to continue a relentless struggle, withthe aid of the new Third International, for the interna-tional revolution of the working class. Meanwhile insideRussia itself the defence of the revolution and itsadvance now required a conscious struggle to recreatethe working class as a material and political force.

The Kronstadt rebellion of February 1921 and aseries of peasant revolts spreading from Tambov toWestern Siberia highlighted the problems facing the vic-tor ious workers' state . A fuel and food crisis inPetrograd precipitated a strike wave amongst the city’sworkers in February. The demoralised and i mpover-ished workers were receptive to Social Revolutionaryand Menshevik agitators and only emergency food sup-plies and a declaration of martial law in the regionsecured a return to work. This revealed that forces whohad supported the Reds against White counterrevolu-tion were themselves profoundly dissatisfied with thepolitical and economic regime of War Communism.That dissatisfaction amongst the peasant sailors of Kronstadt for example served to increase the potentialfor counter-revolutionary elements, masquerading asthe all ies of the toil ing masses, to mobilise mass discon-tent against the revolutionary regime.

The young workers’ state and the NewEconomic Pol icy

It is evidence of Lenin’s supremely concrete understand-ing of the problems confronting the proletarian regimethat, in the face of this upsurge, the Party took specificmeasures both to strengthen its own monopoly of polit-ical power and to affect a retreat from the policies of War Com mu n i s m . The Kron s t adt rebell i on wascru shed.The alternative would have been to tolerate theopening of a new phase of civil war and the joining of a

reactionary peasant war against the regime. But at thesame time,with the inauguration of the New EconomicPolicy (NEP), ma jor concessions were made to the pri-vate peasantry by the workers’ sta te.War Communism’ssystem of requisitions was replaced by a system of tax-ing the peasantry on the basis of a fixed proportion of each peasant farm’s net produce. The after-tax surplusof the peasants could be traded by the peasant on thefree market.

In that it legalised the operation of the law of value,NEP represented a retreat by the regime. In that itserved to revive agricultural production and won abreathing space for the internationally isolated regime itwas a retreat that granted the regime the potential to

make future advances along the road of transition.

Under NEP there existed two fundamental and con-flicting elements in the economy of the Soviet Union. Inagriculture and other petty commodity production thelaw of value was absolutely dominant.Yet in the statifiedeconomy – mainly heavy industry and transport – thelaw of value could be offset by state direction of invest-ment and was, therefore, susceptible to the planningprinciple. In this period the major threat to the workers’state and to its ability to extend its control over theeconomy through extending conscious economic plan-ning was the spontaneous development of primitivecapitalist accumulation in the countryside and thepotential alliance between it and imperialist capital.

For that reason the state monopoly of foreign tradewas an indispensable weapon without which directimperialist penetration into the economy of the firstworkers’ state could not have been prevented. In thestruggle against this threat the young workers’ state hadaccumulated three principle weapons with which todefend itself: the revolutionary expropriation of theindustr ial sector of the economy; the application andex tensi on of the planning pri nciple; and the statem on opoly of foreign t rade. These three measures, takentogether, anti-capitalist by their very nature, form thecharacteristic defining property relations of a workers’state.

NEP was a retreat and was recognised as such byLenin. It made him acutely aware of the need to ensurethat it did not pave the way for a rout. In the last twoyears of his active political life Lenin attempted to con-cretise and refocus the Bolshevik programme for transi-tion.First, it was necessary to construct the mechanismsof economic planning and extend their authority over

the Soviet economy. Enormous problems of experienceand culture faced the young regime in its attempts toweld together an apparatus of economic planning in thematerial circumstances of post revolutionary Russia.

In Febru a ry 1920 a Com m i s s i on for theElectrification of Russia (GOELRO) was establishedwith the brief to coordinate an all-Russian plan for elec-tricity production. While the party programme calledfor “one general State Plan” the mechanism for creatingsuch a plan had to be constructed gradually and on thebasis of the first ever experience of the attempt to createplanning mechanisms in the interests of subordinating

and, eventually, extinguishing the operation of the lawof value.

A Su preme Econ omic Council (Ves enkha) wasestablished as early as December 1917.By the end of theCivil War it possessed the authority and experience todraw up plans for particular industries with the assis-tance of the state planning commission (GOSPLAN)which was established in 1921. It produced a Five-yearplan for the metal industry in 1922-23 and in 1923attempted to produce a general plan that would amalga-mate Vesenkha’s plans for individual branches of indus-try. But in this period the planning mechanisms simply

provided trusts with forecast “control figures” as dictat-ed by their interpretation of market conditions within


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NEP. The strengthening and coordination of thesemechanisms to a level capable of serious subordinatingthe law of value remained a prerequisite of effectivetransitional advance.

But the struggle against the law of value was notsimply a struggle between industry and agriculture. Of necessity it involved a conscious struggle to wean thema jority of the peasantry away from petty commodityproduction and from the economic and political domi-nance of the richer capitalist peasant farmers (theKulaks). In Lenin’s last writings he advanced the pro-gramme of cooperation as the means of effecting analliance (smychka) between the workers’ state and thepoor and middle peasants on the road to building asocialist system of agricultural production:

“By adopting NEP we made a concession to the peas-

ant as a trader, to the principle of private trade; it is

precisely for this reason (contrary to what some peo-

ple think) that the cooperative movement is of such

immense importance.” 15

Lenin realised that the small and middle peasants

had gained insufficient land from the revolution toguarantee them a secure livelihood and to make possi-ble the application of the labour-saving technologiesuti l i s a ble on ly in larger agri c u l tu ral units. Hen cethrough the provision of equipment to the poorer peas-ants organised in cooperatives the workers’ state couldboth raise the technological level of Soviet agricultureand cement solid political ties with the mass of the peas-antry against the layer of rich labour hiring Kulaks.

In On Co-operati on Lenin therefore advocated a pol-icy of the ruthless priori tisation of the provision of credits and machinery to those peasants organised incooperatives as a means of recommencing the transitionto socialism in the Soviet countryside.16

Any other policy would unleash the potential withinNEP to strengthen the tendency to social differentiationwithin the peasantry and towards an increase in thesocial and economic weight of the anti-socialist Kulaks.

Lenin’s last writings also focus on the problem of developing the ability of the working masses to replacethe old form of administrative apparatus and to subjectthe existing state apparatus to the authority of the work-ers’ state.

“Two main tasks confront us, which constitute the

epoch: to reorganise our machinery of state, which isutterly useless, and which we took over in its entirety

from the preceding epoch;during the past five years of

struggle we did not, and could not, drastically reor-

ganise it. Our second task is educational work among

the peasants.” 17

Repeatedly in the period after the Civil War Leninemphasised the bureaucratically deformed nature of theSoviet workers’ state and struggled to reform that stateapparatus:

“Our state apparatus is so deplorable, not to say

wretched, that we must first think very carefully how

to combat its defects, bearing in mind that thesedefects are rooted in the past, which, although it has

been overthrown, has not been overcome, has not yet

reached the stage of a culture that has receded into the

distant past.” 18. . .“The most harmful thing here would

be haste. The most harmful thing would be to rely on

the assumption that we know at least something, or

that we have any considerable number of elements

necessary for the building of a really new state appara-

tus, one really worthy to be called socialist, Soviet

etc:” 19

But this perspective of renovating the Soviet work-ers' state and recommencing the transition to socialismin alliance with the poor and middle peasants remainedpart of a programme for internationalising the workers’revolution. The isolation of that revolution necessarilyserved to retard the development of the material pre-requisites of socialist construction

“The general feature of our present life is the fo ll ow-

ing: we have destroyed capitalist industry and have

done our best to raze to the ground the medieval insti -

tutions and landed proprietorship, and thus created a

small and very small peasantry, which is following the

lead of the proletariat because it believes in the results

of its revolutionary work. It is not easy for us, howev-

er, to keep going unti l the socialist revolution is victo-

rious in more developed countries merely with the aid

of this confidence, because economic necessity,espe-

cially under NEP, keeps the productivity of labour of

the small and very small peasants at an extremely low

level. Moreover, the international situation, too, threw

Russia back and, by and large, reduced the labour pro-

ductivity of the people to a level considerably below

pre-war.” 20

What then were the roots of the bureaucratisation of the workers’ state that Lenin perceived and fought

against in the early 1920s?The functional roots of thebureaucracy lay in the exhaustion and weariness of theinternationally isolated Soviet society in the aftermathof the civil war, together wi th the material backwardnessof the country inherited from Tsarism. In this context aseries of “pre-socialist” and “non-socialist” tasks facedthe young Soviet regime. Trotsky correctly outlined thisprocess:

“No help came from the West. The power of the

democratic Soviets proved cramping, even unen-

durabl e,when the task of the day was to accommodate

those privileged groups whose existence was necessary

for defence, for industry, for technique and science. Inthis decidedly not ‘socialist’ operation, taking from ten

and giving to one, there crystallised out and developed

a powerful caste of specialists in distribution...”21

While the armed forces and executive bureaucracyof the old ruling class were smashed, the proletarianstate was forced to work with significant remnants of the old Tsarist state machine in order to administer theworld’s first workers’ state. Lenin described this process-and its impact in the following way:

“We took over the old machinery of state and that was

our misfortune. Very often this machinery operates

against us. In 1917, after we captured power, the gov-ernment officials sabotaged us.This fr ightened us very


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much and we pleaded: ‘Please come back’. They all

came back, but that was our misfortune.”22

As we have seen, the Russian proletariat itself wasdecimated by the experience of the civil war that itfought to defend the workers’ state. Its most consciousel em ent was drawn into ad m i n i s tering the statemachine, its advanced layers suffered death and priva-tion to secure the victory of the Red Army. Of necessitythe advance of the proletarian dictatorship in the direc-tion of planning and equality depended on the smallconscious vanguard section of the Russian working classorganised in the Communist Party. Political degenera-tion in their ranks, a slackening of their direct commit-ment to socialist advance – nationally and internation-ally – would serve to undermine the proletariat’s onlyguarantee of advance towards socialism.

Enormous objective material factors therefore con-tributed to the process of bureaucratisation. These werestrengthened by the operation of NEP within which thestate apparatus was called upon to play the role of arbi-tration between the interests of the peasantry and theindustrial working class. This process of bureaucratisa-

tion not only led to the continuation of the old form of administrative apparatus and to a considerable continu-ity of personnel between the old and new apparatus.

It also played an important role in shaping the char-acter and leadership of the Bolshevik party itself. By1923 less than 10 per cent of the party had pre-revolu-tionary records and two-thirds of the members and half of the candidates were involved in non-manual jobs. InLenin’s last years alarming signs of bureaucratic degen-eration were apparent in the party’s highest bodies.

In the face of these objective and subjective tenden-cies the key problem facing the workers’ state waswhether the vanguard could regenerate itself and theworking class as a whole, in a struggle against bureau-cratism, national isolation and complacency.Lenin’s lastwritings show him to have been increasingly aware of bureaucratism in the party apparatus and that this wasserving to render the party powerless in the face of theweight of the old state apparatus.

In turn this presented an obstacle to building a newstate appa ra tus responsive to the vanguard itself andcommitted to the transition to socialism. In fact bureau-cra ti sm in the state was positively strengthening the “oldw ays” of Great Russian ch a uvi n is m , ru deness and

bureaucratism within the party itself.

In his last battles Lenin concentrated on the regimein the party and the relation between the party and stateapparatus as the key problems without the solution towhich the transition to socialism would be retarded.Until his death he remained the most astute of all theparty’s leaders as to the realities of Soviet Russia and tothe type, nature and tasks of the workers’ state. His lasttestimony itself – Letter to Congress – contains animplicit criticism of the entire old guard of the party forits failure to grasp the urgency of, and the necessaryconcrete steps towards, regeneration.

Lenin’s eyes were opened to the degree of bureau-

c ra tic degen era ti on within the party by rel a ti on sbetween Dzherzhinsky, Stalin and Ordzhonikidze andleading representatives of the Georgian Communistparty. The latter were resisting plans to replace the loosefederal structure of the young Soviet republic with amore centralised structure under the name of the Unionof Soviet Socialist Republics. During the controversyOrdzhonikiadzhe struck Kabanidze, a supporter of theGeorgian party leader Mdivani. While not in completesolidarity with the political stand of the Georgians,Lenin

weighed in against the central leadership.

Lenin conceded that perhaps the unionisation planhad been premature:

“There is no doubt that that measure should have

been delayed somewhat until we could say that we

vouched for our apparatus as our own. But now, we

must, in all conscience, admit the contrary; the appa-

ratus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is

a bourgeois and tsarist hotch-potch and there has

been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of

the past five years without the help of other countries

and because we have been ‘busy’ most of the time with

military engagements and the fight against famine.

It is quite natural that in such circumstances the

‘freedom to secede from the union’ by which we justi-

fy ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to

defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that

really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in

substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical

Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the

i nfi n itesimal percen t a ge of Soviet and sovi eti s ed

workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-

Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.” 23

Lenin urged exem p l a ry punishment forOrdzhonikidze and that: “The political responsibilityfor all this truly Great-Russian nationalist campaignmust, of course, be laid on Stalin and Dzherzhinsky.” 24

At the same time Lenin urged on the party the strength-ening of the accountability of the state machine throughraising the political weight of the Workers and Peasants’Inspection (RABKRIN).

Mindful of the developing bureaucratic regime inthe party and Stalin’s evident unsuitedness to the post of Secretary that he had quietly assumed in 1922, Leninurged the removal of Stalin from his post:

“Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tol-erable in our midst and in dealings amongst us

Com mu n i s t s , becomes intol era ble in a Sec ret ary

General.That is why I suggest that the comrades think

about a way of removing Stalin from that post and

appointing another man in his stead who in all other

respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only

one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant,

more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the

comrades, less capricious, etc.” 25

As Lenin’s letters to Trotsky published first in The

Stalin School of Falsificati on show, Lenin urged a blocwith Trotsky against Stalin on these issues.26

But the tendency towards bureaucratic arbitrary rule


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within the party continued thro u gh out 1923. There isevidence of the formation of s ec retly organised opposi-tion groups within the party which called for a struggleagainst the new bureaucratism.

The most significant – the Workers Truth group –was led by Miasnikov who had been expelled from thep a rt y in 1921.27 In re s ponse the party leaders h i presponded to the working class discontent that this evi-denced with an attempt to strengthen police dictator-ship within the party itself.A special commission head-ed by Dzherzhinsky “demanded from communists thei m m ed i a te denu n c i a ti on , ei t h er to the Con tro lCommission or to the GPU,of illegal groups within theparty.”28

This crisis coincided with mounting imbalancewithin the NEP economy to the advantage of the privatetrader and farmer and to the disadvantage of the prole-tarian state. By 1922-23, 75 per cent of retail trade wasin private hands. By 1923 industr ial production stood atonly 35 per cent of the pre-war level while the marketedagricultural surplus had reached 60 per cent of pre-wartotals.29

This strengthened a tendency towards a “scissors cri-sis” – rising industrial prices and relatively decliningagricultural prices – which threatened to result in a dropin peasant markets if state industry could not providesufficient manufactured goods at cheap enough pricesto encourage the peasants to sell their surpluses. At the12th Party Congress in 1923 Trotsky showed that indus-trial prices were at 140 per cent of their 1913 level whileagricultural prices stood at only 80 per cent. Only astrengthening of the planned industr ial base of theUSSR could have provided the material prerequisites of coopera ti on – for example tractors , m anuf actu red

implements and have served thus to isolate the prosper-ous Kulak layer of the peasantry which commanded thebulk of the surplus. Continued retardation of industrycould only serve to strengthen the Kulak and the grip of the law of value within the Soviet state.

The growt h of bureaucrat ism

But 1923 also saw mounting signs of the ossification of the party leadership in terms of its ability to aid anddevelop the international revolution of the proletariat.Un der the directi on of Zi n ovi ev the Com mu n i s t

International seriously miscalculated tactics for a revo-lutionary offensive in Germany in the autumn of 1923.The bureaucratically deformed workers’ state remainedisolated.

It is in the face of these manifest degenerativeprocesses that Tro t s ky and the cad re of the Lef tOpposition launched their struggle against the partyleadership in order to reactivate the struggle for social-ism. True, Trotsky failed to activate the proposed blocwith Lenin at the 12th Party Congress in Apri l 1923. Heleft Bukharin to fight alone against the bureaucratism of the party’s leading Troika of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and

Stalin – an unholy alliance united by enmity towardsTrotsky.

In 1924 he was complicit in the decision of the sameparty leadership to conceal the existence of Lenin’s callfor the removal of Stalin. To this extent he clearly didnot share the sense of urgency felt by Lenin as to thethreat to socialist advance in the USSR. But the coinci-dence of Miasnikov’s grouping and Dzerhzhinsky’spolice tactics stung Trotsky into a war against bureau-cratism during the latter part of 1923. In October hewrote to the Central Committee denouncing partyadministration in general – particularly the demise of

the elective principle – and Dzherzhinsky’s proposals inparticular.

Trotsky had no doubt that bureaucratism had a pro-found material roots:

“It is unworthy of a Marxist to consider that bureau-

cratism is only the aggregate of the bad habits of office

holders.

Bureaucratism is a social phenomenon in that it is a

definite system of administrati on of men and things.

Its profound causes lie in the heterogeneity of society,

the difference between the daily and the fundamental

interests of various groups of the population.”

30

But Trotsky insisted this bureaucratism posed fun-damental problems to the advance of the revolution:

“...bureaucratism in the state and party apparatus is

the expression of the most vexatious tendencies inher-

ent in our situation, of the defects and deviations in

our work which, under certain social conditions,

might sap the basis of the revolution.And, in this case

as in many others, quantity will at a certain stage be

transformed into quality.” 31

For Trotsky only the struggle for democracy in theparty could mobilise the vanguard against bureau-

cratism. The alternative was alien ati on and demoralisa-tion amongst the ranks of worker communists.

“Not feeling that they are participating actively in the

general work of the party and not getting a timely

answer to their questions to the party,numerous com-

munists start looking for a su bstitute for independent

party activity in the form of groupings and factions of

all sorts. It is in this sense precisely that we speak of the

s ym ptom a tic import a n ce of gro u p i n gs like the

Workers’ Group.” 32

As a result “ The task of the present is to shift the cen-tre of party activity towards the masses of the party”

because “There is not and cannot be any other means of triumphing over the corporatism, the caste spirit of thefunctionaries, than by the realisation of democracy.” 33, 34

The offensive of Trotsky was complemented, inOctober, by the declaration of 46 Old Bolsheviks includ-ing Antonov Ovseenko, Serebriakov, Preobrazhenskyand Pyatakov. Taken as a whole the two positions repre-sented a platform of extending democracy in the partyas the immediate form of extending workers’ democra-cy in the USSR and of developing industrial planning asthe means of strengthening the smychka with the poor-er peasants against the Kulaks. To this extent it repre-

sented an important development and refocusing of theprogramme of Bolshevism. It contained the key ele-


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ments, in embryo, of the future programme of the LeftOpposition.

The 1923 debate also showed that despite the party’sleadership, the careeri sts who had entered its ranks andthe exhaustion of significant sections of its cadre, thereremained a solid core within the party committed to thetransition to socialism. Despite the campaign against“Trotskyism” that was launched by the ruling Troika theplatform of proletarian democracy received widespreadsupport in the party. It received strong support inMoscow, the Urals and Kharkov.35

As late as 1929 the Stalinist historian Yaroslavsky wasadmitting that the opposition won half the votes in cer-tain areas of Moscow.36 The leadership was forced toconcede the demand of the 46 for a special CentralCommittee meeting on the subject and a decl aration infavour of democratising the party’s life in return for aCentral Committee resolution condemning the activi-ties of Trotsky and the 46. It would clearly be wrongtherefore to conclude that the party at this time couldsimply be described as the property of its central andincreasingly bureaucratic leadership.

The death of Lenin in 1924, fo llowing on from thefirst setback for the forces of the Left Opposition (theCentral Committee confrontation), served to intensifythe tendency towards revisionism and bureaucratismwithin the party leadership. Against the struggle forregeneration waged by Trotsky and the Left there werethree major groupings all representing specific pro-grammatic revisions and degenerations.

In 1924 and 1925 a definite Rightist tenden cyincreased in confidence and weight within the partyapparatus. Represented primarily by Bukharin, Tomskyand Rykov, this tendency reflected the pressure of thericher layers of the peasantry on the party /state appara-tus. Its programme involved continued and extendedconcessions to the richer peasants in the name of build-ing a specifically Russian peasant-based form of social-ism. As its principle spokesman, Bukharin, put it:

“We have come to the conclusion that we can build

socialism even on this wretched technological level...

that we shall move at a snail’s pace,but that we shall be

building socialism and that we shall build it.” 37

During 1925, at both the 14th Party Conference andCongress Bukharin elaborated a specific new content to

Lenin’s call for “an understanding with the peasantry.” Itwas to mean concessions to the peasantry in order toencourage their economy, it was to mean tailoring thepace of industrial development to these concessions.The policies of Bukharin were enshrined in the decisionof the April 1925 Central Committee meeting to sanc-tion the right to hire labour and extend the rights of land leasing and thus strengthen the operation of thelaw of value in the USSR. In April 1925 Bukharin deliv-ered his famous speech to a mass party meeting inMoscow calling on the Russian peasants to “enrichyou rs elves.”

The Ri ght had another social base within thebureauc ratised apparatus of the workers’ sta te . An

important section of the Soviet Trade Union leaders –particularly Tomsky – craved an unprincipled alliancewith the reformist leaders of the Yellow Amsterdam-based International Trade Union Federation. For thempotential alliances with the reformist trade union lead-ers-particularly in Britain-represented a potential roadof protection and stability for the Soviet state in its exist-ing bureaucratised form.

In essence the Right was therefore a tendency com-mitted to strengthening capitalist forces within theUSSR and sec u ring pe ace with world capitalismthrough the medium of the reformist labour bureaucra-cies. The Right’s programme was a narrow nationalistone that sought to preserve the status quo – the bureau-cratically deformed workers’ state. Objectively,however,the Right were in fact a tendency for capitalist restora-tion. This was the logical end point of their programmeof concessions to rich private peasants. In the mid-1920s their reactionary views accorded with the doc-trine of “Socialism in One Country”,a creed they sharedwith Stalin.But the Right’s policy of relative freedom forSoviet Trade Union officialdom and compromise with

the rich peasant farmers meant that they were not of necessity wedded to the forms of bureaucratic rule lateradvanced by the group around Stalin.

In concert with this group against the CommunistLeft, but in material conflict with the Right’s pro-gramme, stood a bureaucratic left centre group aroundZinoviev and Kamenev. Their social base was the indus-tr ial ci ty of Len i n grad and the Com mu n i s tIntern a ti on a l . For the Ri gh ti sts the failed GermanRevolution of 1923 underlined the fact that the prole-tariat of Western Europe could not be relied on to solvethe problems of isolated and backward Russia. For

Zinoviev however, it meant that a serious blow had beenstruck at the ability of the Soviet state to resist the devel-oping bourgeois forces within its own boundaries.Zinoviev expressed this in the following terms:

“An alliance of a proletarian Germany with Soviet

Russia would create a new phase of NEPism... would

nip in the bud the tendency of a new bourgeoisie to

assume a controlling position in the economic life of

our republican union.” 38

The 5th Congress of the Comintern,meeting in Juneand July 1924, reflected a profound disorientation in thestrategy and tactics of the Communist International.

Zinoviev responded to the German defeat and theappearance of capitalist stabilisation with a call tobureaucratically “Bolshevise” the Communist Partiesand a turn to left rhetoric – effectively turning theComintern against the decisions taken at its fourthCongress on the United Front tactic and the Workers’Government slogan.39

It was at this Congress that the characterisation of Social Dem oc racy as a wing of fascism was first aired –by none other than Zinoviev himself. In its aftermathZinoviev probably ordered the abortive uprising inEstonia in December 1924.40

Victor Serge descri bed Zinoviev’s bureaucratic leftistresponse:


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“How could Zinoviev have initiated this imbecile

adven ture? The man terr if i ed us. He refu s ed to

acknowledge the German defeat. In his eyes the rising

had been only delayed and the KPD was still marching

to power.The riots in Krakow were enough for him to

announce revolution in Poland. I felt that he was

obsessed by the error in his otherwise sensible judge-

ment which had led him in 1917 to oppose the incip-

ient Bolshevik revolution; in consequence, he had now

swung into an authoritarian and exaggerated revolu-

tionary optimism.”41

Under Zinoviev therefore the Comintern veeredfrom ultraleft to opportunist tactics to secure success.The base of Zinoviev in Leningrad also served to shapehis response to the Right.

The April 1925 concessions to the peasantry includ-ed a 25 per cent cut in taxation on the peasantry and thefreeing of agricultural prices.42 This caused serious hard-ship and discontent amongst the workers of Leningrad.But while this bureaucratic left could, on occasion,reflect workers’ hostility to the effects of Rightist policieson the working class, they were themselves hostile to the

programme of proletarian democ racy waged by the LeftOpposition.

The campaign against “Trotskyism” was particularlyvi ru lent in Leningrad. It was Zinoviev and Kamenevwho demanded the expulsion of Trotsky from the partyat the January 1925 Central Committee. Stalin opposedthem!43 To this extent they were the pioneers of despo-tism within the party.

Alongside these two groups there existed a centregrouping around Stalin,with its base in the central partyapparatus. Its hold on the secretariat of the party madeit most wedded to the secretarial form of dictatorship inthe party. It stood with the right for concessions to theKulak to the extent that they presented no threat to thepolitical power and modus vivendi of the central appa-ratu s. The Stalinist group did not oppose industrialplanning as such, to the extent that it developed at atempo and in a form that would not disturb the smych-

ka with the rich peasants.

The most important programmatic hallmark of theStalin group was the theory of “Socialism in OneCountry”.

In an article directed against Trotsky in December1924 Stalin first put forward his theory of the possibili-ty of constructing “Socialism in One Country.”

“The victory of socialism in one country, even i f this

country is less developed in the capitalist sense, while

capitali sm is preserved in other countries,even if these

countries are more developed in the capitalist sense –

is quite possible and probable.”44

The programmatic logic of the “ theory” was thatgiven a sufficient period of peaceful relations betweenimperialism and the USSR it would be possible to build“Socialism in One Country”.

In this view the Soviet Union necessarily ceases to be

an integral, and necessarily dependent, component of the world proletarian struggle to destroy capitalism. It is

capable, from its own resources and in isolation, of building socialism without the assistance of the worldrevolution. Of necessity, this leads to a revision of theMarxist concept of socialism. Socialism – as a program-matic goal ceases to mean a developing classless andstateless society. It comes to mean the stability, orderand interests of the USSR as they are construed by thosewho have political power in the USSR.

This theory, and its chief proponent, accuratelyreflected the conservatism of the Centre grouping. Itwas the conservatism of a sti ll-developing bureaucracykeen to defend the marginal,but growing privi leges thatits role within the Soviet state had provided it with.Stalin and his grouping recogn i s ed that thro u gh“Socialism in One Country” – i.e. the abandonment of real socialism which is internationalist by definition,and the development of the Soviet economy under theircontrol – these marginal privileges could be extendedand the bureaucracy strengthened. This explains whythe Stalin group did not wholly support the programmeof the Right , which potentially threatened it with thegrowth of the Kulaks as a rival for power, or the pro-

gramme of the Left, which threatened it with the revo-lutionary rule of the proletariat.

Yet it also explains why it could bureaucraticallyutilise elements of both of these programmes to consol-idate its own position and eventually to secure its ownvictory over both the Right and the Left. The bureau-cracy’s programme was eclectic, pragmatic and vacillat-ing, guided centrally by the principle of self- interest.

In 1923 and 1924 Stalin,Zinoviev and Tomsky had acommon interest in blocking in order to prevent thei m p l em en t a ti on of the programme of the Lef tOpposition. They orchestrated a scurrilous campaign

against Trotskyism, introduced new degenerate normsof debate in the party and new levels of caste loyaltybetween themselves when they conspired to prevent theimplementation of Lenin’s testimony and to keep it con-cealed from the party, (an agreement Trotsky mistaken-ly,went along with).

Fu rth er to this they flooded the party with newrecruits via the Lenin Levy of 1924. In two years theparty’s size was increased by more than two-thirds.45

Most of the recruits were either raw or careerists andtheir presence rendered the party far more susceptible tomanipulation by the bureaucratic leaders, against the

revolutionary left.These measures, taken together, represent a system-

atic and conscious attempt to politically isolate and,ultimately decapitate, the revolutionary leadership of the proletariat. However, at this time no faction was, asyet, strong enough to drive it out of the party.This wasthe beginning of the process of the Thermidoreandegeneration of the revolution, first fought under theslogans of “Socialism in One Country”, “enrich your-selves” and “fire to the left”.

When we use the term Thermidor in connectionwith the Russian Revolution we are using it to describe

a process analogous with that which took place after thegreat French Revolution of 1789. In 1794 power was


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seized from the radical democratic Jacobins by the mostconservative anti-democratic section of the bourgeoisiewhich proceeded to dismantle those elements of the firstFrench Republic which made it the most thoroughgoing bourgeois democ racy in i ts time.

It marked a shift of power from the democratic andrevolutionary to the conservative section of the sameclass – the bourgeoisie. It was not the transfer of powerfrom one class to another. While the Zinovievites,Bukharinites, and Stalinists all had Thermidorian aspi-rations in 1923 and 1924, the form and pace of the vic-tory of Thermidor was not determined at that time.Neither was its eventual triumph inevitable.

Alongside the development of Thermidor we do seea partial advance in the strengthening of the mecha-nisms of planning. By August 1925 Gosplan was able toproduce outline control figures which economic depart-ments were to take into account in structuring theirown plans. Trotsky greeted these figures as “the gloriousmusic of the rise of socialism.”46 But the majority of theparty leaders could not comprehend the potential of thedevelopment of these mechanisms as a means of effect-ing transition.

Bukharinism was committed to a hybridised pop-ulist vision of a small proprietor peasant socialism.Neither Stalin nor Zinoviev evinced enthusiasm for theplanning machinery and the potential of planning whenthey were discussed at the 14th Party Congress inDecember 1925. Only the Left Opposition-and in par-ticular Preobra z h en s ky and Pya t a kov waged anunflinching struggle,at this time, for the planned indus-trialisation of the USSR as the road to rebuild the prole-tariat and thus its social and political weight, in concertwith the poor and middle peasants.

During 1925 a split occurred in the camp of theThermidorians between the bureaucratic left centristsand the Stalin/Bukharin bloc. Defending their base inthe major workers’ city (Leningrad) and the Cominternagainst the nationalist peasant l ine of the “ma jority”,Zinoviev and Kamenev began a struggle based on for-mal opposition to “Socialism in One Country” and thepolicies of concessions to the rich peasants.

It is evidence of the growing grip of the secretariat inthe party that the Stalin group were able – after defeat-ing the Leningraders at the 14th Congress in December1925 – to immediately take the Leningrad organisation

into their control through the person of Kirov. Kirovmoved in to restore “order” in the party – that is to con-solidate Stalinist control over the local party apparatus.In addition Zinoviev was removed as head of theComintern.

The defeat of the left centrists pushed them in thedirection of an alliance with the revolutionary LeftOpposition. At a plenum of the Central Committee andControl Commission in June 1926 Zinoviev openlydeclared to Ordzhonokidze:“Yes, on the question of thedeviation and on the question of bureaucratic oppres-sion by the apparatus,Trotsky proved to be right against

you.” [ that is against the Stalinist Ordzhonokidze –eds] 47 In the summer of that year Trotsky, Zinoviev and

Kamenev formed the United Opposition to wage whatwas to be the final, open campaign inside the party forreactivating the struggle for socialism in 1926 and 1927.

What was the balance sheet of transition in the peri-od of the United Opposition campaign? First, socialdiversification was well developed in the Soviet coun-tryside, giving an enormous bargaining position to theKulaks. In late 1925 Zinoviev produced figures to showthat 12 per cent of peasant farmers were producing 60per cent of the grain supply.48

The United Opposition platform showed – quotingthe Statistical Review – that on 1 April 1926 58 per centof all the surplus grain in the country was in the handsof 6 per cent of peasant proprietors.49

The obverse of this process was the continued exis-tence of 30 to 40 per cent of horseless and toolless prop-erties.50 The regime had manifestly failed to raise thecultural and material level of the poorer peasantsagainst the richer peasants through the medium of cooperation. By 1929, only one-third of the agriculturalpopulation were involved in any form of cooperative

movem en t .

5 1

Th ey rema i n ed rud imenta ry, u n derfi-nanced and underdeveloped.

In the sphere of planned industrialisation with aview to developing the material base of socialism, andsubordinating the law of value to the rule of consciousplanning, the transition was similarly retarded. Gosplanrecommended figures for a Five Year Plan to last from1926-7 to 1930-1. It envisaged only a small growth incapital investment in industry (1,142 million rubles in1928 and 1,205 million in 1931 – in line with the preva-l ent Bu k h a ri n i te ort h odoxy of ach i eving growt hthrough maximising the use of then existing resources.Growth was set at rates between 4 and 9 per cent eachyear.52

The Soviet regime suffered from the fact that itsmanufactured goods were too scarce, too badly pro-duced and too expensive (on average 2.5 times worldmarket prices) to encourage the rich peasant to partwith his grain. Hence the serious danger of grain strikesand shortages and of increased Kulak pressure to relin-quish the state’s monopoly of foreign trade and open upthe USSR as a market for imperialist-produced manu-factu red good s . But the Stalin/Bu k h a rin bl oc wasproposing a state budget for 1931 of 16 per cent of na tional income, compared with the pre-war Tsarist

budget of 18 per cent of national income.

Wretchedly slow rates of industrial growth were of enormous social and political consequence for theworkers’ state. Officially registered unemployment inthe USSR stood at 1,478,000 in April 1927.53 Gosplan’sprojected Five Year Plan envisaged cutting that total by400,000! Real wages increased until 1925 but decreasedin 1926.

The trade unions were relatively moribund withdecisions in the plants being taken by the appointeddirector and the chief trade union and party officials.The Soviets continued to be lifeless bodies usually sub-ordinated to their executive bodies, meeting rarely for


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plenary sessions and with the period between electionsincreased in the mid-1920s.At a time when the workingclass was once again of pre-war proportions and indus-trial production was back to its pre-war tempo,only theLeft Opposition espoused a programme for reactivatingSoviet democracy in the USSR and thus recommencingthe battle to construct a state apparatus of a new form.

The process of degeneration and stagnation was evi-dent in the party too. The party underwent a process of deproletarianisation during 1925 and 1926. The 1927Party Census showed that of those leaving the party i nthe first half of 1925 60 per cent were manual workers,a figure that reached 77 per cent by 1926.54

The census showed that as of January 1927,42.8 percent of party members recorded themselves as officeemployees, 30.0 per cent as factory and transport work-ers, 1.5 per cent as hired farm workers and 8.4 per centas private farming peasants.

Alongside this tendency for the party to remain pre-dominantly an organisation of officials grew a markedtendency to bureaucratisation against the workers’ van-

guard within the party.The campaign against the Oppo s i ti on signall ed a

new and deci sive phase of the Thermi dorean degener-a ti on of the Bols hevik Party. The burea ucrats and pro -Kulak elem ents in the party, that is the majori ty of t hep arty, were separa ted by their privil eges and intere s t sfrom the authentic repres entatives of the pro let aria nvanguard.To them the Oppo si tion’s fight for democra-cy and industrialis ation inevita bly meant a curta il mentof their privil eges and restri ctions on the Kul aks . Th eywere not prepa red to all ow that threat to become are al ity. Th ey adopted methods of “deba te” that openeda peri od of qu alit ative degen era ti on of the Commu ni stParty and laid the basis for Stalin’s later regime of ter-ror.

In the place of the honest debates that were charac-teristic of Lenin’s party, the Stalin/Bukharin bloc stifledthe voice of the Opposition. Articles submitted byTrotsky to the party press were rejected.

The Opposition’s platform was declared to be “ ille-gal information” and the Politburo refused to allow it tobe printed.When the Opposition tried to print it them-selves the OGPU raided the print shop on 12 October1927 and the leading Oppositionist, Mrachovsky, who

was overseeing its production,was arrested and expelledfrom the party.

The technique of associating the Opposition withthe outside counter-revolutionaries, later to becomeinfamous at the Moscow tr ials, was initiated. One of theprinters of the Oppo sition platform, it was falselyclaimed, was in contact with a former member of theWhite army, Baron Wrangel, who was in turn in contactwith a counter-revolutionary group. This whole storywas an OGPU fabrication as even Stalin later admitted.

In addition to slander and bureaucratic repression,the Stalinists introduced into the debate that other bar-

barous hallmark of theirs – violence against the workingclass and its vanguard. Evoking anti-semitic sentiments

– Zinoviev,Kamenev and Trotsky were all of Jewish ori-gin – Stalin ordered hand-picked gangs of hooligans,rightly denounced as “Black Hundred” gangs by Trotsky,to physically smash up Opposition meetings.When theOpposi tion took their case to the factories the hooligansfo ll owed them, beating up speakers and inciting back-ward elements amongst the workers to denounce theOpposition and join in the campaign of physical intim-idation against them.

Af ter one factory meeti ng the hoo l i gans lef tPreobrazhensky beaten almost lifeless at the factorygates. At the same time the Opposition’s public demon-strations were set upon by police squads.

Indeed one crucial development in the debate wasthe extension of police rule within the party. Lenin’sExtraordinary Commission (the Cheka) had under thedirection of the Stalinist Dzerzhinsky been transformedinto the OGPU (Unified State Political Administration)in 1923.The extension of the secret police was inevitablein isolated Russia. Sabotage and espionage were realdangers. However this extension was carried throughunder the direction of a Thermidorian bureaucrat, freefrom any meaningful workers’ control.

In these circumstances the Thermidorian leadershipof the party were able to reverse the role of the secretpolice. From being a weapon of the state aga in s tcounter-revolution, the OGPU was transformed into aweapon of the Thermidorians against their opponentswithin the party. Dzherzhinsky’s Thermidorian projectfor a police dictatorship over party oppositions was atlast being fully implemented on the orders of Gen eralSecretary Stalin.

This process of Thermidorian reaction had majorimplications for the foreign policy of the Soviet State. In1926 the British Communist Party tailed behind theTUC lefts of the Anglo-Soviet Committee who fetedTomsky and betrayed the General Strike of that year.The Chinese Communist Party was ordered to enter thenationalist Kuomintang as a subordinate partner toChiang Kai Shek. It was thus disarmed when Chiangordered a wholesale massacre of Communist Party-ledworkers in Shanghai on 12 April 1927.

The international friends of “Socialism in OneCountry” were given full l icense to betray and slaughterthe advanced guard of the world working class. That theSoviet bureaucracy had not freed itself from the threat

of armed imperi alist intervention was demonstrated inMay 1927 when the British Conservative governmentraided Soviet trading offices in London and broke off diplomatic and trading agreements with the USSR.

On every front the Thermidorian bloc of Stalin andBukharin was poised to plunge the economy of theUSSR into dislocation at the hands of restorationistforces,and to weaken and isolate the USSR in the face of a renewed anti-Soviet war drive. Hence the bitternessand venom with which the Thermi dorians movedagainst the forces of the United Opposition during1927. The leaders of the Opposition were hounded by

the secret police, their supporters threatened with dis-missal and reprisal on the grounds that they were fos-


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tering disunity in the face of danger. In November 1927Trotsky and Zinoviev was expelled from the party.

Fu rt h er ex p u ls i ons fo ll owed at the 15th Pa rtyCongress in December. The leading figures were exiledfrom the major centres of the USSR. In driving out thesection of the Old Guard still committed to an interna-tionalist programme for transition the Thermidorianelements in the part y had completed their task.With thedefeat and ex p u l s i on of Tro t s ky, Preobra z h en s ky,Antonov-Ovsenko, Piatakov, Zinoviev and many otherkey figures in the Party’s heroic history, the Russian rev-olution experienced its own Thermidor. It was carriedthrough by a bloc of the bureaucratic centre and right-ist proto-restorationists presiding over a severe nationaland international crisis within which the Right andCentre could still agree to take joint action to politicallyexpropriate the revolutionary vanguard of the workingclass.

No soon er had the final tr iu m ph of t h eTh erm i dorians been con s o l i d a ted than theThermidorian alliance began to fall apart. The rock onwhich this unity foundered was the Kulak anger of which the left had warned in 1926. In the winter of 1927-28, grain sales to the state agencies slumped. TheKulaks hoarded grain, trying to force up prices by starv-ing the cities. From December 1927 through the earlymonths of 1928 the party repeatedly passed resolutionsfor extraordinary measures against speculators andlaunched a purge against pro-rich peasant local com-munist cadres – part of the Bukharin faction’s socialbase.

The evident danger of Kulak-inspired economicwarfare against the Soviet state coincided with renewedimperialist pressure against the Soviet Republic. In 1927

Britain broke off all diplomatic and trading links withthe USSR. Bukharin’s policies of conciliating the richpe a s a n t s , “s n a i l ’s pace” i n du s tr i a l i s a ti on and ri gh topportunism in international policy, had all sufferedshipwreck. Stalin, an unoriginal man in all respectsexcept as a brutal practitioner of repression, had beentotally complicit in these policies. But the Stalin groupacted swiftly to place the blame for the Soviet Republic’scrisis on Bukharin’s shoulders.

On 15 February 1928 Pravda published an article byStalin entitled The Kulaks raise their heads again . Tenthousand urban cadres were dispatched to the country-

side to carry out procurements in the style of war com-munism.

By the spring it was becoming obvious that a clashwas brewing bet ween Stalin, Ku i bys h ev, Mo l o tov,Ru d z utak and Voro s h i l ov on the one hand andBukharin, Rykov, Tomsky on the other with the Stalingroup moving towards a total break with NEP on theindustrial and agrarian fronts.

With the bureaucracy and for different reasons,alliance of workers, spurred on to defend the workers’state against its internal and external foes, the Stalin fac-tion turned violently to the left. It committed itself to

rapid industrialisation and the end of NEP in the coun-tryside. But this sharp turn in the direction of policies

advocated by the Left Opposition carried with it enor-mous dangers for the Stalin group.An admission of pasterrors would have immeasurably strengthened the Left.It would have necessitated opening the highest bodies of the state and party to the revolutionary Left Opposition.Such a course was impossible for the Stalinists.

Instead their policies of break-neck industrialisationand collectivisation were carried out by bureaucraticdictat and massive police repression. This required theconstruction of the bonapartist Stalinist form of statealongside the industrialisation and collectivisation dri-ves. Stalin’s left turn saw the centr ist Stalin faction trans-formed into a bureaucratic caste committed to a politi-cal programme of counterrevolutionary Bonapartism.

The defeat of the Right proved relatively easy. Theywere already disorientated and demoralized by the col-lapse of the whole world of NEP. The only further stepthat they could have taken in pursuit of their own polit-ical line was to appeal directly to the Kulak, i.e. directlyem brace the bo u r geois co u n terrevo lut i on . Si n ceBukharin, Rykov, Tomsky and the leading Rights wereneither su bj ectively prep ared, n or objectively well-placed, to go this far, they were doomed unless theKulaks and external counter-revolution came to theiralbi by routing the Stalinist bureaucratic offensive.

As co-authors of Thermidor in the party, freshlyimplicated in the destruction of proletarian dem ocracyin all these organs and centrally involved in the expul-sion and persecution of the left opposition, they darednot and could not appeal to the proletariat inside oroutside the party. Thus they surrendered position afterposition without a fight.

Firstly at the Sixth Comintern Congress held in mid-1928, Bukharin’s Comintern Policy was implicitly criti-cised and replaced with that of the “Third Period”, anadventurist pseudo-left policy of refusal of the unitedfront “from above”, i.e. with the reformist leaders. InGermany this policy with its “red days” , “batt les for thestreet”, its aping of right-wing nationalism, was eventu-a lly to pro s tr ate the strongest party of the Th irdInternational under the Nazi jackboot.

By 1930 the Stalin Faction of the Thermidorians hadtriumphed over all their rivals. Kaganovich, Kirov,Rudzutak, Voroshilov, Molotov, Kuibyshev, Kalinin andKossiov dominated the commanding heights of theparty apparatus, the state bureaucracy, the army and the

police. The repression meted out against the Right was,however, much milder than that aimed at the LeftOpposition.

In February 1929 Trotsky was deported to Turkey. InMarch 2,000 Bolshevik-Leninists were arrested anddeported to the Siberian isolators. In December 1929Stalin opened what was to become a “river of blood”between his regime and the Left Opposition. JakobBlumkin, a prominent Bolshevik since the civil war andan important official in the GPU,visited Trotsky in exilein Istanbul and returned with a political document. Onhis return he was arrested and shot.

Two other Oppositionists, Silov and Rabinovich,


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were shot for “sabotage of the railroad system”. From1929-30 the left Opposition conducted its debates andpublished its manuscript organs in the isolators of Verkhne-Uralsk,Suzdal and Yaroslavl. The hunger strikewas its principal form of struggle against the mountingStalinist repression. From 1929 to 1932 a smuggledexchange continued between Trotsky in Turkey and theimprisoned Oppositionists.Then the repression severedthe links.

Whilst the Bolshevik-Leninists were subjected to thefull rigour of the OGPU, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskyretained their seats on the Central Committee and theirfollowers (albeit demoted from positions of command)retained their status as functionaries as well as theirparty membership.

Bukharin was put in charge of the research depart-ment of the Commissariat for Heavy Industry in 1932and later edited the official government paper Izvestia.

Stalin’s Brumaire was possible only on the basis of the Thermidorean destruction of the party and merelycompleted its transformation into a party of func-

tionaries.The weakness of the Bolshevik-Leninist resistance

was partly due to the almost complete changeover of party membership since the heroic days of the BolshevikParty. By 1929 only 8,000 had been members beforeFebruary 1917 and only 130,000 out of one and a half million had joined before the end of the civil war.55 Inthese circumstances the overwhelming bulk of the partyhad known no other regime than that of the Stalinistapparatus.

Helene Carrere D’Encausse has noted that “From1923 onwards, the field of action of the Police Apparatus

extended to the party”.56

The Security Apparatus –renamed GPU in 1922 and OGPU in 1923 – became aninstrument of Thermidorean persecution and violenceagainst the Left Opposition.57 The collectivisation andindustrialisation drive of the 1930s was accompanied bya massive increase in the role, powers and size of theOGPU. In 1930 Yagoda took over an expanding appara-tus with its own network of transportation and labourcamps – the GUlAG.58

In D’Encausse’s words, “the most profound changein the status of the police within the political systemtook place in 1929 with the economic revolution”.59 The

Shaknty tri al of bourgeois experts in July 1928 (five wereexecuted) marked the onset of terror against “ wreckers”.

Whilst some outright sabotage by bourgeois expertswas possible, the main purpose was to silence all objec-tions to the Stalinists’ arbitrary and adventurist eco-nomic targets and to prevent realistic reports beingdrawn up. Realisti c and accurate reports could haveserved as a means of holding the Stalin faction toaccount. Stalin, in 1930, launched a campaign to terror-ize and silence any potential source of criticism.

Having defeated the right and left factions of thepart y, Stalin set out to crush all “neutral” expert ele-

ments whose testimony might be raised against him. InApril 1929 he announced that Shakhtyites are “now

ensconced in every branch of our industry”.60 In 1930,OGPU reported the discovery of an il legal “ToilingPeasant Party” (TKP) under the leadership of thefamous economist N.D. Kondratiev. In the Autumn aplot to disrupt the food supplies was “discovered”.

In Novem ber and Decem ber 1930 the OG P Uunearthed a so-called “Industrial Party” (Prompartiia),responsible for “wrecking” in industry and in direct per-sonal collusion with Raymond Poincare, the Presidentof France! In March 1931 the members of a so-called“Union Bu reau of the Cen tral Com m i ttee of t h eMenshevik Party” were put on trial. In all these cases theaccused confessed to the crimes.

The OGPU and Stalin began to strike at prominentnon-factional theoreticians and intellectuals. The econ-omist I.I. Rubin and the director and founder of theMarx-Engels Institute, D.B. Riazanov, were expelledfrom the party, tried, imprisoned and exiled. In thesecases the OGPU utilized the ful l range of their repressivemeasures, including endless interrogation, torture andthe seizure of relatives as hostages in order to extractconfessions.

As leader of a factional clique that absolutely domi-nated the party and the state apparatus by administra-tive and repressive means, Stalin himself became theobject of an obscene personality cult. The Bonapartistshad to em bell ish and gl ori fy the pers on of t h ei rBon a p a rte . On Stalin’s 50th bi rt h d ay the StatePublishing House published a laudatory anthologywherein one could read that Comrade Stalin was Lenin’s“single most reliable aide, who differed from others bynever faltering, by always moving hand in hand withVladimir Ilyich at all the crucial stages of the revolu-tion.”

Historians now had to revise and shamelessly falsifytheir works. Even long-time opponents of Trotsky, likeM.N. Pokrovsky, fell in the wave of persecutions. By1934 the torrent of gl orifi c ation had mounted toobscene and ludicrous proportions. Pravda carr ied inJanuary of that year a two page article by none otherthan the capitulator Radek which in Medvedev’s wordsheaped “orgiastic praise on Stalin”.61 “Lenin’s best pupil,the model of the Leninist party,bone of its bone,bloodof its blood...as far sighted as Lenin.”

With this article the river of adulation burst itsbanks. The cult of the “all-seeing, all-knowing, wise,

father of the peoples” Stalin put even the glorification of Hitler into the shade.

It was between 1927 and 1930 that all the essentialelem ents of the Stalinist system were assembled in theirown part icular Bonapartist form. The events of 1927 to1930 saw the establishment of a Bonapartist regime onthe ruins of Lenin’s party, the soviet structures of theworkers’ state and the ruins of the Thermidorean party.

The state of the mid-1920 Stalin’s “ Ei gh teenthBrumaire”, like its preceding “Ninth Thermidor” wasnot a single act.62 It was carried out not by an insurrec-tionary coup d’etat, but by a series of blows that,havingalready definitively driven the revolutionary communist


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vanguard out of the party, drove the rightist wing of theThermidoreans out of the leadership and subjected theentire Thermidorean bureaucracy to a one-man dicta-torship. That dictatorship rested, of necessity, on a dra-matically increased police appa ratus able to intervenewithin the party.

The collectivisation of agriculture

As we have seen, the Stalin group had co-existed with

the restora tionist wing of the party tolerating thegrowth of Kulak farming, low industrial growth targetsand ineffective planning machinery. At this stage in itsdevelopment it was defined as a political tendency by itscommitment to holding political power within the iso-lated Russian state on a programme of politically expro-priating the most consciously revolutionary layers of theworking class.

But i t differed from the right in that in certain excep-tional circumstances, should its political grip on theSoviet state be threatened, it was capable of bureaucrat-ically moving against private property and of develop-

ing and extending a form of economic planning in con-flict with the operation of the law of value. Its interest indeveloping forms of planning flowed from its need tohold on to the political power it had usurped, not froma commitment to socialism.

During 1927 the Soviet state faced difficulties inprocuring grain from the peasants to the same level thatit had achieved in 1926.63 Similar problems faced thestate procurement agencies in 1928.The Thermidoreanswere reaping the bitter fruits of under industrialisationand concessions to the Kulak. The centrist Stalin groupmade its decisive turn against the Bukharin wing and

against the policies of late N EP. The prerequisite of theStalin group being able to make that left turn was thatthe revolutionary left had been decisively ousted frompower.

In December 1927 local Communist Party organisa-tions were ordered, with little success, to step up theirefforts to procure grain.At the same time Stalin was sti lldeclaring,“The way out is to unite the small and dwarf peasant farms gradually but surely, not by pressure butby example and persuasion, into large farms based oncommon, co-operative cultivation of the land.”64 Thedraft five year plan accepted in 1928 contained 15 per

cent as an optimal target for collectivisation of agricul-ture in its duration.

Forcible collections of grain were carr ied out underthe guidance of key Stalinists – Stalin himself, Zhdanov,Kossior and Mikoyan – during January and March 1928.The inevitable response of the peasants was to cut backon their sowings of wheat and rye in 1928. Either theStalinists could face a threat to their political power byconceding to the private farmers by raising prices andimporting cheap consumer goods from the West or theycould move to break the hold of private property in thecountryside.

It was in order to preserve their bureaucratic power,rather than because of any long-term plans for co ll ec-

tivising agriculture or expected immediate beneficialresults in the agricultural sector, that the Stalinistsdecided to collectivise Soviet agriculture. The materialbase of the Soviet economy was hopelessly ill-preparedto provide the required resources to supply collectivisedagriculture with the facilities needed to make it capableof achieving qualitatively higher yields.

In 1928 the USSR possessed only 27,000 tractorscompared with the 200,000 it needed.65 The coll ectivisa-tion of agriculture was undertaken without any formaldiscussion or decision making in an official party body.It was the work of the tr iumphant Stalin faction and ameasure of their grip over the party at this time.

On 7 November 1929 the press carried an article byStalin in which he hailed the “spontaneous turn of thebroadest mass of poor and middle-peasant householdstowards collective forms of agriculture.” In DecemberStalin launched a campaign for the liquidation of theKulaks “as a class” which was underwritten by a decreeof 5 January 1930 proclaiming the State’s commitmentto “ total collectivisation.”

Within seven weeks of the decree over 50 per cent of the Soviet peasantry were members of rudimentary andramshackle collectives. Active resistance automaticallyled to protesting peasants receiving the designation“Kulak” from the party organs. By July 1930 320,000Kulak families had been expropriated and deported – anumber that far exceeded the number of Kulaks claimedby Stalinist statisticians on the eve of co llectivisation.

Collective farm membership figures for 1930 showquite how spurious were the Stalinists’ claims that col-lectivisation represented a spontaneous movement of the mass of the peasantry. A brief hint of relaxationfrom Stalin in a March 1930 Pravda article entitled“Dizzy with Success” precipitated a dramatic exodusfrom the collective farms. By early March 1930 58 percent of the Soviet peasantry were enrolled in collectives.That figure had dropped to 23 per cent by June! In theh ighly fertile Central Black Earth Region membershipdropped from 81.8 per cent to 15.7 per cent over thesame period.

The uprooted peasantry found no resources orequipment in the new co ll ectives. Neither the tempo of industrial development throughout the 1920s nor thetargets of the First Five Year Plan made it possible forcollectivisation to do other than simply generalise the

want, squalor and backwardness of Russian agriculture.Peasant resistance to this process took on the characterof a civil war.To the extent that the peasants were inca-pable of resisting collectivisation they slaughtered theirown livestock as their sole means of thwarting the agen-cies of the central state. This is evidenced by the dra-matic drop in Soviet livestock between 1929 and 1934.

In those years the number of horses and pigsdeclined by 55 per cent, of cattle by 40 per cent andsheep by 66 per cent. While 1930 was blessed with agood harvest, agric ul tural output dropped considerablyin the first years of collectivisation. In 1932 cereal pro-

duction was 25 per cent down on the average NEP yearsand famine re-appeared in the Soviet countryside on a


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horrific scale.

Faced with this resistance and the disastrous effectsof co ll ectivi s a ti on on agri c u l tu ral produ cti on , t h eStalinists did order a temporary retreat in 1930.But thecollectivisation drive was resumed in 1931 as the meansby which the Stalinists took a tight grip on the produc-tive forces of Soviet agriculture.

They were prepared to retard the productive capaci-ty of the Soviet countryside in order to achieve this

desired effect for the Bonapart ist regime. By 1932, 61.5per cent of cultivated land was collectivised; there were211,100 cooperative farms (Kholkhozes) and 4,337 Statefarms (Sovkhozes).66

While the Kholkhozes were formally established asco-operatives the local party organs appointed their sec-retaries and leading committees. In 1935 the Kholkhozsystem received a definitive form. Agricultural machin-ery, agronomists, mechanics, educational, veterinaryand training personnel were all to be concentrated ins t a te machine tractor stati ons (MTS ) . Pa rty andSec urity (NK VD) supervision of the countryside was

also to be based in the MTS.The Kholkhozes, in their tu rn, were to hire machin-

ery and experti se from the local MTS. In this way a def-inite layer of privileged MTS workers was crystallised inthe countryside alongside the perfection of an appara-tus of repression and scrutiny over the mass of the peas-antry.

Peasant income was made dependent on the incomeof the Kholkhoz after the state had purchased its cropsand collected its tax tribute from the Kholkhoz. In 1935the average household earned 247 rubles a year forKholkhoz work – the cost of a pair of shoes! In addition

the peasants were now to be allowed a small plot of nomore than half a hectare from which the mass of thesoviet peasantry gleaned the essentials of their miserablelife.

The reintroduction of an internal passport systemfor the Kholkhozniki in 1933 effectively tied the peas-ants to the Kholkhoz. A law of 17 March 1933 stipulat-ed that a peasant could not leave his Kholkhoz withouta contract from an employing enterprise that hadreceived the sanction of the Kholkhoz management.

The Soviet peasantry therefore experienced collec-tivisation as the loss of their “gains of October.” The

Bonapartist burea ucracy had pres erved its poli ticalpower and material privileges by destroying the petty-commodity production base of the Kulak and theNEPman. In this way the ability of the peasantry tochallenge the political rule of the bureaucracy through agrain strike was effectively destroyed.

But the result was not only the agricultural stagna-tion and inefficiency which haunts the Soviet bureau-cracy to this day. It also created a sullen and rebelliouspeasantry held down by savage repression. The Stalinistvictory over the peasantry created an enormous explo-sive charge in the very foundations of the workers’ state

and necessitated a huge appa ra tus of repression –including the slave labour camps which grew alongside

collectivisation – to keep the peasantry in the co ll ectivefarms.

Bonapart ism and industri alisatio n

The left turn of the Stalinists in 1928 also marked thebeginning of their drive to industr ialise the economy of the Soviet Union. Throughout the period of the FirstF ive Year Plans, up to the outbreak of war wi t hGermany, the Stalin faction grappled with the problem

of consolidating and extending their political control of Soviet society at t he same time as they attempted tobuild a modern industrial economy.

At all times their guiding objective was to retaintheir political power and privileges and only in this con-text can the zigs and zags of their economic policies beunderstood. Like all non-revolutionary forces their poli-cies were empirically determined as they searched for away both to prevent the re-assertion of proletarian con-trol over the soviet state, and to fend off the attacks of imperialism.

As such it was this period which was to provide

Stalinism with its formative experience and furnish itwith its characteristic methods and politics. The defin-ing feature of Stalinist state power, the attempt to createa bureaucratically planned economy on the basis bothof the destruction of capitalist property relations andthe political expropriation of the proletariat, took shapein the period of the fi rst two Five Year Plans.

As with all other situations where Stalinists werelater to expropriate private capital and organise produc-tion on the basis of centralised planning, decisive mea-sures against the remaining power of the bourgeoisieand petty bourgeoisie were only taken after the revolu-

tionary leadership of the working class had been politi-cally expropriated.

Up to that moment Stalinism sided with the Rightistpro-capitalist forces against the working class until itcould guarantee that the working class did not have theresources to create organs of a healthy revolutionaryworkers’ state. However in order to defend its own priv-ileges and political power it moved to defend and extendnon-capitalist property relations but in a manner thatensured,and extended, the destruction of the remainingrights of the toilers themselves.

While opposed to the Marxist programme for the

planned construction of socialism in the aftermath of destroying the bourgeoisie, Stalinism can expropriatebourgeois property and create planning mechanisms forits own non-socialist purposes.

As a bureaucratically controlled overturn of capital-ist property relations, the First Five Year Plan and col-lectivisation drive pre-figured the post-second worldwar overturns in all its essential features save that thefirst workers’ state had as its direct origin the proletari -an insurrection of October and the expropriations andnationalisations of 1918.

A politically degenerate a regime such as that repre-sented by Stalinism standing on post-capitalist propertyforms must possess a highly contradictory character.


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The property relations, the potential of plannificationitself, are stifled and distorted. The fact that the proper-ty rel ations of the USSR remained post-capitalist andthat economic policy was the result of central planning,not the working of the law of value, did not mean thatthis statified property in the USSR had a socialist char-acter.

In the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy the statifiedeconomy was not being utilised to construct a societyimplementing a programme of socialist construction –a programme directed to the withering away of inequal-ity and of the state itself. The bureaucracy’s means of administering the planned economy, and the goals theyset for it, flowed from their interest in maintaining theirrule and privileges. The massive cost of the repressivestate machine built up to protect the bureaucracy con-stituted, in and of itself, an enormous burden on theproperty relations of the USSR.

The Stalinist form of planning is only possible afterthe proleta riat has been politically expropriated. Thismeans that the self-activity and democratic initiative of the toilers themselves – the very force that is indispens-able to planning and developing the productive forceson the road to socialist construction – cannot be har-nessed by the bureaucracy. Because the Stalinists denythe masses all political r ights, they must also deny themaccess to the decision-making machinery of the centralplan. In that the plan guarantees the privileges of thebureaucracy it must, in concealing these privileges,shroud the workings of the plan in a veil of secrecy.

As the bureaucracy denies the masses’ elementaryrights and material needs so the toilers conceal the realworkings of the economy from their bureaucratic over-lords. Low labour productivity, high absenteeism and

labour turnover are evidence of this. At each and everystage in the bargaining process that precedes agreementson plan targets, the bureaucrats and managers them-selves conceal their real productive potential from theirsuperiors in order to gain maximum leeway from thecentral state apparatus. These aspects of the bureaucrat-ic plan were all in evidence in the First Five Year Plans.

They have been present in every plan since. Theircumulative effect is to periodically slow down growthrates, disrupt the economy, create shortages and throwthe economy into crisis. Enthusiasm of the masses,evoked by promises of socialism, recedes as does the

possibility of socialism or even of real and lasting eco-nomic improvement. The bureaucratic plan extends itspotential as it increases inequality and fosters dispro-portionality in the economy. It cannot achieve sustainedqualitative growth in the economy.

That is, while it has been able to modernise theUSSR by copying capitalism’s highest achievements, ithas not, in a rounded and developed way,ever been ableto outstrip the economic achievements of the majorimperialist powers.

Within the Stalinist regime, planning is necessarilyc ru de and blind. The existence of that regime based on

bureaucratic power means that the transition to social-ism in the USSR is blocked. Although post-capitalist

property forms remain in existence the Stalinist regimefrom its inception prevents them being consciouslydeveloped as a means of implementing the programmeof revolutionary Marxism.

Many attempts have been made to challenge theTrotskyist characterisation of the property relationsupon which the Soviet state is based.There certainly hasbeen no shortage of pedantic intellectuals who use thepublished evidence of the non-fulfilment of plan targetsas verification of their own heavily ground academic axethat the Soviet economy is planless – and has alwaysbeen so.

The journal Critique invests its credibility, and thatof its lead editor Hillel Ticktin, in this thesis. After rum-maging in the academic bargain basement for what reg-ularly passes as new ideas freed from the “stale ortho-dox y ” of the past, the leadership of the Bri ti s hRevolutionary Communist Party have decided they canplug a gap in their own theoretical dyke by opting toattempt to convince us of this same sophistry.

Seizing on the evident expansion of producer goods

production at the expense of consumer goods and fort i-fied by the manifest deterioration in the living standardsof the working class, the founder of the British SocialistWorkers Party Tony Cliff has deduced that the inaugu-ration of the First Five Year Plan, taken in con junctionwith the collectivisation of agriculture, signifies the re-introduction of capitalism – albeit in a bureaucraticstate capitalist form – in the USSR.67

Other analysts purporting to stand in the Trotskyisttradi tion – notably Ernest Mandel – have sought toprove the non-capitalist nature of the property relationsextended and fortified by Stalinism by reference simplyto their statistically evident growth in comparison withworld capitalism.68

None of these schools begin to tackle the fundamen-tal problems presented to Marxists in defining the prop-erty relations presided over by Stalinism in the USSR.Whether non-capitalist property relations exist in theUSSR depends on whether the fundamental law of cap-italist production the law of value – determines thenature of production, remuneration and exchange inthe USSR.

Even the healthiest of workers’ states, would – in asituation of blockade and encirclement – be forced to

subordinate the consumption of the masses to the pro-duction of producer goods to survive in the face of imperialism. Whether the economy is planned or notdepends on whether the fundamental laws of capitalistproduction have been subordinated as the principallaws governing production by a system of rules emanat-ing from the centralised decision-making apparatus of the USSR. It flows from the fact of the political expro-priation of the working class in the USSR that thenorms of planning in the USSR will not conform tothose for which revolutionary Marxists fight. However,the non-existence of the norms of socialist planning isnot sufficient evidence to deduce the non-existence of

planning per se in the USSR.


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It is impossible to talk of Soviet planning as if theoutcome of every productive operation was, or is, sim-ply the execution of the will of the central planningbureaucracy. The periods of fastest growth have beenduring the First Five Year Plan and in the immediateaftermath of the Second World War.

In both cases relatively primitive tasks of construc-tion and reconstruction had to be fulfi ll ed ,growth tookplace primarily in the producer goods sector and thebureaucracy could rely on a significant degree of enthu-siasm and self-sacrifice from large sections of the work-ing masses.

However, in general – for example at the end of theFirst Five Year Plan and increasingly in the post-warperiod – the Stalinist burea ucracy has de speratelysearched in vain for rational methods of administeringthe plan,of co-ordinating its various branches and mea-suring needs and output.

Under the capitalist system of production thesedecisions are taken by the laws of the market itself. In ahealthy workers’ state they are the result of the con-

scious rule of the toilers themselves deciding on theirtasks and needs in order to establi sh a socialist order.

Neither the anarchic laws of capitalism nor the rulesof transition are determinant in the USSR.The histor i-cally illegitimate bureaucracy has to attempt to makeorder out of property relations that historically only hasvalidity as the means by which the working class con-structs socialism. Hence the particular gross absurdities,irrationalities and failures of Soviet planning.

The St alinist model of planning

The Stalinists sought to expand their industrial basethrough a drive to both increase the USSR’s heavyindustrial base and to extend the operati on of cen-tralised production planning in every major sphere of Soviet industrial production. Planning was, therefore, avital means for asserting and maintaining the hold of the Stalinists over Soviet society as a whole. The Stalingroup proceeded, at first, to revise the plan targetsupwards in a particularly adventurist fashion and thento call, in December 1929, for the completion of the FiveYear Plan in four years.

The target growth rate for 1931 was to be nearly doublethat originally intended. Over the four and a quarter

years from October 1928 to December 1932 actualinvestment in heavy industry nearly doubled the origi-nal estimates. The Stalinists, breaking with the Right,attempted to establish a dynamic industrial economythrough centralised planning.

It is necessary to understand the term “ planning” asit can be applied to this stage of the development of theSoviet economy. At least in the early years of the FirstFive Year plan the targets were arbitrary to a large extentand played an exhortative rather than an immediatelyprescriptive role.

For example the maximum variant of the First FiveYear Plan called for a quadrupling of investment in stateindustry, an 85 per cent in consumption expenditure, a

70 per cent increase in real wages and a 30 per centincrease in peasant incomes!69

In the realm of consumption expenditure,real wagesand peasant incomes in reality bore no resemblance tothese figures by the end of the Fir st Five Year Plan.

The results of the first major round of Stalinist plan-ning were uneven. For reasons we have already dis-cussed agricultural production fell far short of plannedtargets. Similarly the production of consumer goods

failed to reach planned targets. Even bourgeois com-mentators, however, are forced to accept that the pro-duction of producer goods increased considerably andon a scale beyond that envisaged by the plan formula-tors. Alongside this there were significant advances inthe construction of an operative apparatus of planningin the USSR. A balance sheet of the achievements andshort comings of the First Five Plan can be drawn fromthe foll owing table:

1927-8 1932 Plan Target 1932 Actual

Producer goods [ in mil lions of rubles] Consumer

Goods Agricultural Production 13.1 25.8 16.6 (Source:A. Nove:An Economic History of the USSR p191)

6.0

18.1

23.1

12.3

25.1

20.2 70

Stalinist planning did achieve notable successes dur-ing the First Five Plan period. Achievements wererecorded primarily in the sphere of heavy industry,which received 80 per cent of total investments. Some1,500 new factories were built with metal plants beingestablished at Magnitogorsk, Kusnetsk, Zaporozhe. A

new coalfield was built in Kazakhstan. The biggesthyd ro-el ectric station in Eu rope was buil t on theDneiper. At a time when world capitalism was reelingunder the effects of severe recession the First Five YearPlan increased Soviet production by 250 per cent. In theheavy industr ial sphere this momentum was continued,albeit at a slightly slower pace, in the Second Five YearPlan. As a result coal and pig iron production increasedfive fold between 1928 and 1940, steel fourfold, andchemical production tenfold.

But to what extent can these achievements be attr ib-uted to planning?The drafting of plans was the joint

responsibility of the party and government with theState Planning Commission – Gosplan. They were


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responsible for drawing up both a prospective plan forthe Five Year period and a series of current plans which,initially, took the form of annual control figures. In 1931an annual plan was produced for the first time andthereafter yearly. During the 1930s mechanisms weredeveloped with a view to both maintaining an accountof what was being produced and a material balancebetween qua ntities produced by various branches of industry.

It was not until the very late 1930s that the planningmechanisms were sufficiently well developed to draw upa general balance of the economy of the USSR as awh o l e . Du ring the Second World War (1939-45)Gosplan was resorting to monthly plans as its means of organising and directing production. The execution of plans was the re s pon s i bi l i ty of the va ri o u sCommissariats and other economic authorities underthe Supreme Economic Council.

Targets were set in quantitative terms and, in thesphere of heavy industr y, were generally fulfilled in theperiod of the First Five Year Plan. The Stalinist systemshowed that it could use the potential of a centralisedplanned economy to direct resources to the front of heavy industry.Figures for consumer goods productiondemonstrate the bureaucracy’s ability to ensure thatavailable resources were primarily made available to itspriority projects.

But quantitative successes should not blind us to thequalitative failures of Stalinist planning during this earlyperiod. Alongside the Stalinists’ adventurist upping of all plan targets, productivity was due to rise by 42.1 percent in 1931 but rose by 20.5 per cent. Production costsin that year rose by 6 per cent rather than a planned 8per cent reduction.

By the admission of the Stalinists themselves thequality of goods produced deteriorated during the FirstFive Year Plan.Hence Molotov could declare on January1933, “ In the course of the Second Five Year Plan wemust focus our efforts not on the quantitative growth of production but on improving the quality of productionand on the growth of labour productivity in industry”.72

Periodic breakdown of planning occurred particu-larly in the light industrial sector. Textile production,forexample, fell in certain years of the First Five Year Plan.73

Rakovsky showed that for light industry during Mayand June 1931 “the plan was lit tle more than 50 per cent

fulfilled”.74

The Stalinist planners faced mounting probl em sboth of maintaining proportional balance between thevarious sectors of the economy and in devising rationalmeans of measuring production, needs and the rate of exchange between goods. These were not simply prob-lems of the consumer goods sector. 16,000 ki lometres of new railways were planned for the First Five Year Planperiod – the materials were only made available to build5,500 kms.

Bureaucratic planning, as the plan proceeded, facedmounting problems of distributing’ produced goods tothe institutions most in need of them. In 1932 and 1933

the planning mechanisms came under considerablestrain and disorganisation. The adventurist targets of the Stalinists were only an additional contributory fac-tor rather than the root cause of the disorganisation of the Soviet economy by the end of the First Five YearPlan.

Con sis tent with the reacti on a ry programme of Socialism in One Country the Stalinists aspired to thebuilding of an autarchic planned economy separatedfrom the operations of the world capitalist economy. Ina manner that prefigures the projects of Pol Pot andLeng Sary, Stalinist planners theorised a transition tocommunism in the USSR through the achievement of complete autarchy and the utilisation of the USSR’s ownresources.

But as Trotsky had warned in Towards Capitali sm or

Socialism in 1925, this attempt to create a planned econ-omy in isolation proved a utopia. Despite the enormousresources of the USSR both the workings of the worldmarket and imperialism’s hostile designs against theUSSR peri od i c a lly and inevi t a bly disru pted theStalinists’ goal of establishing an autarchic plannedeconomy.

During the First Five Year Plan, for example, declin-ing world prices for raw materials occasioned by worldcapitalism’s recession, obliged the Soviet planners toexport more raw materials in order to purchase machin-ery and import less, for example, cotton and wool thanhad been planned.

The targets and priorities of the Second Five YearPlan were to be severely disrupted by the increasingobligation on the Soviet planners to prepare the militarydefence of the USSR.

Having attempted to send the mechanisms of themarket “to the devil” the Stalinists faced insurmount-able problems in devising rational pricing mechanismswithin their economy. In 1930 and 1931 Soviet econo-mists were again heard to rationalise the pricing chaosin the USSR as a symptom of the withering away of money!

Bread rationing was re-introduced in 1929 and wasextended to most other manufactured consumer goodsduring 1930. In addition the same commodity could bepurchased at five different prices: commercial prices inspecial restricted access shops for luxuries; open model

stores with prices above “commercial” prices; specialshops in workers’ districts that in theory sold goods atbetween commercial and ration prices; Torgsin storesselling in exchange for precious metals and foreign cur-rency;and “free prices” on the private and black market.

Prices paid by the state to the Kholkhoz were plannedon the basis of the state’s revenue requirements notdetermined on the basis of the law of value. For example,in the mid 1930s the peasants were paid 5.70 rubles for acentre of rye by state provincial agencies which sold it tostate flour mills at 22.20 rubles a centre. The pricingmechanisms made possible a large revenue to the centralstate in the form of the “turnover” tax.

Failure to raise labour productivity in line with plan


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targets posed major problems to the Stalinists as to howthe industrialisation was to be financed. The heavy tax-ation tribute extracted from the peasantry provided half the turnover tax yield to the state budget in 1935.75 Butincreasingly during the First Five Year Plan new invest-ments were funded from the massive and inflationaryexpansion of the supp ly of printed money. In 1928 1.7milliard rubles were in circulation – the figure reached8.4 milliard by 1933.

As the Left Opposition tirelessly pointed out thisinflationary spiral made it all the more impossible forthe Soviet planners to measure, compare and judgeach i evem ent in the Sovi et econ omy. The Stalinistbureaucracy did not have its own alternative rationalmeasuring criteria with which to replace those of thelaw of value.

These contradictions within the Stalinist systemtook on an increasingly dramatic form in the last periodof the First Five Year Plan occasioning a serious crisis inthe planning system in 1932 and 1933. There were seri-ous shortfalls in target achievement for electricity, pigiron, coal and oil in 1932. Steel production which hadover-fulfilled its 1928-9 target figure was below the 1930level in 1932 and the 1933 target was set at 7 per centbelow the 1931 target.

Steel production suffered from a major failure to putnew facilities into operation. In 1933 there was a 14 percent drop in investment. In addition to the famine thatstruck the Soviet countryside that year there was a seri-ous transport crisis and gross industrial production,which had been rising at 20 per cent per annum, rose byonly 5 per cent.

The Soviet crisis of 1932 and 1933 had its roots notin the operation of the law of value on an internal orinternational scale. It was a crisis of a system based onconsciously challenging the laws and dictates of marketmechanisms by a Bonapartist bureaucracy which couldnot develop and sustain a planned and balanced growthof the productive forces at its disposal. It represented acri sis of Stalinist planning in a form that pre-figures thecrises of proportionality and stagnation that have regu-la rl y interru pted the devel opment of bu re a u c ra ti cplanned economies.

The very existence of this form of crisis was predict-ed and analysed by Trotsky in his writings on the Sovieteconomy.Writing in 1931 in Problems of Development of

the USSR Trotsky evidenced the tendency to crisis thatlurked behind the facade of success:

“the industrial successes of recent years in themselves

do not at all assure an uninterrupted growth in the

future. Precisely the speed of industrial development

accumulates disproportions, partly inherited from the

past, part ly growing out of the complications of the

new tasks, partly created by the methodological mis-

takes of the leadership in combination with direct sab-

otage.”77

He envisaged the principal elements of the form thatthe crisis of bureaucratic planning would take:

“ the substitution of economic direction by adminis-

trati ve goading,with the absence of any serious collec-

tive verification, leads inevitably to the inclusion of

mistakes in the very foundation of the economy and

to the preparation of ‘tight places’ inside the econom-

ic proces s . The disproporti ons driven inw a rd

inevitably remain at the fo ll owing stage in the form of

disharmony between the means of production and

raw materi a l s , bet ween tra n s port and indu s tr y,

between quantity and quality and finally in the disor-

ganisation of the monetary system.” 78

He developed this method of analysis with greatercl arity during 1932:

“The whole trouble is that the wild leaps in industrial-

isa tion have brought the various elements of the plan

into dire contradiction with each other. The trouble is

that the economy functions without material reserves

and without calculation.

The trouble is that the social and political instruments

for the determination and effectiveness of the plan

have been broken or mangled. The trouble is that the

acc rued disproportions threaten more and greater

surprises.The trouble is that the uncontrolled bureau-

cracy has tied up its pres tige with the subsequent

accumulation of errors. The trouble is that a crisis is

impending with a chain of consequences such as the

enforced shutting down of factories and unemploy-

m ent.”79

Th ere was def i n i tely a ten dency for the Lef tOpposition in the early 1930s to envisage a completecollapse of the planning machinery and Stalin’s indus-trialisation project. Rakovsky’s The Five Year Plan in

Crisis written in 1936 is built on a perspective of impending collapse drawn from a sharp and clear analy-sis of the tendency towards crisis. As theCritique edito-rial boa rd gleef ully points out, Ra kovsky and theMensheviks envisaged a developing and progressive“planlessness” in the Soviet economy. A similar tele-s coped perspective can also be found in some of Trotsky’s writings on the economy of the USSR in theearly 1930s:

“In the sphere of money inflation, as in that of

bureaucratic despotism, is summed up all the falseness

of the policy of centrism in the field of the Soviet

economy as well as in the field of the international

pro l et a rian movem en t . The Stalinist sys tem is

exhausted to the end and is doom ed . Its break up is

approaching with the same inevitability with which

the victory of fascism approached in Germany.” 80

Reality was, however, to show these perspectives tobe too starkly drawn.History allows us, with Trotsky, torecognise that the planned property form did survivethe 1932-3 crisis only for the general tendencies towardscrisis that we have discussed to re-occur at the latter endof the Second Five Year Plan.

In the face of crisis the Stalinists dramatically re-drafted their plan targets during 1933. The plan targetsfor 1934-6 were relatively well fulfilled. In steel produc-tion, for example, 35 per cent, 22 per cent and 28 percent of targets were met and marginally over fulfilled.81


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In 1936 cotton cloth production rose 22.3 per cent overits 1935 level.

Again it would be difficult to attribute the relativelystable expansion of the USSR’s productive forces in thisperiod either to the operation of the law of value or tothe work of “planlessness”.While the tendency towardsplanlessness was always part of the Left Opposition’stheory of the roots of crisis, they never attempted toch a racterise the sys tem as perm a n en t ly “p la n l es s”.Neither can one seriously begin to explain the relativelystable mid-1950s in the Soviet economy without recog-nising the existence of and strengthening of, planningmechanisms during this period.

In 1935 the most rounded and even fulfilment of plan targets was achieved. That year also saw the plan-ning agencies relatively free from the adventurist pres-sure of the Stalinists, chastened by the 1932-3 crisis. Tothis extent it was a period where the planning mecha-nisms had the greatest opportunity to prove their realpotential. In this year quantitative growth targets weref u l f i ll ed , for the first ti m e , by every all - u n i onCommissariat. Labour productivity in heavy industryactually rose more than its planned target. 1936 waseven more satisfactory than 1935 in most regards.

How then do we explain this relative success?Firstlyit demonstrates the superiority of, and potential of,planned production itself. It pays tr ibute to the potentialof the socialist organisation of production. This wasrecognised by Trotsky in 1936:

“With the bourgeois economists we have no longer

anything to quarrel over. Socialism has demonstrated

its right to victory,not on the pages of Das Kapital ,but

in an industrial arena comprising a sixth of the earth’s

surface, not in the language of dialectics, but in the

language of steel, cement and electricity.”82

On the basis of material experience, Trotsky’s esti-mate of the achievements of Soviet planning – but notof its deform ati ons and tendency to breakdown – hadbeen developed in the light of previously unobtainableexperience. This has led the supporters of Critique to“accuse” Trotsky of changing his position in the mid-1930s and breaking with the “correct” perspective thathe and Rakovsky held to in the early 1930s.83

They are right to suggest that Trotsky modified hisestimate of the achievements of Soviet planning. But it

was Trotsky who was correct to modify his view of plan-nification in the USSR on the basis of learning from theunique and concrete experience of the USSR in the1930s.Revolutionary perspectives are of necessity tenta-tive and in permanent need of being tested and re-assessed.Academics can afford the luxury of orthodoxyand of “never changing their position” whatever mayhappen in the material world.

Unless revolutionary Marxist perspectives are per-manently tested and re-assessed on the basis of livingexperience the door is open to dogmatism, to schema-tism and the collapse of the revolutionary programmeas an instrument of intervention. .

An explanation of the relatively stable mid-1930s

period must also base itself upon an understanding of the operation of other contributory factors. A numberof the major projects of the First Five Year Plan – includ-ing Magnitogorsk – only became fully operational dur-ing this period. The proportion of machinery importedfrom the West declined during this period as a result of the achievements of the First Five Year Plan.

A relaxation of rationing was accompanied by ani n c rease in Labour produ ctivi ty wh i ch con ti nu edthrough to 1937.Again it was the achievements of plan-ning and not the opera tion of the laws of capitalism orthe lawlessness of the USSR as viewed through the eyesof theCritique editorial board that explains this relativestability.

The last year of the Second Five Year Plan in 1937experienced the onset of significant disequilibrium andstagnation. Steel production rose by only 4 per centcompared with 28 per cent in the previous year.84

It grew by only 2 per cent in 1938 and fell by 4 percent in 1939.The effects of the disastrously bad harvestof 1936 were felt throughout the USSR in 1937. The

Third Five Year Plan – prepared in 1937-8, inauguratedin 1938 and ratified at the 1939 18th Party Congress –was in the process of being fulfi lled only in an extreme-ly uneven and unsatisfactory manner at the time of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in 1941. Sugar productiondeclined, oil production was stagnant leading to a seri-ous fuel shortage alongside the miserable performanceof the steel industry.

How do we explain this second major crisis of plan-ning in the USSR?Once again we are confronted withthe major features of mounting disproportionality anddeveloping stagnation towards the end of a planningperiod. Again the planning mechanisms were faili ng tosustain balanced growth and target figures were becom-ing increasingly fictional. With trade with the Westdiminishing and the market effectively subordinatedwithin the USSR the root of this crisis cannot be foundprimarily in the effects of the spontaneous operation of the law of value. However we are once again faced witha tendency for the planning processes of Stalinism tobreak down.

Contingent and particular factors can be advancedas an explanation of the stagnation of the Soviet econo-my in the later 1930s. The period saw the dramatic re-organisation of Soviet production to meet the mount-

ing war threat presented by imperialism. While defenceexpenditure as a percentage total of the Soviet budgetstood at only 3.4 per cent in 1933, it grew to 11.1 percent in 1935,16.1 per cent in 1936 and 25.6 per cent in1939.85 This had the effect of forcing the operative plan-ning agencies to divert investment and goods earmarkedfor consumer good production into prioritised heavyindustry and military projects.

This has been adduced by Cliffite theorists of “StateCapitalism” as evidence of the existence of a PermanentArms Economy which propelled the USSR to becomelocked into ever larger rounds of arms production in

order to produce “use values” to survive successiverounds of arms-based competition between state capi-


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talist Russia and the West.

But this arms production was organised by the Sovietbureaucracy – by its own methods – as a means of defending the planned economy of the USSR (and theprivileges of the bureaucracy that depended on it)against the designs of German and Japanese imperialismto turn the USSR into a semi colony once again.Even thehealthiest of workers’ states would act far more decisive-ly to this end than did the Stalinist bureaucracy thatplaced its hopes for defence on alliance with one, oranother,of the camps of imperialism.

The purges of the mid-30s had a devastating effecton the personnel and morale of the planning apparatus.Similarly relative success in the field of planning saw therecrudescence of the adventurist, arbitrary and bogusnorms of Stalinist planning.Increases in labour produc-tivity encouraged the Stalinists to inaugurate a majordrive to storm production targets. This was the contextof the Stakhanov movement launched in August 1935.

In August 1935 Stakhanov bust his work norm bymining 102 tons of coal in six hours. He did so with the

help of a handpicked team and special training and pro-visions. His “achievement” was, however, to set the pacefor Soviet labour in the next period. In October 1935Makar Lashtoba fulfilled his work norm by 2,274 percent when he mined 311 tons of coal in one day!

At the first all-union conference of Stakhanovitesthe ex-Oppositionist Pyatakov gave voice to the crudeadventurism of the Stalinists when he declared:

“We will smash the devil himself and attain unheard

of production results of which no one has ever

dreamed....One must simply shout ‘the devil take it’” 86

Competing for favour from the central planning

agencies, local management showed a definite tendencyin. this period to keep their acclaimed Stakhanovitesfully supplied while shortages and bottlenecks kept thema jority of the workforce idle. In its own peculiar waythe Stakhanovite movement testified to the inability of the Stalinists to genuinely mobilise the working class toutil ise the “gains of October” and the inability of theStalinist bureaucracy to effect ra ti onal and long termmethods to raise the productivity of labour.

But separated from these contingent factors the cri-sis of the late 1930s stands as evidence of the funda-mental contradictions that are to be found at the heart

of planning under Stalinist bureaucracies.

The planned economy as “ state capit alism”

It is not possible within the confines of the present workto deal with all aspects of Tony Cliff ’s analysis of theSoviet Union as a bureaucratic state capitalism. It is nec-essary, however, to point up the inadequacies of his fun-damental thesis concerning the creation of Russian“state capitalism” and to draw out the most importantpolitical ramifications of his method.

Cliff interprets the creation of the bureaucratically

planned economy of the USSR as a social counter-revo-lution that inaugurated bureaucratic state capitalism in

the USSR. In this analysis the newly emerged rulingbureaucracy is seen as having been transformed into acollective capitalist by virtue of the fact that it under-took the “bourgeois” task of accumulati on. In hisattempt to make this theory stick, Cliff has to falsifyboth the realities of the Soviet economy in the 1930sand, indeed, the Marxist definition of capitalism itself.

Cliff wishes to prove that, at the same time as theworking class lost political power, the bureaucracywhich replaced it was in the process of developing intoa capitalist class because of the economic measures thatit was forced to take. Therefore, alongside data estab-lishing the fact that the proletariat lost all sembla nce of control, direct or indirect, we find in Russia – A Marxist

Analysis a constant emphasis on the parallels betweenthe tasks the bureaucracy undertook and those under-taken by the nascent bourgeoisie.

For Cliff the significance of this lies in the fact that,“Under capitalism the consumption of the masses is sub-ordinated to accumulation.” 87 He has no difficulty inpresenting figures to show that the First Five Year Planwitnessed a significant change in priority from con-sumption to accumulation.Within the use to which Cliff puts these figures (which are not themselves in dispute)lies a most important element of Cliff ’s method – the useof the syllogism: under the First Five Year Plan con-sumption was subordinated to accumulation; undercapitalism consumption is subordinated to accumula-tion; ergo, the First Five Year Plan was capitalism!

The syllogistic method of formal logic is no substi-tute for dialectics in the analysis of social phenomena.Being formal it ignores the content of such phenomena,i.e. the class content. This is the tell -tale weakness of Cliff ’s analysis.

The accumulation of the bourgeoisie is the accumu-lation of capital which can, of course, be expressed inthe accumulation of the means of production such asf actori e s , ra i lw ays and power stati on s . However,whether such things are capital in any given circum-stances is not determined by the mere fact that they areaccumulated. Indeed, this point was one of the firstadvances made by Marx in his analysis of capitalism. InWage Labour and Capital , for example, he argued:

“Capital consists not only of means of subsistence,

instruments of labour and raw materials, not only of

material products; it consists just as much of exchange

values. All the products of which it consists are com-

modities.Capital is,therefore, not only a sum of mate-

rial products; it is a sum of commodities, of exchange

values, of social magnitudes.” 88

He further argued that:

“Capital does not consist in accumulated labour serv-

ing living labour as a means for new production. It

consists in living labour serving accumulated labour

as a means of maintaining and multi plying the

exchange value of the later.” 89

The accumulation of the means of production in the

Soviet Union in no way squared with this definition of capital. Neither the factories, mines, power stations and


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machinery nor the products made with them were com-modities, they were not produced for eventual sale onthe market. They were not built in order to, “multiplythe exchange value” of accumulated labour but ratherbecause they were necessary for the implementation of the industrialisation programme. In other words theywere not capital but use values.

A workers’ state must, necessarily, accumulate use-values, in particular the means of production, since itstask is to expand produ ction on a massive scale.Whether this accumulation preponderates at any giventime over consumption cannot be a test of the classnature of the state that presides over the economy.Production of munitions and material for the Red Armywas an absolute priority during the wars of interventionagainst the young Soviet republic, and quite rightly too.

The same formalist method is extended by Cliff to“prove” that the bureaucracy is a collective capitalist.Basing himself on Lenin’s description of the historictask of the bourgeoisie to “increase in the productiveforces of social labour and the socialisation of labour”,Cliff explains why the First Five Year Plan was the pointof transform ation of the bureaucracy into a collectivecapitalist:

“It was now, for the first time, that the bureaucracy

sought to realise the histori c mission of the bour-

geoisie as quickly as possible.A quick accumulation of

capital on the basis of a low level of production, of a

small national income per capita,must put a burden-

some pressure on the consumption of the masses, on

their standard of living. Under such conditions the

bureaucracy, transformed into a personification of

capital, for whom the accumulation of capital is the

be-all and end-all, must get rid of all remnants of

workers’ control, must substitute conviction in thelabour process by coercion, must atomise the working

class,must force all social-political life into a totalitar-

ian mould...

“Thus, industrialisation and a technical revolution in

agriculture (co ll ectivisation) in a backward country

under conditions of siege transforms the bureaucracy

from a layer which is under the direct and indirect

pressure of the proletariat, into a ruling class...”90

Leaving aside the claim that collectivisation, i.e. theexpropriation of all rural capital, big and small, was amere “technical” question, the bureaucracy that under-

took it and directed the Stalinist form of industrialisa-tion on the basis of command planning now somehowbecomes the most perfect example of a capitalist classbecause:

“The fact that the bureaucracy fulfils the tasks of the

capitalist class, and by so doing transforms itself into a

class, makes it the purest personification of this class.

Although it i s different from the capitalist class, it is at

one and the same time the nearest to its historical

essence.” 91

That any social grouping should be defined as a classbecause it undertakes a task “normally” associated witha class, let alone a particular class, is incompatible with

Marxism. In the greater part of the world the task of industrialisation will fall to the proletariat. In manycountries the proletariat will face the problems of eco-nomic dislocation and political isolation that wereencountered in the Soviet Union in the 1920a if not onthe same scale.

The implication of Cliff ’s analysis of Russia in theyears before the First Five Year Plan is that progress,indeed survival, will be determined solely by externalfactors.Internally, all policies must lead to the restora-tion of capitalism in one form or another. In the 1920ssays Cliff, there were only two realistic economic pro-grammes:

“One solution to the conflict between state industry

and individualist agriculture would have been to make

the development of industry depend an the rate at

which agricultural surp luses developed.

Alternatively, the conflict between industry and agri-

culture might have been resolved by rapid industriali-

sation based on ‘primitive accumulation’ by expropri-

ating the peasants and forcing them into large mecha-

nised farms thus releasing labour power for industryand making agricultural surp luses available for the

urban population.” 92

In other words Bukharinism and Stalinism were theonly choices that faced the Russian workers, revolution-aries could have had no alternative programme.

For Cliff there was no way forward for the Russianworking class other than reliance on the European rev-olution which never came. The policies of the LeftOpposition, designed to regenerate the prol etariat viaplanned industrialisation and the siphoning of a surplusfrom the rich peasantry to pay for it, were a utopia for

Cliff. He singles out Preobrazhensky as an example,:“Actually the implementation of Preobrazhensky’s

‘socialist primitive accumulation’ would logically have

led to a very different state of affairs from that which

he envisaged. Any attempt to ‘squeeze’ the peasants

would be likely to be met by a deliberate reduction in

production, so that if the ‘terms of trade’ between

agriculture and industry were in favour of the latter,

the amount of trade would fall. There would be only

one way to deal with such a strike and that would be

to use violence against the peasants, to expropriate

them, and to concentrate them on such large farms

that it would be possible for the state to control theirwork and output.”93

Thus, the logical outcome of the policies of the LeftOpposition would have been Stalinism! No doubtPreobrazhensky and the other capitulators developedsimilar justifications, that is no reason for today’s revo-lutionaries to argue that Stalin carried out the rationalkernel of the Left Opposition’s programme.

This tacit acceptance that the proletariat cannot usestate power to maintain and extend its interests in anunderdeveloped country, that is to say, this rejection of the strategy of Permanent Revolution, is the conse-

quence of Cliff ’s revision of the nature of capitalistaccumulation. It has a Menshevik logic that would leave


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meaningless scrambling of Marxist categories. Value isnot the expression of competition between independentproducers. It is the measure of socially necessary labourtime congealed within a commod ity.

By definition a commodity is a product made forexchange and it is through exchange that the owner of the comm odity realises its value. The law of value, asdiscovered by Marx, is a codification of the fact that theexchange of commodities takes place on the basis of theamount of value contained in the commodities to beexchanged, like exchanging with like.

In its most simple form this does not involve anycompetition between the producers. This only ariseswhere we are dealing with the realisation of the value of commodities in which there is contained surplus value,that i s to say,commodities produced by proletarians butowned by capitalists, The competition consists in thevarious capitalists attempting to increase the proportionof su rp lus within their commodities which they canrealise through sale. The successful capitalist is able torealise a greater amount of surplus value than his com-petitors and, as a result, increase his capital for the nextcycle of production. Thus, the struggle to amass greatervolumes of capital is the only way in which the law of value can express itself.

When Cliff argues that,“Because international com-petition takes mainly a mil itary form the law of valueexpresses itself in its opposite, viz. a str iving after usevalues” 95 he is again equating the accumulation of use-values with the accumulation of capital. “Striving afteruse-values” is only another way of saying, “striving toaccumulate material wealth” something which has beena feature common to all societies save the most primi-tive.

This is not to say that there is no kernel of rational-ity whatsoever within Cliff ’s argument. The pressure of military competition does exercise a distorting effect onthe soviet economy, as it will on the economy of anyworkers' state, healthy or unhealthy. Certainly a degreeof s ymmetry in the matter of military technique isimpo s ed by this imperialist pressure and the limits of this pressure are related to the functioning of the law of value within,most importantly, the US economy.Again,this would be the state of affairs if we were examiningquite the healthiest workers’ state and how its economywas affected by imperialist blockade. None of this

means for a moment that military competition can takethe place, or have the same results, as capitalist compe-ti tion.

The Five Year Plans

The working class grew considerably as a result of Stalinist industrialisation.During the fi rst Five Year Planthe cities grew by 44 per cent. In 1931 alone 4,100,000peasants joined the city population. But this swellingarmy of proletarians was subject to severe dictatorship.The triangle arrangement of management, party and

union administration in the plants, that had developedduring NEP, was abandoned in 1929 for fierce manage-

rial rule. The Stalinist Kaganovich declared “the earthshould tremble when the director walks around theplant” 96.

The First Five Year Plan initially saw an enormousturnover of labour. During 1929 the Soviet workerchanged jobs,on average,every two months. This figurewas down to four months in the coal and iron ore min-ing industries.97 In conditions of an acute labour short-a ge , Soviet workers resorted to defending themselvesand their bargaining power thro u gh this labo u rturnover. The trades unions had been transformed intotransmission belts for the directives of the Bonapartiststate.

During the 1930s the bureaucracy acted to curtailthis route of self-defence for the working class. From1930 labour exchanges were instructed to keep lists of those who had “arbitrarily” terminated their employ-m ent. By September 1930 such workers were to perma-n en t ly lose their ri ghts to unemp l oym ent ben efit.During 1931 every worker was issued with a wage bookincluding details of every change of job and dischargefrom work.

By 1932 all employees had to show an internal pass-port to obtain work and had to have their place of workentered in their passport. Employees were obliged todischarge workers guilty of truancy (Progul) with onedays absence from work being sufficient to justify dis-missal. “Truants” were to be deprived of all food andmerchandise ration coupons and to be evicted from anydwelling that went with the plant.

In December 1938 – at a time of serious disequilib-rium in the Third Five Year Plan – new disciplinary pro-visions were introduced to the Soviet labour code.Arriving more than 20 minutes late for work was to con-sti tute “un justified absence”. Full sickness benefits wereonly to be made available after six years employment ata given plant.

Ta ken toget h er these measu res con s ti tuted themeans by which the Bonapartist bureaucracy consoli-dated its political dictatorship over the Soviet workingclass.They were, however, accompanied by the develop-ment of forms of remuneration and retail outlets thatenabled the Stalinists to stimulate the crystallisation of adistinct layer of skilled workers in the USSR who had amaterial interest, through their relative privileges com-pared with the unskilled, in the maintenance of the

Stalinist regime.

The Stalinists have always made sure that a signifi-cant section of Soviet society has a material interest innot challenging the rule of the central bureaucracy.

In 1932, Stalin explicitly disavowed the Marxist goalof the gradual progressive abolition of inequality.

“Equalitarianism owes its origin to the individual

peasant type of mentality, the psychology of share and

share alike, the psychology of primitive communism.

Equalitarianism has nothing in common with Marxist

socialism. Only people who are unacquainted with

Marxism can have the primitive notion that theRussian Bolsheviks want to pool all wealth and share


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it out equally. That is the notion of people who have

nothing in common with Marxism.” 98

For the mass of the Soviet workers, the First FiveYear Plan led to a serious drop in their real wages. Thedoubling of labour productivity on which the achieve-ment of the targets depended was not achieved. Inindustr y as a whole, labour productivity grew by 41 percent by 1934.99 As a consequence the working class suf-fered a severe drop in income to pay for the achievementof targets. The fall in living standards was about 40 percent between 1929 and 1932.100 At the same time therange between salaries was increased and the old partymaximum, which prevented a party member earningmore than a skilled worker,was abolished.

Alongside Stalin’s critique of egalitarianism, wagedifferentials between skilled and unskilled workers wereincreased to a ratio of 3.7: 1. In addition,“Cadres” wereto receive higher pay and privileges. “Shock workers”and management personnel were given access to closedshops, to special clothing allowances, and to top priori-ty in housing lists.

The general dearth of consumer goods highlightsthe significance of these privileges. In the entire periodprior to 1940, the urban population increased by 79.2per cent,and the urban housing stock by a mere 27.6 percent. Hence the importance of the seemingly marginalprivileges that Stalinism was able to bestow on a skilledaristocratic layer of the Soviet working class.

The Stakhanov movement of 1935 represented afurther attempt, on the part of the Stalinists, to create aprivileged layer of workers separate from the mass of theworking class and beholden to the Stalinists for theirdistinct and relatively luxurious lifestyle. By 1935 thislayer of Stakhanovite “shock workers” in the industrialand agrarian work force was receiving on averagebetween 500 and 2000 rubles a month compared withan average wage of 150 rubles. In 1933 20 per cent of urban workers received 40 per cent of the available wagefund.101

The St alin t urn in f oreign po licy

Up until the victory of Nazism in Germany in 1933, theComintern, under Stalin, had pursued the ultra-leftpolicies of the Third Period. Adventurism at home wasreflected by adventurism abroad. The Third Period was

designated the final period of capitalism. Communismwas around the corner. As such all bourgeois parties –social democrats and fascists alike – were equal enemiesof the working class. The Comintern characterisedsocial democracy as “social fascism” and refused to unitewith reformist workers in a struggle against the growingfascist danger. The tactic of the united front, developedby Lenin and Trotsky, was abandoned in favour of the“red front”.

Fascism, as the last phase of bourgeois rule, was evento be welcomed since their victory would simply mean“our turn next” !

These policies produced tragic results. Hitler cameto power in March 1933, and proceeded to butcher the

flower of the strongest working class movement in theworld. Even the Kremlin bureaucracy could not fail torecognise that his ascension to power represented a direthreat to the USSR. In foreign policy, as in internalaffairs, the Stalin group would admit of no mistakes.The Comintern sections continued to affirm the cor-rectness of their line. However, the line was changed intypical bureaucratic fashion. The Comintern, a sub-servient tool of Soviet foreign policy, received newdirectives from the USSR.

In order to ward off the Nazi threat, Stalin nowattempted to engineer a bloc with those “democratic”imperialisms that were likely to clash with Germany –principally Britain and France. In accord with the newdiplomatic needs, Stalin flipped 1800 from ultraleftismto the right opportunism that was to become so centralto Stalinist strategy.

The united front was embraced only to be turnedinto a popular front – an alliance between the workersand liberal, anti-fascist elements of the bourgeoisie inthe democratic camp. This all iance could only mean thesubordination of the workers’ interests to those of thebourgeoisie. The Stalin-Laval pact of 1934 was the firstcodified operative agreement to maintain peaceful coex-istence between the Stalinists and a section of worldimperialism – “democratic” France.That this bound theFrench working class hand and foot to the bourgeoisiebecame clear in 1936.In that year the Stalinists connivedin the defeat of the biggest strike wave that had evergripped France, in order to maintain the Popular Front.

The development of t he LeftOpposit ion’s analysis of St alinism

Faced with the monstrous growth of this bureaucratictyranny, raising itself above the working class andreducing its already heavily bureaucratised party, tradeunions and soviets, to empty ciphers the BolshevikLeninists (led by Rakovsky within the USSR and byTrotsky abroad) had to analyse these events and the con-clusions for strategy and tactics they held.

Trotsky,Rakovsky and the expelled Left Oppositionwere faced with the task of analysing the results of theirown defeat, of assessing the Stalinist “ left turn”, thedebacle of the Bukharinites, and the increased bureau-cratic tyranny of the early 1930s.They were subjected to

pre ssure from “ l ef t’ sect arian po si ti ons within theOpposition (the Dem oc ra tic Centralists) and to right-opportunist forces (the capitulators to Stalinism forexample Radek, Preobrazhensky and Pyatakov).`̀

In arguing with the Democratic Centralists, whoclaimed that the counter-revolution was victorious andthat capitalism had been restored, or the capitulatorswho argued that Stalin had adopted the Lef tOpposition’s policies, Trotsky, Rakovsky and their co-thinkers were obliged to re-examine both the concretestages in the development of the bureaucracy and theterminology and analogies they had used throughout

the 1920s. Central to this process was the discussion of the question of Thermidor and Bonapartism.


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The Left Opposition had operated with an analogywith the Fren ch Revo lut ion of 1 7 8 9 - 9 8 . The LeftOpposition, in combating the Stalin-Bukharin bloc inthe years 1926 to 1928 had characterised the threatwhich the righ tist policies posed to the workers’ state asone of concealed capitalist restoration. This danger theynamed Thermidor.

“What does the right danger signify in the present

period?It is less the danger of an open, fully-fledged

bo u r geois co u n terrevo luti on than that of a

Thermidor, that is a partial counterrevolutionary shift

or upheaval which, precisely because it was partial,

could for a fairly long time continue to disguise itself

in revolutionary forms but which in essence would

already have a decisively bourgeois character, so that a

return from Thermidor to the dictatorship of the pro-

letariat could only be effected through a new revolu-

tion”.102

Trotsky argued that a “strongly advanced process of dual power” existed in the Soviet Union. That powerhad slipped out of the hands of the proletariat “to a con-siderable degree, but still far from decisively”.103 Thedecisive question for Trotsky in 1928, and indeed to theend of his li fe was, had state power passed to the agentsof the bourgeoisie, was capitali sm being restored?

His answer was categorical:

“No ... the bourgeoisie could seize power only by the

road of counterrevolutionary upheavals. As for the

proletariat, it can regain full power, overhaul the

bureaucracy and put it under i ts control by the road of

reform of the party and the soviets”.104

The retreat of the proletariat on the one hand andthe advance of the Kulak and NEPman on the other, in

his view, gave the room for the “monstrous predomi-nance of the bureaucratic apparatus oscillating betweenthe classes”.105 However, in his and the Lefts’ use of theanalogy,Trotsky mistakenly identified Thermidor with asocial counter-revolution.

“Why do we speak precisely of Thermidor? Because,

historically, it is the best known and most complete

example of a counter-revolution which is masked,

which still retains the outer forms and the ritual of

revolution, but which changes irreversibly the class

content of the state”.106

Trotsky saw Thermidor and Bonapartism as differ-

ing types of social counter-revolution. In 1931 heexpressed it thus:

“By Thermidorean overthrow the Left Opposition

always understood a decisive shift of power from the

proletariat to the bourgeoisie, but accomplished for-

mally within the framework of the Soviet system

under the banner of one faction of the official party

against the other. In contrast to this the Bonapartist

overthrow appears as a more open,“riper” form of the

bourgeois counterrevolution, carried out against the

Soviet system and the Bolshevik party as a whole, in

the form of the naked sword raised in the name of

bourgeois property”.107

Thus for Tro t s ky the ex p u l s i on of the Lef t

Opposition in 1927 was only a “party rehearsal forThermidor” 108. Moreover since “ In the Soviet Uniononly the peasantry can become a force for Thermidor,”109

Trotsky looked to the Bukharinites with their openlypro-Kulak policy as the principal agents of the comingThermidor even after their defeat in 1924. The Stalinistfaction he saw as playing an auxiliary role to the Right.

However, despite the errors of this use of the analo-gy, Trotsky (and Rakovsky) did methodically analyse,step by step, the growth of Stalin’s Bonapartist power.

In late 1928 Trotsky pointed to the Bonapartist ele-ment in the po s ition of the Stalin regime.

“The Master [Stalin – eds] says: ‘These cadres can be

rem oved on ly by civil war’. Klim [Voro s h i l ov,

Commissar for War – eds] adds, ‘If you workers make

too much fuss, remember that a great power stands

behind me’.Both these statements point to elements of

Bonapartism. In the first case speaks the party-state

apparatus,which considers itself higher than everyone

else, higher even than the army. In the second case

speaks the military apparatus, which tomorrow will

feel compelled to ‘put the civil ians in their place’. Abloodless victory of the centrists’ party app a ra tus over

the right would not do away with the Thermidorean-

Bonapartist perspective but would only change and

postpone it”.110

Whilst for Trotsky, the Bonapartist regime couldonly be fully actualised as an instrument of social over-turn,he described and analysed its “preparation” in sucha way that his self-revision was no sudden or ill-pre-pared leap.By 1931 Trotsky was talking of the “plebisci-ta ry degen era tion of the party app a ra tus (wh ich )undoubtedly increases the chances of a Bonapartistform [of counter-revolution - eds]”.111

He referred many times in these yea rs to the“Bon a pa rtist fea tu res of the regime in the Sovi etCommunist party”.112 Furthermore he noted that “ Theparty, as a party does not exist today. The centrist appa-ratus has strangled it”.113 Here it might be observed thatthere was a contradiction.

Trotsky and the Bolshevik-Leninists insisted that thebureaucracy could be ousted on the road of reform andthat no new party was necessary.This paradox was moreapparent than real.

Trotsky clearly regarded the Left Oppositionists as

representing the nucleus of the Bolshevik party. He heldthat the “relation between the Left Opposition and thecentrist apparatus ... is a substitute for the party andholds the right in check” 114

Trotsky advocated that the Left Opposition mount aclear and independent defence of the interests of theworking class in line with the Platform of t h eOpposition. This was to include the leading of struggles,wage struggles for example, against the bureaucracy.This being so, why did Trotsky hold back from the viewthat a new party was neces sary?

The answer to this lies in essence in the internation-

al nature of the Opposition’s platform. The Russianparty remained a section of the Comintern, an all iance


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of subjectively revolutionary mass parti es albeit subject-ed to centrist misleadership. The years 1929 to 1933were years of acute crisis in all capitalist countries. Themass CPs, especially the German Party faced the .ques-tion of fighting for power point blank.Indeed the latterfaced the que stion of vi ctory or de stru ction. TheComintern’s tactics, forced on the German Party, weredisastrous. A united front with the Social Democracywas vital to obstruct the fascist onslaught.

The Comintern’s proscription of the united frontexcept from below, its ludicrous characterisation of thereformists as “social fascists” created a situation of enor-mous po litical tens ion thro u gh o ut the com mu ni stmovement. If the German party managed to ad just itstactics in t ime – i.e. rallied to the Left Opposition’s tac-tics, then the domination of the Stalin leadership with-in the Russian party and state would have been calledinto question. Before the German revolutionary crisiswas re s o lved i t was impo s s i ble to abandon theComintern as dead for the revolution. Therefore it wasimpossible to abandon the CPSU.

Trotsky’s change of analysis hinged not upon eventsin Russia, but in Germany – “the key to the internation-al situation.”

The crushing defeat of the German CommunistParty (KPD) in early 1933 demonstrated that the roadof reform of the Comintern, the KPD and the CPSU wasat an end. Trotsky, by October of this year, was drawingdecisive new conclusions.

Firstly, he asserted the importance of the Germandebacle for the Soviet workers. In The Class Nature of the Soviet State , he wrote:

“The Soviet workers would have settled accounts with

the de spo tism of the apparatus had other perspectivesopened before them, had the Western horizon flamed

not with the brown colour of fascism but with the red

of revolution”.115

He concluded that with regard to the internal polit-ical situation a decisive shift had occurred, but this didnot extend to the social roots of the proletarian dicta-torship:

“the bureaucracy has expropriated the proletariat

politically in order to guard its social conquests with

its own methods. The anatomy of society is deter-

mined by its economic relations. So long as the forms

of property that have been created by the OctoberRevo lut i on are not overt h rown , the pro l et a ri a t

remains the ruling class.” 116

Moreover, here for the first time Trotsky began to re-examine the Thermidor /Bonapartism analogy:

“ If Urbahns wants to ex tend the con cept of

Bon a p a rti sm to inclu de also the pre s ent Sovi et

regime, then we are ready to accept such a widened

interpretation – under one condition: if the social

content of the Soviet ‘Bonapartism’ will be defined

with the requisite clarity. It is absolutely correct that

the self-rule of the Soviet bureaucracy was built upon

the soil of veering between class forces both internal aswell as international.

Insofar as the bureaucratic veering has been crowned

by the personal plebiscitary regime of Stalin, it is pos-

sible to speak of Soviet Bonapartism. But while the

Bonapartism of both Bonapartes as well as their pre-

sent pitiful followers has developed and is developing

on the basis of a bourgeois regime,the Bonapartism of

Soviet bureaucracy has under i t the soil of a Soviet

regi m e . Term i n o l ogical innova ti ons or histori c a l

analogies can serve as conveniences in one manner or

another for analysis, but they cannot change the social

nature of the Soviet state”.117

Al on gs i de this re - ex a m i n a ti on of the analogy,Trotsky changed his position on the question of the newparty and the possibility of peaceful reform.“ No normal‘constitutional’ ways remain to remove the ruling clique.The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power intothe hands of the proletarian vanguard only by force.”118

Trotsky insists that “it will be necessary to applyagainst it, not the measures of civil war but rather mea-sures of a police character”.119 In essence Trotsky herepresents for the fi rst time the programme of politicalrevolution, though he does not explicitly call it such.His

programme is for a programme of political revolutionbecause he continues to insist that no social overturnhas occurred. But it remains a revolution nonethelessbecause no peaceful process of reform will remove thebureaucracy. The full elaboration of this posi tion how-ever took place only in February 1935 in Trotsky’s essayThe Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism , and in1936 in The Revolution Betrayed .

It was in these works that Trotsky finally came toterms with the contradictory nature of Stalin’s Russia.That it remained a workers’ state was evidenced by thefact that the fundamental property rel ati ons of the

USSR were those created by a workers’ revolution whichhad expropriated the capitalists. The Soviet Thermidorand Stalin’s Bonapartism had developed on the basis of these property relations and had not overthrown them.

In July 1935 in The Workers’ State, Thermidor and

Bonapartism ,Trotsky fully revised his earlier position onThermidor. He recognised it as a form of political coun-terrevolution that had taken place on the social founda-tion established by the revolution. The working classhad been politically expropriated by the Thermidorianbureaucracy but that bureaucracy still rested on theplanned property relations of the USSR.

Trotsky recognised that 1924, and the triumvirate’scampaign against himself and the Left, marked thebeginning of Thermidor and that,once tr iumphant, thebureaucracy had resorted to a form of Bonapartism toexercise its rule:

“In the former case [Napoleon I – eds.] the question

involved was the consolidation of the bourgeois revo-

lution through the liquidation of its principles and

political institutions.

In the latter case [Stalin – eds.] the ques tion

involved is the consolidation of the worker-peasant

revolution through the smashing of its international

programme, its leading party, its soviets ... What else

should this regime be call ed , i f not Sovi et


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Bonapartism?” 120

From this point on Trotsky is no longer ambiguousabout the nature of Soviet Bonapartism or the tasks of revolutionaries in relation to it. In The Revoluti on

Betrayed Trotsky analyses the material roots of theSoviet Thermidor:

“No help came from the West.The power of the demo-

cratic soviets proved cramping, even unendurable,

when the task of the day was to accommodate those

privileged groups whose existence was necessary fordefence, for industry, for technique and science. In this

decidedly not ‘socialist’ operation, taking from ten and

giving to one, there crystallised out and developed a

powerful caste of specialists in distributi on.” 121

In this situation “The young bureaucracy, which hadaris en at fi rst as an agent of the proletariat, began nowto feel i tself a court of arbitration between the classes.”122

For Trotsky the roots of Soviet Thermidor were to befound in the crystallisation of this agency into a distinctbureaucratic stratum with its own privileges and con-servative interests separate from those of the proletariat:

“The leaden rump of the bureaucracy outweighed thehead of the revolution. That is the secret of the Soviet’sThermidor.” 123

The Soviet Thermidor – spearheaded by Stalin andBukharin – had a Bonapartist logic from the start:

“The Bonapart ist rule grew out of the fundamental

contradiction between the bureaucracy and the peo-

ple, and the supplementary contradiction between the

revolut i onists and the Therm idorians within the

bureaucracy. Stalin rose by supporting himself pri-

mari ly on the bureaucracy against the people, on the

Thermidorians against the revolutionists. But at cer-

tain critical moments he was compelled to seek sup-port among revolutionary elements, and, with their

assistance, among the people against the over precipi-

tate offensive of the privileged ones. But it is impossi-

ble to support oneself on a social contradiction that is

turning into an allies. Hence the forced transition to

Thermidorian ‘monolithism’ through the destruction

of all vestiges of the revolutionary spirit and of the

slightest manifestations of political self-activity on the

part of the masses.” 124

This led Trotsky to finally reject the term “ bureau-c ratic centrism” as in any way applicable to the Stalinistbureaucracy in 1937.125 If Trotsky was now no longerambiguous about either the “centrism” of Stalinism orthe reformability of the Soviet State,he sti ll had to grap-ple with the problem of developing a characterisationof, and perspective for, a state where post capitalistproperty forms remained but where all vestiges of pro-l et a rian po l i tical power had been de s troyed by aBonapartist bureaucracy. Despite its enormous privi-leges and power,Trotsky rejected the designation of thebureaucracy as a ruling class for reasons which we con-sider valid.

The Soviet bureaucracy does not have the character-isti cs of a ruling class in the Marxist sense. Within theMarxist tradition, classes are defined not within the

relations of distribution or authority of any given soci-ety but by their position in the relations of productionthemselves. A class be it a ruled or ruling class – has adistinct, necessary and identifiable relation to the pro-ductive forces within the social relations of production.Layers of administrators are not classes in the scientificMarxist use of the term.

While the bourgeoisie under capitalism is a neces-sary component of the rel ations of production, theSoviet bureaucracy is not such a necessary element inthe planned property relations of the USSR.On the con-trary, its monopoly of political power, its control overdistribution is, and always has been (even during themost dynamic phases of Soviet economic development)an obstacle to the full realisation of the potential of theproperty relations of the USSR. In all hi therto existings oc ieties the property relations, and the class structuresthat necessarily flowed from them, became a brake onthe development of the productive forces of mankind.In the USSR it is not the property relations but a layer of administrators and distributors who block the develop-ment of the productive forces.

The fundamental contradiction of hitherto existingsocieties on the eve of social revolution – that betweenthe forces of production and the class relations of pro-duction - does not exist in the USSR.The bureaucracy isin fact unnecessary for the rational and progressivedevelopment of the productive forces within the systemof planned property relations.

The contradiction at the heart of the Soviet Union isthe contradiction between a system of property rela-tions and a layer of administrators and distributors (thebureaucracy) who stand in the way of the working classdynamically developing the productive forces in its own,

i.e. socialist, interests.

Because it is therefore a parasite on the propertyrelations, not an indispensable part of them, we rejectthe view that the bureaucracy is the ruling class in theUSSR.

For these reasons it remains the case that even inStalin’s Russia the working class remained the rulingclass because the property forms in existence were thosethat the working class requires in order to build social-ism. The working class had, however, been politicallyexpropriated by a caste of bureaucrats analogous to thecaste of bureaucrats in the trade union movement

under capitalism.

Along with Trotsky we say that the USSR:

“can be called a workers’ state in approximately the

same sense – despite the vast difference of scale – in

which the trade union, led and betrayed by oppor-

tunists, that is, by agents of capital, can be called a

workers’ organisation. Just as the trade unions under

capitali sm are workers’ organisations run by class col-

laborationist bureaucratic castes in the working class,

so the USSR remains a state where the working class is

the ruling class but where power is in the hands of a

reactionary bureaucratic caste.” 126

It follows however, that this parasitic bureaucracy –


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as long as it retains power – blocks the transition tosocialism in the workers’ states. Trotsky was adamantthat in designating the USSR a “workers’ state”, albeit ina bureaucratically degenerated form, did not mean thatthe USSR could be characterised as socialist. In The

Fourth International and the Soviet Union, written inJuly 1936, he explicitly rejected the attempt to describethe state property of the USSR as socialist property:

“ for the latter has as its premise the dying away of the

state as the guardian of property, the mitigation of

inequality and the gradual dissolution of the property

concept even in the morals and customs of society.

The real development in the Soviet Union in recent

years has followed a directly opposite road.Inequality

grows, and, together with it , state coercion.” 127

A workers’ state within which the transition tosocialism is blocked must prove a highly unstable andcontradictory phenomenon. The bourgeoisie historical-ly can tolerate the loss of direct political power withinBonapartist regimes so long as its property and eco-nomic life is safeguarded. But i ts property relations can

prosper and expand under Bonapartism as can thebourgeoisie itself.

However the loss of political power by the proletari-at undermines the very workings of the property formsestablished by the working class. Of necessity thereforeStalinist Bonapartism as a political regime has to main-tain itself in power with a degree of terror and repressionagainst society at large that testifies to its lack of histori-cal legitimacy. Only ruthless terror and the atomisationof society can maintain the Stalinist bureaucracy inpower. That is why the Stalinists have never been able topermanently coexist with independent organisations of the working masses and why all Stalinist regimes haveultimately relied on terror and large scale force to bothestablish and maintain their rule.

The Stalinist form of Bonapartism was, for Trotsky,unprecedented in the degree of independence fromsociety that it had established for itself.

“The Stalin regime, ri sing above politically atomized

society, resting upon a police and officers’ corps, and

a ll owing of no control whatever, is obviously a va ria-

tion of Bonapartism – a Bonapartism of a new type

not before seen in history.” 128

In political form the Stalinist regime and the fascist

regimes in Western Europe “In many of their featuresthey show a deadly symmetry.”129 And this symmetryitself testified to the inability of Stalinism to survive asanything other than a regime of terror.

From this analysis of the contradictory nature of theUSSR Trotsky developed a perspective based on itsinherent weakness and instability. The social base of theSoviet Bonapart ism was particularly fragile. On the onehand, it based itself on the property relations of a work-ers’ state and a small privileged layer of those who pros-pered from the political expropriation of the workingclass within that state. This meant that the regime set

itself against the overwhelming bulk of the populationover which it ruled.

“In the USSR there are 12-15 million privileged indi-

viduals who concentrate in their hands about one half

of the national income, and who call this regime

‘socialism’. On the other hand there are approximately

160,000,000 people oppressed by the bureaucracy and

caught in the grip of dire poverty.” 130

On the other hand, it based itself on constructingstrategic alliances with sections of the world bourgeoisieas a means of buttressing and maintaining its power.However, the 1930s showed very clearly that imperial-ism’s alliances with the Stalinists were entered into bythe imperialist powers on ly for tacti cal re a s on s .Whatever its hopes or expectations the Bonapartistregime could not eliminate the fundamental contradic-tions that ex is ted bet ween the property system itpresided over and that of world imperialism. It foll owedfor Trotsky that such a regime must,of necessity, provea regime of permanent crisis and prove to be a shortlived episode in the history of the transition to social-ism.

He returned to this theme time and t ime again in themid to late 1930s and in 1935 in The Workers’ State and

the Question of Thermidor and Bonapartism he formu-lated this perspective in the following way:

“Bonapartism, by its very essence, cannot long main-

tain i tself as a ball balanced on the point of a pyramid,

it must invari a bly roll down on one side or the

other.” 131

The onset of the bloody purges of the mid and late1930s seemed to provide ample evidence of the inabili-ty of the regime to stabilise itself and its rule:

“Severe crisis cannot be a permanent condition of

society. A totalitarian state is capable of suppressing

social contradictions during a certain period, but it isi n ca p a ble of perpetu a ti ng itsel f , The mon s tro u s

purges in the USSR are most convincing testimony of

the fact that Soviet society organically tends toward

ejection of the bureaucracy ... symptomatic of his

oncoming death agony, by the sweep and monstrous

fraudulence of his purge,Stalin testifies to nothing else

but the incapacity of the bureaucracy to transform

itself into a stable ruling class.” 132

The onset of the imperialist war furnished furtherevidence of the fragility of Stalinism’s base. The waritself opened the road for the final destruction of Stalinism. In his last years Trotsky presumed that eitherthe proletariat would destroy the bureaucracy in then ext period or that the burea ucrac y, inca pable of defending planned property relations, would open thedoor for the restoration of capitalism in one form oranother. This was the immediate perspective uponwhich the Transiti onal Programme was based:

“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 to capitali sm; or the working class

will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to social-

ism.” 133

It was this perspective that Trotsky considered was


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confirmed by Stalin’s 1939 pact with Hitler and theSoviet bureaucracy’s humiliatingly unsuccessful bid tosei ze parts of Finland in 1939.

“Stalin’s apogee is behind him, Not a few fateful tests

are before him, With the whole planet thrown out of

equilibrium Stalin will not succeed in saving the

unsteady equilibrium of totalitarian bureaucracy.” 134

For Tro t sky the impending de s tru cti on of t h eStalinist regime either at the hands of the proletariat or

of capitalist restoration flowed inevitably from thenature of the Stalinist bureaucracy itself. Hence the con-fidence with which he could declare,

“ if this war provokes, as we firmly believe, a proletari -

an revolution ... To every single person it will become

clear that in the process of the development of the

world revolution the Soviet bureaucracy was only an

episodic relapse.” 135

And again:

“Either the Stalin regime is an abhorrent relapse in the

process of transforming society into a socialist society,

or the Stalin regime is the first stage of a new exploit-

ing society.” 136

We will return later to the problems posed toTrotsky’s perspective and analysis by the stabilisationand expansion of Stalinism in the aftermath of theSecond World War. As we have already argued, perspec-tives must always be put to the test of real experienceand ad justed accordingly. What lay at the heart of Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR during this period wasthe unswerving insistence that only if the proletariatseized political power through revolution in the USSRcould the property relations of the Soviet Union be putto their correct historical use in the process of socialist

construction.The full development of Trotsky’s analysis of Soviet

bonapartism took place alongside, and indeed madepossible, the development of Trotsky’s programme forthe degenerate workers' state. When the call for theFourth International was first made Trotsky did notspell out that the tasks of the new Soviet section wouldbe those of political revolution.

Without a clear understanding of the nature of thepolitical counter-revolution that had taken place thiswas not surprising.So in 1933 he argued:

“Much more important is the fact that these organisa-

tions [part ies of the F.I. – eds.] will acquire an enor-

mous authority in the eyes of the Soviet workers and

will thus finally create favou ra ble conditions for the

rebirth of a genuine Bolshevik party. It is only on this

road that the reform of the Soviet state is possible

without a new proletarian revolution.” 137

Trotsky was hamstrung by his wrong conception of Thermidor. Germany had convinced him of the need tocall for new parties – though he had effectively recog-nised that the last congress of the real Bolshevik partytook place in 1923. However, he sti ll erroneously heldonto the perspective of reform.

Only after the development of the characterisation

of the regime as a counter-revolutionary workers’ stateruled by a form of Bonapartism,did Trotsky fully appre-ciate the need for a new proletari an revolution:

“To believe that this state is capable of peacefully ‘with-

ering away’ is to live in a world of theoretical delirium.

The Bonapartist caste must be smashed, the Soviet state

must be regenerated.Only then will the prospects of the

withering away of the state open up.” 138

This programmatic position was the decisive out-

come of Trotsky’s theoretical analysis of the USSR. Byrecognising the possibility of a counter-revolutionaryworkers’ state, Trotsky was able to arm his supporterswith a programme that dialectically com bin ed defenceof the property relations established by October withthe most intransigent revolutionary opposition to thebureaucratic caste. That position remains valid todayand applies to all of these states which we characterise asdegenerate workers’ states.

Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR was in a state of con-stant development. While he was wrong not to haverealised that Thermidor had been completed until 1935

his struggle, and that of the Left Opposition was histor-ically justified. The events that unfolded in the USSRwere not readily grasped in their complexity by the LeftOpposition until the late 1930s. However throughoutthis entire period Trotsky waged a revolutionary strug-gle against Stalin’s Bonapartism.

In the end the argument over whether Trotsky wascorrect in the timing of his call for a new party in theUSSR is a formal one. For Trotsky the key question wasthe best means of approaching the Soviet masses andwinning them fighting to win leadership of “Lenin’sParty” or turning one’s back on it?Furthermore the pos-sibility of reform of the party and the Comintern waslinked to the existence of millions of subjective revolu-tionaries within the Comintern.

Their revolutionary consciousness made the strug-gle for reform both viable and politically correct. Thedefeat of the working class convinced Trotsky that theirconsciousness could no longer be turned into a materi-al force for reform.

With the collapse of this perspective and amidst thewelter of police repression that followed in the USSR, itwas clear that Trotsky needed to ground new perspec-tives in theoretical analysis.

Like Marx and Engels in 1848 he had oriented hisfollowers to pursue a consistent Marxist l ine. Like themthe failure of that l ine to triumph forced him to consid-er the problem at a deeper level. His tardiness on thequestion of calling for a new political revolution is,therefore, explicable in terms of the enormity of theproblems posed by the establishment of an entirely newformation – a degenerated workers’ state.

It was Trotsky’s genius that he learnt from the fail-ures of his init ial analysis and perspective and provedcapable of constructing a new analysis and a new pro-gramme. His revolutionary genius developed the theory

of a degenerated workers’ state and that same geniusdeveloped the Marxist programme to meet this new and


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unexpected eventuality.

Bonap ati sm in crisis: St al in’s t error

All of the essential elements of Stalinist Bonapartismhad been constructed by the early 1930s. However, thesuccesses and failures of the Five Year plans and collec-tivisation and the enormous social contradictions thatthey created set a distinct limit to the “golden age” of Stalinist Bonapartism.

The road to untrammelled Bonapartist tyranny ledthrough a series of zig-zags to a struggle, muted andrepressed to be sure,within the Stalin faction which nowfelt the varied social pressures of Soviet society, theeffects of co ll ectivisation and the Five Year plan. TheThermidorians had denied to the proletariat and itsvanguard the ability to consciously deal with the prob-lems of the direction of the workers’ state. The revolu-tionists were imprisoned and exiled; the Right, whoreflected the pressure of the better-off peasantry hadbeen silenced. The pressure of the working class andpeasantry now was distantly refracted, through the

boorish bu re a u c ra t s , the “ru de satra p s” (Tro t s ky ’sphrase for men like Kirov) but it could not be totallysuppressed.

By 1932 the sufferings of the masses began to telleven on the nerves of their overworked taskmasters.Thehard-pressed lower echelons of the bureaucracy’s desirefor a halt were expressed in the Ryutin group. M.N.Ryutin, a member of the Central Committee and theman responsible for organising anti-opposition strong-arm squads in Moscow, tried to organise within thisbody for the removal of Stalin as general secretary.Stalin, informed by the OGPU, tried to order Ryutin

and his fellow plotters to be executed. Yagoda, head of OGPU refused unless the Control Commission and thePolitburo authorised it.

According to George Paloczi Horvath in his bookKruschev , Stalin’s motion to allow this in both theCentral Committee and in the Politburo was defeated-twice.139 The upper levels of the bureaucracy, althoughthey had init iated and officiated in the Stalin cult for thelast two years, refused Stalin licence to terrorise them.In deed Po l i tbu ro mem bers Ki rov, Ru d z utak andOrdzhonikadze led the opposition in this case. All threewere dead by 1937.

The famine of 1933 and the under-fulfilment of much of the Five Year Plan served as a brake on theStalinist bureaucracy’s adventurist stampede towardsindustrialisation. The famine in the countryside couldnot be allowed to spread into the cities. Fearing that theferocity of the attacks on the peasantry would intensifythe agricultural crisis, Stalin and Molotov circulated aninstruction in May 1933 to curb excesses.

They denounced the “saturnalia of arrests” andordered that future arrests should only be directedagainst “organised resistance.” 140 By 1934 there waswide-spread desire within the bureaucracy for relax-

ation – for an easing of tempos in agriculture and indus-try. In the Politburo the three members cited above,

often with the support of Kalinin and Voroshilov, resist-ed Stalin’s break-neck policies.

The Congress of Victors in 1934 was the public out-come of those internal Politburo decisions. In January1934 the XVIIth Party Congress confirmed the completevictory of Stalinism over the revolutionary vanguardwithin the USSR.

At this congress the Stalinists were able to put ondisplay an abject parade of repentant oppositionists

from both the Left and the Right. Preobrazhenskydeclared the incorrectness of the Left Opposition’s eco-nomic policies, while saluting the far-sightedness of Stalin. Tomsky performed in a similar vein on behalf of the Right. Delighted at the “unity”, that is at their totalvictory over the main opposition,Kirov,on behalf of theStalinists, declared: “Our successes are really immense.The devil take it, to speak frankly, one so wants to liveand l ive! After all, look and see what is going on aroundus. It ’s a fact.”141

The other side of the Congress was an attempt byKirov and his supporters to curb the growth of Stalin’s

bonapartist rule over themselves. While Stalin was reaf-firmed in all of his positions the darling of the congresswas undoubtedly Kirov. He had received the ovations.He, according to Roy Medvedev, only had three votesagainst him in the Central Committee elections, where-as Stalin i s supposed to have had 270 cast against him.142

It was in the context of this that Stalin’s title waschanged from General Secretary to Secretary. ClearlyKirov hoped to use his own enhanced posi tion to curbStalin’s personal rule. However, his unwillingness tofight to remove Stalin (unlike Ryutin) was to prove fatalfor himself and for the great bulk of the “victors” whowere to fall at the hands of Stalin’s regime of one-manBonapartism.

Kirov’s failure to really challenge Stalin – or ratherhis inability to do so – meant that Stalin was able to usethe Congress to further consolidate his plans for his dic-tatorship. The secretariat was dominated by his own keymen – Zhdanov, Kaganovich and himself, plus Kirov.Yezhov became a full member of the Central Committeeand was placed on the Orgburo and, as second in com-mand to Kaganovich, in the Party Control Commission.The Central Committee itself came to be dominated byhand-picked police members, loyal to Stalin. Thus whilethe Congress of Victors signified the final victory of the

Stalinist faction, it heralded the final victory of Stalinhimself over his faction.

The moves towards relaxation were continued afterthe XVIIth Congress. The Congress had accepted a pro-posal from Ordzhonikidze for a slower rate of industri-al growth than originally proposed in the draft SecondFive Year Plan.

Later, in November 1934, it was announced thatbread rationing was to be lifted and peasants on the col-lective farms were given the right to cultivate privateplots.Throughout the year there were pronouncementsemphasising raising the standard of life. Agriculturaloutput began to rise for the first time since 1928.


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Towards the end of the year Stalin declared the sloganfor 1935 to be: “Life has become better, comrades, lifehas become more joyous.” This was far from the truth.In 1934 attacks on the party had continued with 340,000p u r ged from mem bers h i p. In Len i n grad 30,000Communist and non-party workers were deported.

Only by reforming the security apparatus and plac-ing it under the control of his most trusted henchmencould Stalin hope to exercise the degree of terror neces-sary to prevent opposition to him from within his ownfaction. This he accomplished in 1934. In July of thatyear the OGPU was reorganised and renamed thePeople’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (the NKVD).Its head, Yagoda, had proved unreliable in the Ryutincase. While he remained at the head of the NKVD, hewas now to be overseen by Yezhov – a key supporter of Stalin who, in 1935, was to succeed Yagoda.

Stalin was able to prepare this machinery withoutmeeting any opposition because in the economic fieldand in foreign policy he continued to pursue the policiespushed for by Kirov.He appeared united with his polit-ical opponents while at the same time preparing tolaunch a devastating blow against them.

This blow, begun in the last month of 1934 and car-ried on through the Great Purges of 1936-8, constitutethe transformation of Soviet Bonapartism from theBonapart ist rule of a faction into the Bonapartist rule of one man.

On 1 December 1934 Sergei Kirov was assassinatedby the young Nikolayev.A degree of mystery surroundsthis event. For example the NKVD officer responsiblefor Kirov’s safety died before anybody was able to ques-tion him.

Whether or not Stalin directly organised, or simplywithdrew any obstacles to the murder, it served as theimmediate signal to launch his full-scale war on theparty’s old Bolshevik leaders.

In early 1935 Yezhov took over the Party ControlCommission and succeeded Kirov as Secretary of theCentral Committee. Khruschev, Malenkov and Beria –all absolutely trusted henchmen of Stali n – were movedinto key positions within the party and the state. Themurder provided these gangsters with the pretext theyneeded to exercise their total control. The rights of any-one accused of terrorist acts were suspended.

Thus the NKVD could select who it wished forimmediate transportation and execution. From 1935into 1936 Stalin, true to form, struck first at the Lefts –Zinovievites and the capitulators from the Trotskyistopposition. Zinoviev and Kamenev were tried andimprisoned in January 1935 for complicity in the assas-sination of Kirov.

Stalin chose his charge well – every bureaucrat fromthe party cell secretary in the Kolkhoz to the head of aministry feared the silenced and brutally oppressedmasses, they feared the appearance of “the avengers”that the Narodnik trad ition had implanted in the

Russian consciousness. Any sacrifice seemed jus ti fied todispel the long shadow of terrorist revenge.

The bureaucracy raised above its head the guill otineit had for so long feared. After a lull of some eighteenmonths in August 1936 the great purges and the slaugh-ter began. In the first trial of the “terrorist counter-rev-o lut i on a ry Tro t s kyist Zi n ovi evist bl oc”, Zi n ovi ev,Ka m en ev, Yevdokimo and Ivan Sm i rn ov madegrotesque extorted “confessions”. At the instigation of “Judas Trotsky” they had become the “despicable ser-vants and agents of Germano-Polish fascists”.

The defendants – the closest collaborators and com-rades of Lenin for many years – were summarily shot. InJanuary 1937 the second wave began, this time centringon the old members of the Left Opposition who hadlong since capitulated Pvatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov,Serebryakov, Muralov. In June 1937 Stalin attacked theleadership of the Red Army including Tukhachevsky.The purge was thoroughgoing; three out of five SovietMarshals, 13 army commanders out of 15, 57 corpscommanders out of 80, 70 divisional commanders outof 190,75 of the 90 members of the Higher War Council– indeed over half the officer corps was purged. Theroad to the massive Soviet defeats of 1941 was opened

by this holocaust.That the old “ l ef t” were attacked fi rst can be

explained by the nature of Stalin’s bonapartism. TheStalinist Bona pa rtist state depended on nego ti a tedalliance and co- existence with the governments of theimperialist states.From the time of Hitler’s rise to powerthe Stalinists sought to cement alliances with democra-tic imperialism.The Stalin-Laval pact signalled this.TheSoviet bureaucracy was prepared to lend its wei ght ,experience and police agents to drowning the Spanishworkers’ vanguard in blood in order to keep alive thisstrategic element of international class collaborati on in

the Stalinist programme. Stalin was keen to make surethat the “democratic” imperialists were able to point toaspects of Soviet life that corresponded with the valuesand ideals of bourgeois dem ocracy. The left, despitetheir capitulations, remained thorns in his side.

Zinoviev, for example, had been the bogey of theEuropean democ racies during his period as head of theComintern in the 1920s.To allay suspicion Stalin aimedto discredit and destroy the “left”. By linking them withGermany and Japan – suggesting they were agents –Stalin was linking them to the enemies of “democrati c”imperialism. At the same time he was linking them to a

danger that ordinary Soviet citizens realised was a veryreal danger.

His Bonapartism also led him to once again ally withthe Right, now broken and not a real threat. Bukharin,a symbol of the Right and therefore a symbol of appeasement with imperialism, was allowed to be theeditor of Izvestia, the official government paper and wasi nvo lved in dra f ting the 1936 Con s ti tuti on . Th eConstitution itself was symbolic in that it reproducedbourgeois democratic norms – such as geographicalrepresentation – but confirmed the absolute supremacyof the Party. It was a piece of paper that liberal friends in

the West could point to in their pursuit of the PopularFront, but it was also a tool in the hands of the police


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dictatorship.

But the terror did not stop at the old “ left’. It was toengulf Soviet society for the last years of the 1930s.Howdo we begin to explain this particular bloody period of Stalinist Bonapartism?

In the late 1930s internal and external contradic-tions propelled the Bonapartist regime into deep crisis.In a manner that prefigures the experiences of Stalinistterror in Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, the

Stalinists could only respond to that crisis by unleashingtheir terror apparatus against every layer of Soviet soci-ety. Stalin’s purges represent this extraordinary form of Bonapartism’s response to crisis rather than the essenceof Stalinism itself.

The later “de-Stalinisation” by Khruschev in the1950s was an attempt to return to the norms of pre-1934 Stalinism rather than any attempt to dismantle theessential machinery of the Stalinist regime itself.

The key elements of Stalinism’s crisis were analysedand predicted by Trotsky and the International leftOpposition.

The international position of the USSR deteriorateddramatically in the mid-1930s. On 25 November 1936Japan and Nazi Germany signed the anti-Soviet anti-Comintern pact. In the face of the fascist offensive theSovi et bu re a u c rac y ’s all i a n ce with the “We s ternDemocracies” proved bankrupt.

The certain victory of Franco in the Spanish CivilWar by 1938, the “Anschluss” of Austria with NaziG erm a ny in 1938, and the Mu n i ch agreem ent of September of that year whereby the British and Frenchbo u r geoisies recogn i s ed Hi t l er ’s sei z u re of t h eSudetenland, all testified to the weak and duplicitous

nature of the “democratic” bourgeoisies.Having slaughtered the left as a means of appeasing

the democratic imperialists the Stalinists turned toslaughter the Bukharinites and Soviet military chiefswho,each for their own part icular reasons, were pledgedto pro-Western or anti-German policies. The purgesmade possible the dramatic about-turns in Stalinist for-eign policy as the Soviet bureaucracy turned first to theWestern bourgeoisie and then to the fascists with the1939 Stalin-Hitler pact as a prop to sustain them in theaccelerating international crisis.

Secondly, the late 1930s saw the increased articula-

tion of the accumulated contradictions of autarchicbureaucratic planning.Even the most limited discussionor accountability proved intolerable for the Stalinistregime in these circumstances. Only massive purges andthe expansion of the Gulag economy could plug thegaps and keep the system in operation during the ThirdFive Year Plan.

In these crisis circumstances the bureaucracy couldnot tolerate discussion within its own ranks. A recrude-scence of factionalism erupted in 1932-34.Unless it wasterror i s ed into su bm i s s i on , the bu re a u c racy itsel f threatened to so divide under the impact of internal and

external pressure that the right and more dangerouslythe left stood to gain a hearing once again both within

the ranks of officialdom and, more importantly, withinthe working class itself. Hence Stalin’s resort to extremeterror and the wholesale destruction of nearly all whoh ad any con n ecti on with ei t h er the heroic orThermidorian period of the Revolution.

The terror also served another purpo s e . Th egrotesque show trials and confessions could serve notonly to silence the Soviet masses but also to explainshortages and increased work speeds. The visible short-comings of Stalinist planning could be “blamed” onsabo teurs and agents. The bureaucratic mis-managers,hiding behind the cloak of police terror, could covertheir own incompetence and privileges from the scruti-ny of the masses.

A final factor in explaining Stalin’s post 1934 offen-sive against the Thermidorian party was his terror of arevival of the lef t, fo ll owing the German debacl e .Trotsky had been proved so signally correct againstStalin and the fate of the German workers might haveawakened sections of the Communist movement to thisfact. Stalin could not risk such a possibility. This periods aw not on ly the sti gm a ti s a ti on of a ll the “o l dBo l s h evi k s” as co u n terrevo lut i on a ri e s , but also aworl dwide campaign to implicate Trot s ky and theTrotskyists in the crimes of fascism, In all the tr ials the“fascist” Trotsky was the chief defendant – in absentia.His followers were murdered by the NKVD: Klement,Ignace Reiss, Leon Sedov among them.The Bonapartistterror was aimed at destroying the Trotskyist movementinside the USSR and outside, and preventing it frombecoming a challenge to Stalin.As Trotsky rightly point-ed out:

“but under no condition is it permissible for the inter-

national pro leta ri an vanguard to obtain the opportu-

nity to verify freely and critically the ideas of Leninismthrough its own experience and to juxtapose Stalinism

and so-called Trotskyism in the broad light of day.” 143

The net result of the purges was the total destruc-tion, not merely of Lenin’s party (which had occurredmuch earlier), but of virtually everybody who had beenin Lenin’s party. Stalin successfully created a party thatwas his tool and was made up of his followers.

The XVII I Party Congress in 1939 was the first sincethe Congress of Victors. The victors had now been van-quished, with the majority of delegates to the 1934Congress having been killed in the purges. As Molotov

pointed out at the XVIII Congress, the party was dra-matically transformed under the impact of police terror.Some 80 per cent of republic Party secretaries and 93per cent of district secretaries had joined the party after1924,and had known no other party regime than that of Stalin.144 Equally significantly the party dropped in sizefrom 3,500,000 members in 1933 to 1,900,000 by 1937.

The 1937 census for the USSR revealed a populationof 164 mil lion – some 16.7 mill ion less than the plannedforecast. This shortfall gives some indication of the scaleof the terror that Stalini sm inflicted on Soviet society.

The monstrous barba ri ty of Stalin’s regime was notthe result of his deranged personality. In order to free


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itself from all social restraint and to destroy any poten-tial base for opposition, Stalinism had to create thisapparatus and regime of terror. In its own way this tes-tifies to the illegitimacy of the Stalinists’ usurpation of power and the inability of the Stalin clique to legitimisetheir regime in the eyes of the mass of Soviet toilers.

Their creation of an army of m illions of slavelabourers enabled them to both terrorise the Sovietworking class with the threat of the camps and completea series of industrial projects under the bayonets of theNKVD. As Roy Medvedev has explained it:

“State plans assigned an increasingly important role to

Gulag.By the end of the thirt ies GULAG was respon-

sible for much of the country’s lumbering and extrac-

tion of copper,gold and coal. GULAG built important

canals, strategic roads, and many industrial enterpris-

es in remote regions... The planning agencies fre-

quently put pressure on the NKVD to speed up certain

projects. Planning was done not only for projects

assigned to GULAG but also for the growth of its

labour force. Planning even encompassed the mortal-

ity rate in the camps – and in this respect achievement

far exceeded plan goals” 145

In the spheres of c u l tu ral and family li fe theStalinists inaugura ted a peri od of ac ute re acti on .Incapable of legitimising their dictatorship as eithersocialist or the will of the working class the Stalinistbureaucracy decked out their dictatorship ever increas-ingly in the colours of Great Russian chauvinism.Medvedev highlights this well when he describes how,

“A symbol of the time was the absence in Moscow of a

monument to Marx, to Engels,or even to Lenin, while

a statue of Yuri Dolgorukii, a stupid and cruel twelfth

centu ry prince, went up on Soviet Square, replacing

the Obelisk of Freedom that had been erected at

Lenin’s suggestion.”146

Thermidor and the family

The reactionary impact of Stalinism is vividly illustrat-ed by its erosion of the rights won for Soviet women bythe October revolution and the proletarian dictatorship.In The Revoluti on Betrayed ,Trotsky correctly stated that“The October Revolution honestly fulfilled its obliga-tions in relation to women.” The early Soviet govern-ment granted women full political, legal and economic

equality and took important positive steps towardsremoving the burden of women’s oppression within thehome. All legislation which assumed the subordinateposition of women was repealed,and women were writ-ten into the constitution with equal rights and obliga-tions. Protective legislation was extended to women,specifically in the areas of night and underground work,and any work considered injurious to a woman’s health.Equal pay for equal work was established as a funda-mental principle.

All restriction on women’s movements were lifted –she no lon ger had to move with her hu s b a n d .

Inheritance and property laws were revised to weakenthe strength of the nuclear family. In December 1917

civil registration of marriage and easy free divorce weregranted, abortion was legalised in 1920 and made avail-able free in Soviet hospitals. In Central Asia there wereproblems with the ex treme oppres s i on of Musli mwom en , and concessions were made on marriage laws,but abduction, forced marriage and the Kalym (brideprice) were made criminal offences.

Alongside these legal measures:

“the revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-

called ‘family hearth’– that archaic, stuffy and stagnantinstitution in which the woman of the toiling classes

performs galley labour from childhood to death”. 147

The family hearth was to be replaced by socialisedinstitutions for child care, eating, laundry etc. Theseplans were made, and support for them built, but due tothe poverty of the Soviet state and the exigencies of thecivil war, they could never be adequately implemented.During the Civil War there were communal diningrooms, as there were during the industrialisation of theearly 1930s, their popularity being probably due moreto the absence of other sources of food than to a com-

mitm ent to communal living.The establ is h ment of the Zhen o tdel (Wom en’s

Department in the Party) in 1918 was important as ameans of positively mobilising and propagandisingamong women,but the female membership of the partystill remained low – by 1922 only 8 per cent of partym em bers were women.

The period of the NEP curtailed the limited socialprogrammes that had been established, and the unem-ployment it created amongst women pushed them backinto the home and, increasingly, onto the streets. The1926 family legislation made married and unmarried

couples responsible for supporting each other -– a mea-sure dictated by the inability of the state to support thevast numbers of deserted women,and aiming to preventthem from abandoning their children and turning toprostitution.

Thermidor as it affected the family and women canbe seen to develop from these early problems, but tothen have been actively exacerbated and consolidated byStalinism.

During the First Five Year Plan, women’s employ-ment increased at a rate that exceeded the expectationsof the planners – the number of women in industry and

the national economy doubled from 1928-1932, andcontinued to rise to 41.6 per cent of the working popu-lation by 1939, 56 per cent after the Second World War,51 per cent in 1970.

During the init ial rise in the early 1930s, it was notaccompanied by a correspondingly large increase inchild-care and communal facilities.Women were simplyworking longer hours and doing all the housework.Childcare, of necessity, was expanded in the USSR, butit was still inadequate, both in numbers of places andthe care received so that many women would prefer touse a “Babushked” – an unpaid member of the family, to

look after the children.Protecti ve legislation for women,particularly maternity leave, and pay declined propor-


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tionately with the increase in female labour. Thus theforced industrialisation policy meant that “A woman’splace is in the factory and the home”.

Up to the mid-1930s, the soviet government was stilldeclaring that it would abolish the yolk of domesticslavery. “Down with the Kitchen!” was one of their slo-gans. In the mid-1930s this was abandoned alongsidemoves to strengthen the family. An ideological cam-paign was mounted, and backed up with legislation, toreinforce the family as a bastion of the “new socialistsociety”. This was officially justified partly as a responseto the “promiscuity” and breakdown in family life thathad been witnessed after the revolution.

The Stalinist state wished to re-establish the familyas a performer of domestic labour,but more important-ly as an insti tution for the maintenance of discipline andorder, to put a check on the youth and return workers tothe isolation of the nuclear family.Homelessness amongchildren, and prostitution were both increasing and thestate response was to punish both – parents who wereforced by poverty and destitution to abandon their chil-dren were fined and imprisoned, harsh measures weretaken for the first time by the Soviet state against prosti-tutes and homosexuals.

This change in position on the family was consoli-dated in the new family legislation of 1936, which madeabortion illegal,emphasised the centrality of the nuclearfamily and made divorce much more difficult. Stalinmade other direct attacks on the equality that had beenestablished after the revolution – in education differen-tiation of male and female roles was emphasised inschools and courses, and in 1943 co-education wasactually abolished in many schools.

Still to this day, girls are taught domestic science andneedlework in school and an emphasis on the duty of motherhood remains.

The Marxist tradition has always held that the levelof culture and emancipation of society as a whole can begauged by the position of women within it. Just asStalinism upholds and extends the oppressive apparatusassociated with the old type of state. So it struggled torecreate the old forms of oppression in family life. Theposition of women in the USSR at the end of the 1930sserved as a poignant symbol of the profound degenera-tion that the world’s first workers' state had undergoneat the hands of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist

regime.

Footnotes

1. L.Trotsky, H istory of the Russian Revolu tion, (London 1967) p27.

2.M. Dobb, Soviet Economic Development 1917 (London 1966) p 38.

3.Ibid,p36.

4. L.Trotsky,op.cit. p27.

5 . N . Buk hari n and E. Preobra z h en s ky, T h e A BC of C om m u n is m ,

(Harmondsworth 1969) p 186.

6.R. Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism (London 1974) p137.

7.Quoted in Dobb, op.cit.p83.

8.E.H.Carr, Th e Russian Revolu tion from Lenin t o Stalin 1917-29 (London 1979)

p11.9.N.Mironov and Z.V.Stepanov, Rabochie Leningrada (Leningrad 1975) p 184.

10. S.N.Kanev and V.M. Nanov, Ocherki Istorii Leningradskoi organizatsii KPSS

(Leningrad 1968) p148.

11. O.I. Shkaratan, “Ismeneniya v sotsial'nom sostave fabrichnozavodskikh

rabochikh Leningrada” in Voprosy Istorii (SSR 1959) No.5 p22.

12.Ibid. p32.

13.P.R.Gregory and RC.Stuart, Soviet Economic Structure and Perform ance (New

York 1981) p41.

14. H.Carrere O'Encausse, Len in - Revolution and Power (London 1982) p131.

15. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow 1966) pp 467-8 16. Published in Pravda

May 26th and 27th. See Collected Works Volume 33.

17. Lenin, Collected W orks , op. cit.Vol 33 p 474.

18. Ibid,p487.

19. Ibid, p 488.

20.Ibid,p 498.

21. L. Trotsky, The Revolu tion Betrayed (London 1967) p 59.

22. Lenin,op.cit.p 428.

23. Lenin, Collected Works op.cit.Vol. 36. p 606.

24.Ibid.p 610.

25. Ibid, p 596.

26. L. Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsi fication (New York 1937) pp 58 - 63.

27. H.C. O'Encausse, op.cit. p 154.

28. quoted in M. Schactman, The Struggle for the New Course (Michigan 1965) p

153.

29. Oobb, op. cit. pp 161-162.

30. L. Trotsky, The New Course (Michigan 1965) p 45.

31. Ibid. p 46.

32. Ibid, p 18.

33.Ibid,p 19.

34 Ibid, p 23.

35. M. Schactman,op. cit. p 169.

36. Quoted in ibid, p 170.

37. Chetyrnadtsaty S'Ezd VKP (b), Stenograficheski Otchet . (Moscow 1926) p

135. .

38.Quoted in W.Korey, Z inoviev and the Problem ofWorld Revolu tion 1919 - 1927

(Unpublished PhD thesis,Columbia 1960) p 189.

39. For a fuller discussion of this seeWorkers Power Journ al, (Autumn 1977) No

5, pp 10 - 15.

40. For more details see A. Neuberg, Arm ed Insurrection (London 1970) 41. V.

Serge, M em oirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941 (London 1963) p 177.

42. H.C. D’Encausse, op.cit. p 170.

43. Ibid, p 165.

4 4 . J. Sta lin , “The October Revo lut i on and the Tactics of the Rus s ian

Communists” in Len ini sm (London 1940), pp 96 -97.

45. E.H. Carr,op.cit. p 69.

46. L. Trotsky, Towards Capitalism or Socialism ? (London 1976) p 9.

47. L. Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin (New York, 1970),p 240.

48. Pravda , 20 October 1925.

49. Platform of the Joint Opposition (London 1973), p 28.

50.Ibid, p 28.

51.M. Lewin, Ru ssian Peasan ts an d Sov iet Power (London 1968) p 99 52.Platform

of the Joint Opposition op.cit. p 38.

53.Ibid,p17.

54. Figures from T. H. Rigby, Com munist Party membership in the USSR

(Princeton 1968) Chapter 4.

55. H.C. D'Encausse, Stalin - Order Through Terror (London 1981) p2.

56. Ibid, p 8.

57. GPU means State Political Administration; OGPU means Unified State

Political Administration.

58. GULAG means Main Camp Administration.

59. H.C. D'Encausse, Stalin , op. cit.P 12.

60. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge (London 1972) p 113.

61.Ibid,p 148.

62. The term “Eighteenth Brumaire” refers to Naopleon I’s coup d'etat on 9

November 1799.Brumaire (literally the “foggy month”) was a month in the newcalendar adopted by the French revolution aries of the eighteenth century. We use


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the term here in an analogous sense to describe Stalin’s coup d' etat, and the

establishment of “Soviet Bonapartism” .

The Term “ Ninth Thermidor” refers to the events of 27 July 1794 in France when

the majority of the Convention ousted Robespierre and his key followers from

the Convention and its committees and thereby defeated the most radical ele-

ments of the Jacobins and ended their dictatorship.Like Brumaire, Thermidor

was a month in The French Revolutionary calendar (li terally the “hot month”).

We use the term in an analogous sense to refer to the victory of the Stalin/Right

(Bukharinite) bloc against the Left Opposition.

63.R. W. Davies, The Indu strialisat ion of Russia , Volum e 1: T he Socialist Of fen sive

- The Collectivisation of Agricultu re 1929-30 (London 1980) p 39.

64.Quoted in A.Nove, An Econom ic History ofthe USSR (Harmondsworth,1972)

p 148.

65. D'Encausse, Stalin op. cit. p 17.

66.Ibid, p 19.

67. T. Cliff, Ru ssia , A M arxist Analysis (London, 1970).

68. cf E. Mandel, M arxist Econom ic Theory (London 1968).

69. Gregory and Stuart, op cit. p 98.

70.A shortfall made even more considerable in i ts effects on the living standards

of the working masses by the fact that in 1927-28 artisan production was respon-

sible for a considerable proportion of consumer good production but was not

accounted for in these figures for state production. During their “ left turn” the

Stalinists virtually abolished artisan production in the USSR.

71. For a discussion of the evolution of Soviet planning mechanisms, see A.

Baykov, The Development of the Soviet Economic System (London 1946).

72. Quoted in ibid,p 167 73.Dobb,op.cit. p 238.

74. C. Rakovksy,“The Five Year Plan in Crisis” in Critique Vol 13 p 21.

75. A.Nove op.cit. p 211.

76. H. Hunter,“Priorities and Shortfalls of Pre-War Soviet Planning” in

J. Degras and A. Nove (Eds), Soviet Planning (Ox ford 1964).

77. L.Trotsky, Writings 1930-31 (New York 1973) p 206.

78. Ibid, pp 206 -7.

79. L. Trotsky, Writings 1932 (New York 1973) pp 277-8.


81. cf Hunter op. cit.

82. L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed , op. cit. p 8.

83. cf Translators afterword to Rakovksy,op,cit. p 53.

84. Hunter op. cit.

85. Nove op.cit. p 227-8.

86. Quoted in S.M.Schwarz, Labour in th e Soviet Union (London 1953) p 195.

87. Cliff, op. cit. p 33.

88. K. Marx ,Marx and Engels Collected W orks (London 1977) Vol9 p 212.

89. Ibid, p 213.

90. Cliff, op.cit. p 107.

91.Ibid, p 118.

92. Ibid, p97.

93. Ibid,p161.

94. Ibid, pp 160-161.

95.Ibid, p 160.

96. Quoted in M. Lewin, “Society and the Stalinist State in the Period of the Five

Year Plans” in Social History (May 1976) p 151.

97.Schwarz, op cit. p 87.

98. Quoted in P.Bell is, M arxism and the USSR (London 1979) pp120-1.

99. Dobb op. cit. p 239.

100. D'Encausse, Stalin op cit. p 139.

1Of. Ibid, p 24.

102. L. Trotsky, The C hallenge of the Left Opposition 1928-29 (New York 19811 p

139.

103.Ibid, p 294.

104.Ibid,p 295.

105.Ibid, p 294.

106. L. Trotsky, Writings 1932-33, op.cit. p 76 (our emphasis).

107. L.Trotsky, Writings 1930-31, Op cit. p 221.

108.L. Trotsky, Writings 1929 (New York 1975) p 281.

109. L. Trotsky, Writings 1932-33, op cit. p 77.110. L.Trotsky, Challenge of the Left Opposition 1928-29 op. cit. pp 275-7.

111. L. Trotsky, Writings 1930-31 op.cit. p221-2.

112.Ibid,p 73.

113.Ibid, p 75.

114.Ibid,p75.

115. L. Trotsky, Writings 1933-34 (New York 1972) p 104.

116. Ibid,p 104.

117.Ibid,p108.

118.lbid,pf17.

119.lbid,p118.

120. L. Trotsky,“The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism”, in Writings

1934- 35 (New York 1971) p 181.

121 L. Trotsky, T he Revolu tion Betrayed , op.cit. p 59.

122. Ibid,p 90.

123.Ibid,p 94.

124. L. Trotsky, Writings 1936-37 (New York 1970) p 331.

125. cf ibid,p 478.

126. L. Trotsky, Writings 1935-36 (New York, 1970), p 360.

127. Ibid ,p354.

128. L.Trotsky, The R evolution Betrayed , op cit. p 277-8.

129.Ibid,p 278.


131. L.Trotsky, Writings 1934-35 op cit. p 181 -2.

132.L. Trotsky, In D efence of Marxism (New York 1973) pp 13-14.

133. L.Trotsky, Transitional Programm e for Socialist Revolution (New York,1977)p 142.

134. L Trotsky, Writings 1939-40, op.cit. p 164.

135. L.Trotsky, In Defe nce of Marxism , op cit . p 131.

136.Ibid, p 132.

137. L. Trotsky, Writings 1933-34, op.cit. p 21 (our emphasis).


139. According to G.P, Paloczi, Kruschev: the Road to Power (London 1960).

140. L.Schapiro, Hi story of the Com m unist Party of the Soviet Union

141. Nove op cit . p 221.

142. R. Medvedev,op cit. p 156.

143. L. Trotsky, Writings 1934-35 op cit . p 126.

144. D'Encausse, Stalin op cit. p 126.

145. R Medvedev op. cit. p 394.

146.Ibid,p 493.

147. L.Trotsky, The R evolution Betrayed , op cit. p 144.


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The continued existence of the Soviet Union as adegenerated workers’ state into the 1980s can only

be understood and explained by an analysis of theexpansion of Stalinism since the end of the SecondWorld War. The theoretical and poli tical problemsposed by this expansion have caused programmaticconfusion amongst those claiming to uphold the ban-ner of Trotskyism. In part or in whole this confusionhas stemmed from an inability to creatively elaborateTrotsky’s own analysis of Stalinism under the changedconditions of the war and its aftermath.

Ever since the early 1920s Trotsky sketched out thegeneral contradictions which were pushing towards anew imperialist world war. He correctly recognised thatthe USA emerged from the First World War far strongerthan both the victorious and the defeated imperialismof Europe.At that time Trotsky believed that a new warwould arise out of a failed attempt at post-war USAexpansion, a failure caused by an inability to accumu-late sufficiently on a ruined European economy, andFrench and British unwillingness to be reduced tosemi-colonies of the USA.1

The major impetus which forced Trotsky to concre-

ti se his analysis and discuss the tempo of the comingwar in the 1930s, was of course, the rise to power of Hi t l er in 1933 in Germ a ny.2 Prec i s ely bec a u s eStalinism’s fate was inextricably tied to the respectivefortunes of imperialism and the working class, Trotskydrew a number of conclusions regarding the fate of theKremlin usurpers should the expected war materialise.

Trotsky argued that the imperialist war and itsaccompanying revolutionary upsurges would sweepaway the Stalinist bureaucracy.Either it would succumbdirectly to the onsl aught of i mperialism aided byrestorationist forces within the USSR or a series of suc-cessful proletarian revolutions in Europe, arising out of the war, would lead to polit ical revolution in the SovietUnion and destroy the Kremlin bureaucracy.3

Taken as a strategic prognosis, Trotsky’s formula-tions retain their validity. The reactionary, utopian pol-icy of “detente” practiced by Stalinism in the USSR wil llead, inevitably, to the destruction of the collectivisedproperty relations should the working class not firstcome to the rescue. This undeniable tendency towardsthe destruction of Stalinism was,however,offset duringthe course of the second world war, by a set of conjunctural factors which Trotsky did not, and, in somecases, could not anticipate.

St alinism and class st rugg le in t hesecond w orld w ar

The divisions within world imperialism weakened itsoffensive capacity against the USSR.The very nature of the imperialist war – bloody conflicts over the divisionof the world markets – led to the Allied or “democrat-ic” imperialist nations (primarily Great Bri tain and theUSA) eventually enlisting the support of the Stalinistbureaucracy for its war effort against the Axis Powers.

The defeat of the Axis countries and the variouscompromised national bourgeoisies at the close of the

war was accomp an ied by large-scale anti- ca pi t alistmobilisations. This confi rmed the objective potentialfor the revolutionary variant of Trotsky’s programmefor the war. In the Axis countries (Bulgaria, Romania,and Hungary) the upsurges were most pronouncedafter the German defeat. In Bulgaria, for example, The Economist (7 October 1944) noted that throughoutThrace and Macedonia,“Soldiers councils have been setup, officers have been degraded, red flags hoisted andnormal saluting has been abolished.” 4

In Eastern Europe the working class was most to thefore in Czech o s l ovakia wh ere plant com m i t tee s ,

Councils and workers’ mili tias were created, and dualpower existed for many months in 1944 and 1945. Itwas a full year before the government dared limit work-ers’ control in the factories. In Germany there werewidespread workers’ uprisings, particularly in Halleand Magdeburg. It has become commonplace, evenamongst bourgeois historians to recognise that thedefeat of Hi tler in Fra n ce during 1944 provo kedextremely favourable conditions for the working classto seize state power.6

The successful imperialist bloc in the war was itself not able to crush this movement. Imperialism was

forced to lean upon the Kremlin and its armed agenciesto abort this rising tide of war and rising class struggle.The use of the Red Army to forcibly end workers’ con-trol in the factories was widespread, particularly inPoland, Romania and Bulgaria. In defeated Germanyand Austria the working class suffered much worse.Many workers’ districts were terror ised. Vienna waslooted and pillaged for three days.

The continuance of the all iance had the effect of del aying an immed i a te con f ron t a ti on bet weenStalinism and world imperialism. This unholy all ianceagainst the working class took on a sickening dimen-

sion in Indo-China where the Stalinists, from posit ionsof great prominence in the ranks of the workers and

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peasants, helped butcher the vanguard and delivered abroken proletariat into the hands of imperialism.

In Greece the Stalinists, acting in accord wi thStalin’s directives, were guilty of a simi lar betrayal.“Spheres of influence” deals struck between Churchilland Stalin in Moscow and by all the allies at Yalta hadgiven Indo-China and Greece to the imperialists andStalin was determined to honour this deal.

Trotsky’s prognosis had always insisted that the pre-

requisite for the revolut ionary destruction of the Sovietbureaucracy during the war was the ascendancy of theleadership of the Fourth International (FI) . However,the war came to a close, and working class struggleserupted, in a situation in which the FI cadre were aimcomp letely margi n a l i s ed , except for a few notableexceptions, such as Indo-China. The Stalinists in theUSSR and elsewhere were able to survive, therefore,because the revolutionary upsurge lacked a leadershipcapable of directing it against the bureaucracy, as wellas against imperialism. The role of the conscious factorin Trotsky’s prognosis should never be overlooked.Failure to recognise its importance led the FI move-ment, eventually, to believe that Stalinism and imperi -alism could be overthrown by the “objective process”,unfolding independently of human wil l. This methodof thinking was alien to that of Trotsky. He believedthat prognoses had to be revised and corrected in thelight of experience.

The survival of the USSR and Stalinism within itcannot just be explained by a series of international fac-tors. Important internal events must also be taken intoaccount. The swift and extensive construction of a wareconomy displayed the progressive potential of theplanned property relations in the USSR. But the sur-

vival of the Soviet Union is ultimately accounted for bythe heroism of the Soviet masses (e.g.20 mill ion dead)in the face of German imperialist aggression.

The resistance of the people to fascism, despite thetyranny of Stalinist rule, is explained, on the one hand,by the sobering experience of fascist rule in large west-ern areas of the USSR,and, by the relative weakening of the Bon a p a rtist state mach i n ery over the masses,enabling them to efficiently organise their own defencea gainst German imperialism rel a tively free frombureaucratic oppression as happened in Leningrad.

Although the property relations of the USSR were

to prove resilient to the attacks of imperialism the wardid wreak havoc on the productive forces of the SovietUnion. This manifested itself most dramatically in asevere contraction in accumulation and an absolutedecline in the level of productive forces. In all 31,850industr ial plants were destroyed. 65,000 kms of railwaytrack, 15,800 locomotives and Y(?) (CHECK) 2 mi ll ionfreight cars were ruined. Coal and steel production fellbetween 40-50 per cent in 1942-3. It only reached the1940 level again in 1946. In addition, 4.7 mill ion hous-es, 1,710 towns and 70,000 villages were destroyed.

In agriculture the picture was equally grim. Some

98,000 collective and 1,876 state farms disappeared.Seven mill ion horses were lost as were 20 out of 23 mil-

lion pigs. Only 3 per cent of the tractors survived inG erm a n - occ u p i ed Ru s s i a .7 Cen tr i f u gal ten den c i e sundermining the planned property relations becamemore and more pronounced between 1941 and 1944.Heavy industry, for example,suffered greatly as budgetproduction costs were done away with in 1941, givingautonomy to the trusts.Light industry was often organ-ised on a local scale and even reduced to handicraftproduction in some areas.

In the countryside the war witnessed an acceleratedtempo of capitalist restoration in agriculture, with theextensive development of primitive capitalist accumu-lation which threatened to undermine the social regimein the USSR.As Germain observed:

“The corollary to greater freedom given to the rich-er peasants was a massive increase in draconian mea-sures taken against the working class in the cities inorder to meet the war’s demands. At the same time theprivi leges of the bureaucracy and its cohorts wereextended. The right of inheritance was increased, theorthodox church re-established, and the army and GPUwere given independence from the party. Despite thismassive crisis the Kremlin rulers managed to reasserttheir rule and establish an unexpected level of stabili ty.As the siege of Leningrad was li fted, for example, theGPU converged on the city once again. This was possi-ble because of the exhaustion of the working class.Furthermore, the lend-lease aid given to the Kremlin bythe Allies at Teheran and Potsdam served to shield thebureaucracy from the worst effects of its economic cri -sis.As it became clear that Hitler was going to be defeat-ed the Kremlin took fright at the powerful restora-tionist forces it had unleashed and which threatenedthe collectivised property; a FiveYear Plan (the Fourth)

was drawn up for 1945-49 which aimed at a 10 per centgrowth rate. At the end of 1944 large show trials of industrial bureaucrats were held for “misappropria-tions” and at the end of 1945 in official pronounce-ments, the terminology of “Marxism-Leninism” beganto replace that of Great Russian/Imperial chauvinismthat had been stoked up in the war.

Gradually the Bonapartist state machine was re-built up all over the country as a guardian of thebureaucracy’s interests against restorationist and prole-tarian threats to its existence. On the one hand, thisbonapartism struck out against the elements of restora-

tion in the countryside which had been let loose. At thesame time,however, the Kremlin lashed out against theworking class which had shown a developing indepen-dence from the bureaucracy during the process of defending the USSR.

However, the survival of the Stalinist caste was not,in the last analysis, a question to be settled on thenational arena. Rather, it was the international scene atthe close of the war which held the key to the future of the Kremlin bureaucrats.

Formal political and military contact between theUSSR and the Allies was established in July 1941, a

month after the German invasion of the USSR put anabrupt end to the Stalin-Hi tler pact. The mil itary bloc


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was always shot through with suspicion and hostilityon both sides. Even the fi rst meeting of the heads of theGrand Alliance in late 1943 in Teheran was a bitteraffair at which the Soviet Union urged the immediateopening of a second front in Europe.

The Western All ies, in fact, had left the Soviet Unionto take on the might of German imperialism in the Eastwhile they concentrated on reconquering lost coloniesfrom Germany and Japan. While the US did give lend-lease aid to the USSR their poli cy was one of bothdefeating Germany and exhausting their Soviet ally.Astoken of its sinceri ty towards its democratic imperialistallies the Kremlin formally dissolved the Communist(Third) International in 1943, thus ending even thepretence of commitment to international revolution.

Diplomatic manoeuvres betw eenSt alinism and imp erialism

In the earlier part of the war the dominant thinkingamongst US imperialist leaders was total US controlover Europe. George Kennan,chief foreign policy advi-sor to Roosevelt and head of the Policy Planning Staff

in the White House said in 1942:“We endeavour to take over the whole system of con-

trol which the Germans have set up for the adminis-

tration of the European economy,preserving the appa-

ratus putting people of our own into the key positions

to run it, and that we then apply this system to the exe-

cution of whatever policies we adopt for continental

Europe, in the immediate post-war period.”9

The decisive shift in the balance of forces betweenAllied and Axis imperialism took place during thecourse of 1943, when the victory of the All ies becamemore and more assured. Soviet victory at Stalingrad

and entry into Eastern Europe forced the imperiali sts tocome to terms with the bargaining power of the Sovietbu re a u c racy within the anti - G erman all i a n ce . AtTeheran little consideration was given to post-war ter-ritorial divisions apart from a general agreement to dis-member Germany. Stalin said: “There is no need tospeak at the present time about any Soviet desires. Butwhen the time comes, we will speak.” 10

However, Roosevelt left the conference convincedthat some tactical concessions would have to be made tothe USSR after the war. It was only as the defeat of Germany became a certain prospect and the role that the

USSR would play in the defeat became clear to the USAthat such tactical concessions were even considered.

Roosevelt on his return from the Yalta conference inJanuary 1945 confessed to a group of Senators:

“The occupying forces had the power in the areas

where their arms were present and each knew that the

o t h ers could not force things to an issu e . Th e

Russians had the power in Eastern Europe ...The only

practical course was to use what influence we had to

ameliorate the situation.” 11

Even in these moments of weakness the imperialistsdid not give carte blanche to the USSR. They insisted

on spheres of “ influence”, not “control”. Faced with thisprospect the Kremlin was confronted with several acute

problems, all of which necessitated a right turn in inter-national policy. The chief problems was the contain-m ent of the rising ti de of a n ti-capitalist upsu rgethroughout Europe which was largely outside the con-trol of the Soviet bureaucracy or was threatening to getout of control of the indigenous Stalinists. But theSoviet leaders also had to be wary of the strategic threatfrom Anglo-American imperialism.Although the tacti-cal alliance with the latter bloc was necessitated by thethreat of German imperialism, as this threat subsided,

so the threat of Anglo-American aggression resurfaced.It was essential for Stalin to take steps to prepare for thisthreat.

Su ch tactical con ces s i ons to the Kremlin wereopposed by sections of the US ruling class. ActingSecretary of State throughout most of 1945 was JosephGrew,a warmonger who argued in December 1944 (theeve of Yalta):

“It wi ll be far better and safer to have the showdown

before Russia can reconstruct herself and develop her

tremendous potential mil itary, economic and terr ito-

rial power” 12

At the Potsdam Conference in June and July 1945,the fine details of the post-war carve up were agreed.On 16 July the USA exploded the first atomic bomb inNew Mexico. The existence of the bomb would renderredundant the US imperialists request for a Soviet dr iveagainst Japan at the end of European hostilities andserve to shift the balance within the alliance against theSoviet Union. Churchill, on behalf of the Brit ish, wasdelighted at the new weapon. Before the news of Churchill’s defeat in the July General Election forcedhim to take his leave of Potsdam, he wrote:

“We now have something in our hands which would

redress the balance with the Russians. The secret of

this explosive and the power to use it would com-

pletely alter the diplomatic equilibrium which was

adrift since the defeat of Germany.” 13

In addition Churchill was determined to keep theGerman army intact as a bulwark against the USSR.

Aware of this potential threat Stalin recognised theimperative need to rebuild the ravaged economy asquickly as possible so as to re-establish his security bothinternally against the working class and externallyagainst the threat from imperialism. In order to put

pressure on the Kremlin, lend lease aid to the USSR wasstopped in June 1945, immediately prior to Potsdam.

The US also took a much tougher line on repara-tions.Both these measures were designed to punish theUSSR for supposedly overstepping the limits of theYalta agreements. Consequently at Potsdam reparationswere the sticking point, as Stalin was determined tomake Germany pay for the cost of the war. In the end,the seal of approval was given to any reparations takenfrom USSR occupied territory and 25 per cent of “unnecessary” capital equipment from the imperialist-controlled zone of Germany.

The polit ics of St alinist reconst ructio n


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af ter the war

Given the crucial nature of the manifold threats to theexistence of a stable, parasiti c caste in the USSR, andthe international character of the dilemma,the survivalof Stalinism was inescapably bound up with the politi -cal consolidation of its mili tary expansion in EasternEurope.

Stalinism’s expansion was marked by a number of specific features. Stalinism fears above all the threat of

genuine pro leta rian revo lut i on. Con s equ en t ly, t h eexpansion of its political influence was achieved in amanner which subordinated the interests of the workingclass to itself, and through it to imperialism. The reac-tionary,utopian theory of “socialism in one country”,thecredo of the Stalinist bureaucracy, leads programmati-cally to the illusory strategy of “peaceful co-existence”with world imperialism. The interests of the workingclass were sacrificed on the altar of this strategy.

However, u nder excepti onal circ u m st a n ce s , t h estrategy of “detente” with private property on a worldscale can lead, by its very logic, to i ts tactical negation

on a local scale. In other words, the overall desire tostrike a “modus vivendi” with private property leads tothe abolit ion of private property in certain, local cir-cum sta nces where this proves unavoida ble for theStalinists.

This proved to be the end result in most of the areasthat the USSR had occupied at the end of the war. Butthis only occurs when the balance of “detente” hasbecome very unfavourable to the Stalinists. It occursonly in order to re-establish “peaceful co-existence”with the imperialists on a more stable basis on a worldscale.14 It does not indicate that Stalinism has in any way

become a revolutionary factor in events.An extremely important impulse for expansion was

the crisis of accumulation within the USSR. For exam-ple, the Soviet Union sought to repair its war-torneconomy at the close of the war through forced trans-fers of raw materials and energy (i.e. plundering) andthrough unequal exchange (i .e. the “mixed company”).

The previously Axis countries of Bulgaria, Rumaniaand Hungary were hit first and hardest. Immediatelythey were occupied, about 70 per cent of their industr i-al machinery was removed. In Hungary some 90 percent of industr ial capacity in the metal and engineering

industries was removed in 1945.In Ru m a n i a , bet ween 23 August 1944 and 12

September 1944 equipment to the value of $2 bill ionwas taken, including the entire war fleet, most of themerchant marine fleet, half the available railway stock,and the oil indu s try equ i pm en t . In Po l a n d ,Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia some 15-25 per cent of the industrial stock was removed. Sixty large industrialenterprises alone were dismantled from the Sudetenregion of Czechoslovakia.

In that part of Germany annexed by Poland afterthe war, it is estimated that up to 30 per cent of indus-

tr y was uprooted and taken to the USSR. In addition,up to 30 per cent of each occupied country’s annual

GDP was siphoned off by the Kremlin.

In theory the “mixed company” was supposed to bean equal combination of Russian and national bour-geois capital. In reali ty very litt le of the Russian sharewas forthcoming. Under this guise lots of raw materialsand energy supplies went to the USSR for next to noth-ing in exch a n ge (e.g. Rumanian oi l , Iranian oi l ,Yugoslavian bauxite).15

We must remember Trotsky’s own warning that the

rapacious insatiable appetite of the bureaucracy, withits desire to enhance its privileges and prestige overother areas, will always be a factor in any expansion.However, this wil l be very much a subordinate factorsince alone it would not be sufficient reason for theStalinists to risk their “understanding” with imperial-ism nor provoke the possibi li ty of unleashing unwant-ed revolutionary action by the oppressed masses.

In Eastern Eu rope (i .e. Hu n ga ry, Bu l ga ri a ,Rumania, East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia)the political strategies pursued by the Stalinists at theend of the war, and the impetus behind them were

essentially the same. In each of these countries thedefeat and retreat of German imperialism was accom-panied by uneven and potentially revolut ionary mobil-isations of the urban and rural workers and peasants.

Although anti -capitalist in direction, these actionsof the masses were without revolut ionary Trotskyistleadership. The hold of indigenous Stalinism on theother hand, over the vanguard of the masses was veryuneven throughout Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakiawas the only Eastern Europe country on the eve of warto have even a semblance of bourgeois democracy.Thishelped the CP to operate fairly openly.At i ts lowest pre-war point the KSC (Czechoslovakian CP) had a mem-bership of 24,000. Electorally it always managed to pickup at least ? [CHECK] mill ion votes, although i t onlycontrolled about 12 per cent of fi le?trade union mem-bership. It survived the occupation emerging with amembership of 27,000 in May 1945 in the Czech areasalone. This grew to 1,159,164 by January 1946.

On the other hand the Polish Communist Party suf-fered from the Stalin purges of 1938. It was virtuallyliquidated, with 12 of its Central Committee membersexecuted. Reconsti tuted in late 1941, after the break-down of the Stalin-Hitler pact (in preparation forwhich the Polish Stalinists had been killed), it stil l only

had a membership of about 4,000 in 1942-3.

In the last analysis, though, the weakness of certainindigenous Stalinist part ies was compensated for by therole and control of the Red Army.Given the sporadic andatomised nature of the resistance movements in EasternEurope the major force for sweeping German imperial-ism out was the Red Army – the armed wing of theKremlin. From 1944 onwards, the defeat of Germanimperialism by the Red Army was accompanied by thedeliberate destruction of the anti -fascist and anti capital-ist movements of the Eastern Eu ropean masses.Everywhere the Stalinists protected, and in some cases

reintroduced, the rule of the bourgeoisie in the economyand prevented the seizure of private property by the


Check

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workers and peasants. Where the workers had alreadyseized factories then the Stalinists used nationalisation asa means of taking direct control away from the workers.

Molotov’s strictures to the Bulgarian working classwere typical of this period: “ If certain Communistscontinue their present conduct we will bring them toreason. Bulgaria will remain with her democratic gov-ernment and present order.” 16

Of Bulgaria, the French bourgeois paper, Le Monde ,

was pleased to note in June 1946: “Moreover, theFatherland Front, has been able to maintain a soundeconomic situation and to safeguard the financial sta-bility of the country.” The equally worthy Swiss publi-cation, theGeneva Journal crowed the previous month,with regard to Hungary, “Wherever they can do so, theRussians block and oppose the taking over of largeindustr ial enterprises under a new statist system.”

In Rumania, the fascist collaborator and big oil trustmagnate Tatescu was vaunted by the Stalinists as an a ti onal hero. Even the discred i ted Ru m a n i a nmonarch, King Michael was brought back,decorated by

Stalin and put back on the throne.

17

In the occupied countries of Eastern Europe such asCzechoslovakia the German bourgeoisie owned muchof the capital. In 1945 in Czechoslovakia more than 60per cent of the industry, and virtually the whole of thefinancial system was in German hands.

With the retreat of the fascists the workers estab-lished workers’ control throughout the nation. Theworkers’ councils set up national managements, whichthe Benes government were forced to recognise.A shorttime after there were some 10,000 national manage-ments embracing some 75 per cent of industr ial work-

ers. Nationalisation by the state and the gradual intro-duction of state functionaries into the plants as man-agers was the only way,short of terrible blood letting,of defusing the revolut ionary situation.

At the same time there was considerable popularpressure for nationalisations from the working classwho bel ieved it would mean an end to capitalistexploitation. As a result , the October 1945 nationalisa-tion decrees brought 61.2 per cent of the working classinto nationalised industr ies (16 per cent of the enter-prises). This did not represent the expropriation of thewhole capitalist class by the Czech workers.On the con-

trary, as the KSC put it: “By nationalisation we under-stand the tra n s fer of the property of G erm a n s ,Hungarians, Traitors and collaborators to the hands of the Czech and Slovak nation.” 19

One nationalisation decree was even more explicit,stating that the enterprises were to be administered inline with the principles of commercial business, inde-pendence, profit making and free competition.20 Theimpeccably bourgeois president of the first Czech gov-ernment, Benes, stated the posit ion clearly in an inter-view to theManchester Guardian in December 1945:

“ The Germans simply took control of all main indus-

tries and all the banks ... In this way they automati-cally prepared the economic and financial capital of

our country for nationalisation. To return this prop-

erty and the banks into the hands of Czech individu-

als or to consolidate them without considerable state

assistance and without new financial guarantees was

simply impossible.The state had to step in.”

Dual pow er in East ern Europ e, 1944-47

At the level of the state, the Red Army served to stabiliseand in some cases reconstruct the forms of administra-

tive and repressive state apparatus associated with bour-geois rule:government centralised in the hands of a dis-tant and unaccountable executive; internal and externalsecurity centralised in the hands of a standing armyabove and opposed to the mass of direct producers.

Given the highly statised nature of the propertyrelations in these countries and hence the relativeweakness of the individual representatives of capital inthe economy, it was particularly important for theStalinists to construct coalition governments with therepresentatives of the bourgeoisie in high, if not crucial,places.

In Bulgaria, throughout 1945 there was a wave of po l i tical exec uti ons po s s i bly nu m bering 20,000.Nevertheless, the popular Agrarian Party leader, NikolaPetkov was in the government. In November the elec-tions took place with an overwhelming majority for theFatherland Front, a Stalinist and bourgeois nationalistcoali tion headed by the str ident anti-communist PrimeMinister Georgiev. In Romania the first governmentafter the German defeat was made up by the NationalPeasants and National Liberals in September 1944, theon ly Stalinist repre s en t ative being the Mi n is ter of Justice Patrascanu.

The machinations and brutal force of the Red Armyover the next months in Romania were designed toremove the two major bourgeois parties (The NationalDemocratic Bloc) and replace them with a governmentof the National Democratic Front (NDF), consisting of Stalinists, Social Democrats, Union of Patr iots and thePloughman’s Front.

Such a government would be an extremely mal-leable one for the Kremlin. In this period the Kremlincharge, Vyshinsky, dictated the sequence of events toKing Mi ch ael. Eventu ally after a period of a rm eddemonstrations an ND F government was installed in

March 1945 with 17 Cabinet positions going to theNDF and three economic ministries to the oil magnateTatarescu who was installed as foreign minister. Thesemeasures were clearly designed to placate the “democ-ratic” bourgeoisie.

A similar struggle took place in Poland this timebetween the US/GB backed London based group of Polish nationalists headed by Peasant Party leaderMikolajczyk and the Soviet backed Lublin Committee.In each of these cases the purges, intimidation and liq-uidation of prominent bourgeois figures must not beinterpreted as the complete elimination of bourgeois

rule, but as measures designed to crush bourgeois par-ties with strong roots in the national population and


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replace them with other bourgeois figures who wouldhave li ttle base from which to resist the designs of theKremlin, but which could, at the same time, administerthe economy in a way that would also serve the interestsof the national bourgeoisie and even solicit aid fromimperialism. In each of these countries the state appa-ratus had, to a greater or lesser extent, disintegrated inthe last period of the imperialist war.

While the Stalinists prevented the workers andpeasants from creating their own new state apparatus(based on Soviets and a workers’ mili tia) and re-estab-lished bourgeois control in the economy, they kept thekey levers of the reconstructed state apparatus fi rmly inthe grip of the Red Army and its local allies and agents.The leading Hungarian Stalinist Rakosi spoke for all hisilk in Eastern Europe in this period when he remarked:

“Th ere was one po s i ti on , con trol of wh i ch was

claimed by our party from the first minute.One posi-

tion where the party was not inclined to consider any

distribution of the posts according to the strengths of

the parties in the coalition. This was the State Securi ty

Authority. . . We kept this organisation in our hands

from the first day of its establishment.”21

In fact, it was in Hungary where the Stalinists had tomake the most concessions on the issue. The coali tionwhich emerged from the October 1945 elections hag-gled over portfolios. Eventually Imre Nagy secured theMinistry of the Interior but responsibili ty for the policewas delegated to the Smallholders Party. With theexception of Czechoslovakia, the Stalinists also retainedthe post of Defen ce , a gain ref l ecting the rel a tivestrength of the bourgeoisie in this country.

Everywhere the levers of armed power were used inthis period to intimidate opponents, fix elections and ingeneral guide policy down desired channels.

The result was a dual power situation that reflectedthe balance of forces between the world bourgeoisieand the USSR as it manifested i tself in the EasternEuropean area. Poli tical power was spli t, or rathershared, between the Stalinists and the bourgeoisie.

The Stalinists held a monopoly of repressive powerbut the bourgeoisie were reintegrated into the politicalsuperstructure via their control of the highly statifiedeconomy. Nowhere was this more clearly the case thanin Czechoslovakia. The Germans were finally driven

from Prague only in May 1945. The first post-war gov-ernment set up was a coali tion of four bourgeois par-ties and two bourgeois workers’ part i es. The KSCemerged from the war the strongest and they weregiven fi rst choice of ministries, the 22 portfolios beingdivided up equally among the parties. The KSC choseInterior, Information and Agriculture, leaving the eco-nomic ministries in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

By defining this period as one of dual power we canunderstand its instabili ty and its eventual outcome. InEastern Europe after 1945 the dual power consisted of apact between the Stalinists and the bourgeoisie. Such apact was necessary for the bourgeoisie because theywere weak and depended on the Stalinists to maintain

private property. It was necessary for the Stalinistsbecause during the period 1945-47 they wanted tomaintain private property to fulfi l their deal with impe-rialism and in return secure economic aid. Dual powerwas also necessary for the Stalinists because it was ameans of crushing the independent activity of theworking class. Trotsky, drawing on the experience of the English and French revolut ions (17th and 18th cen-turies) anticipated the possibil ity of such a form of dualpower:

“The splitting of sovereignty foretells nothing less

than civil war. But before the competing part ies wil l

go to that extreme – especially in case they dread the

interference of a third force-they may feel compelled

for quite a long time to endure, and even to sanction,

a two power system.” 22

The coalition governments were the sanction givenby both parties in Eastern Europe in 1945 to the splitsovereignty that existed. These governments had, to agreater or lesser extent, bonapartist characteristics.Thiswas less so where the indigenous bourgeoisie andStalinists repres en ted genuine social force s, as forexample in Czechoslovakia, more so where the newgovernmental form had little indigenous social founda-tions e.g. Soviet Occupied Germany.

The abili ty of the Stalinists to resolve the dual powerfrom 1948 onwards without recourse to civil war can beexplained by their dominance within those govern-ments. Dual power does not necessari ly mean that bothsides are equal and balanced. The Soviet Army andpol ice apparatuses established in Eastern Europe meantthat repressive power lay exclusively in the hands of theStalinists.There were therefore able to use this power toresolve dual power in a cold manner,when world impe-

rialism moved against them.

Popular front and bourgeois workers’government

Within the coalition governments in existence through-out Eastern Europe in this period the Stalinist partieswere the decisive force because of their rel ations to thearmed forces of the USSR.23 Committed to the mainte-nance of private property and the demobilisation andcontinued exploitation of the masses they acted eitherin a form of popular front with the bourgeoisie as in

Czechoslovakia or as a specific form of a bourgeoisworkers government. These parties with roots in thenational working class, owing their power to the Sovietbureaucracy, shaped the policies of government in theinterests of a deal between imperialism, its own nation-al bourgeoisie and the Soviet bureaucracy.

The two forms of government established by theStalinist Parties were different. A popular front is anopen coalition of bourgeois and workers’ parties, whilethe bou r geois workers’ government is a conce al edcoali tion in which a workers’ part y governs on behalf of and in the interests of, the bourgeoisie.

However, in content they are both designed todeflect the working class from seizing power and exer-


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cising it in its own name. Of the bourgeois workers’government the Comintern rightly stated that they:

“are a means of deceiving the proletariat about the

real class character of the State, or to ward off, with

the help of corrupt workers leaders,the revolutionary

offensive of the proletariat and to gain time.” 24

Likewise with the popular front, as Trotsky pointedout, referr ing to i ts role in demobilising the Frenchworking class in 1936:

“The People’s Front in France took upon itself thesame task as did the so-called ‘coali tion’ of Cadets,

Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries in Russia in

February 1917 – checking the revolution at its first

stage.” 25

He went on to point out that, like a bourgeois work-ers’ government, the popular front disguises the realnature of bourgeois power from the workers:

“ The workers were depri ved of these instruments

[party and soviets– Eds] because the leaders of the

workers’ organisations formed a wall around the

bourgeois power in order to disguise it , to render i t

unrecognisable and invulnerable. Thus the revolutionthat begun found itself braked, arrested, demor-

alised.” 26

The bourgeois workers’ governments and popularfronts played exactly these roles in Eastern Europe.Thebourgeoisie was extremely vulnerable. Its armed powerwas negligible. It lacked, at this time, decisive supportfrom imperialism. The advance of the Red Army hadaroused the expectations and activities of the masses.Everywhere the objective possibi li ty of replacing thecollapsed power of the bourgeoisie with genuine prole-tarian power existed. Such an outcome could have

delivered a death blow to the Kremlin Stalinists.For that very reason, rather than moving against the

bourgeoisie, they either governed on their behalf (e.g.East Germany) in specific forms of bourgeois workers’governments, or drew the bourgeoisie into open coali-ti on s , i . e . popular fronts (eg Czech o s l ovakia andRomania). The dominance of the Stalinists in the bour-geois workers’ governments and the Popular Fronts didnot alter their nature. It did alter the eventual outcomeof these necessari ly temporary government formations.The bourgeois workers’ government, as the Cominternpredicted, could “objectively help to accelerate the

process of disintegration of bourgeois power.”27

Thanksto the shift in imperialist policy and the dominance of the Stalinists, this objective possibili ty was realised.

The popular fronts were also superseded by govern-ments in which the Stalinists had absolute control.They were able to dispense with their weaker coalitionpartners, when the main threat came from imperialismrather than genuine proletarian revolutions which thePopular Fronts laid served to check.

The nationalisations of the coalition period werecarried through as the result of an agreement betweenthe Stalinists and the bourgeoisie to nationalise that

property which was owned by the Axis powers andt heir collabora tors . Land reform affected only the

largest estates and occurred generally within the firstmonths of “ liberation”, but was uneven between coun-tries and inadequate in scope.

Given the weight of the peasant-based parties in thepost-war coali tions, the large-scale evacuations of theland by former landlords in the wake of the Germanretreat and the immense contribution of the peasantryin the various partisan forces, it was expected that therewould be a considerable movement pressing for landredistribution. In addition, the immediate need forincreased food production required giving peasants theinitiative to produce. The most sweeping reforms werein Hungary where all landholdings were reduced to 142acres.

In Romania all holdings of more than 500 hectareswere partitioned. Thousands more peasants “benefi t-ed” from such decrees but the social condition of mostremained the same. This was because the Red Armytook the best agricultural machinery to the USSR asreparations and left untouched the crippling system of credit, thus condemning the small peasantry to perpet-ual crisis.

It is clear than between 1944-47 the Kremlin andthe local Stalinists were committed to resolving thedual power situation through the creation of capitaliststates fr iendly to the USSR. To this end they sought tomaintain or part ially reconstruct the old (i .e. bour-geois) official app ara tu s es . O n ly these app ara tu s e scould have permanently guaranteed the protection of bourgeois property. Thus, in the period of dual powerthe states in Eastern Europe can be described as still,essentially,capitalist. However, this general statement isinsufficient to explain the dynamics of a dual power sit-uation which by definition is transitional and lends to

the state itself a contradictory, transit ional character.AsTro t s ky poi n ted out with rega rd to the Ru s s i a nRevolution after February (i .e. before the proletarianrevolution):

“ if the state is an organisation of class rule, and a rev-

olution is the overthrow of the ruling class, then the

transfer of power from the one class to the other must

necessari ly create self-contradictory state condit ions,

and first of all in the form of dual power...”28

The aim of the Stalinists was to prevent the resolu-tion of dual power in a genuinely revolut ionary direc-tion. Two options alone were open to them in carrying

this through. Either, they could ful ly reconstruct a cap-italist state and cede power to it – a course that wouldin fact have resulted in the restored capitalists dumpingthem from government and attacking them (as hap-pened in Vietnam in 1945).

Or they could have carried through a bureaucraticrevolution which from the outset, excluded the prole-tariat from direct political power as they had done inthe Baltic states and Eastern Poland at the beginning of the war. The possibili ty of these two options for theStalinists invested the state machine in Eastern Europebetween 1944-47 precisely with a self-contradictory

character. The Stalinists reintegrated sections of thebourgeoisie into the state machine, but their fear of the


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reintroduction of imperialism into their newly estab-lished“buffer zone” led them to exclude the bourgeoisiefrom any control over the armed power of the state.

This does not mean, however, that these statesbecame degenerate workers’ states immediately afterthe entry of the Red Army. We do not, as Marxists,define the form or the content of the state according tothe social or polit ical composit ion of its personnel.That the Stalinist personnel were in the last analysislargely dependent on post-capitalist property relationsbut found themselves defending capitalist propertyrelations further underlines the contradictory, transito-ry nature of the period 1944-47.

From compr omise to cont ainment

S h ort ly before his death Tro t s ky com m en ted thatshould the Stalinists successfully make their peace withcapitalist property relations in those countr ies it domi-nated politically for any length of time, then we wouldbe forced to revise our understanding of Stalinism andthe social nature of the USSR.29

A closer appreciation of Trotsky’s reasoning on thisscore allows us to affi rm the correctness of his analysis.Trotsky’s statement was based on the irrefutable factthat with regards to an isolated workers’ state, imperial-ism (i.e. world capitalism) remains stronger than theUSSR. If Stalinists were to hold power then their reignmust inevitably be short-lived as the national econom-ic power of the bourgeoisie, itself drawing on the powerof imperialism through its thousands of ties, would bemarshalled to unseat the “alien body” in the bour-geoisie’s state.

In this way a bourgeois polit ical counter-revolut ion

would destroy the political rule of Stalinism and thecontradiction within the social formation would be“resolved” in favour of imperialism. For this reason theStalinist project of consolidating capitalist states wasnecessarily utopian.

It is within this perspective and not by abandoningit that we must understand the situation in EasternEurope at the end of the war. A situation that allowedthis contradiction to exist in reali ty, but only for a shortperiod. The stagnation of world trade and the protec-tionism of the decade before the war was at its heightduring the war itself and spil led over into the post war

period. With the partial exception of Czechoslovakia,the Eastern European countries had been bonapartistregimes throughout the 1930s and of semi-colonial sta-tus. Their economic and political ties with imperialismwere severely dislocated dur ing the war. The contrac-tion of world trade and the fracturing of the worldeconomy continued right through the 1944-7 years.However, relations between Anglo-American imperial-ism and the national bourgeoisies of Eastern Europewere vir tually non-existent after the war.

In its turn, this reduced the power of the nationalbourgeoisies to resist the enforced direction of the

Stalini s ts. This fracturing of the relations bet weenimperialism and its national agents was a highly unsta-

ble, conjunctural factor which temporarily offset thecontradiction between Stalinism and the bourgeoisie.But this strategic contradiction reasserted itself during1947/8 when the long expected “united front” of thesuccessful imperialisms was directed at the Kremlin’srole in Eastern Europe.

The tactical united front between imperialism andthe bureaucracy, put together to deny the possibi li ty of a European revolution now subsided along with thethreat of a revolution itself. Relations between theUSSR and the Western Allies had deteriorated withincreased rapidi ty during the course of 1946, which wasa watershed year, a transitional year from compromiseto contain.ment on U.S. President Truman’s part . Hehad an ally in Churchill who had become the front run-ner for a more hawkish attitude ever since he detecteda“betrayal” of the Yalta agreement in 1945.

In fact, the first reference to an “Iron Curtain”across Europe dates from five days after the Germansurrender in May of that year.

The celebrated reference in a major speech in the

USA in March 1946 to the Iron Curtain was a pullingtogether of the threads of what was to later becomecalled the Cold War stance of America and Bri tishimperialism against the USSR.

The reasons which underpin the gradual change inideological stance in 1946 are not hard to find. TheYalta and Potsdam conferences had come to an agree-ment over “spheres of influence” which basically cov-ered Europe and the Balkans. But the Kremlin’s refusalto take its troops out of Northern I ran in February1946, Molotov’s claim to the “trusteeship” of Libya inNorth Afr ica, and the USSR’s fiery insistence on havingthe right of access to a warm water port in theDardanelles in August, convinced the imperialists of the urgent need to contain the USSR. The imperialistoffensive was led by the USA; the western nations,suchas France and Great Britain, were in the midst of eco-nomic crises and were thus unable to relaunch a vigor-ous round of accumulation on their own.

British coal production in 1946 was 20 per centdown on its 1938 level; in Western Germany it was two-fi fths of its 1938 level. Precisely because of the domi-nant position of Germany in the industrial field beforethe war, its crushing defeat was bound to have an enor-mous effect throughout Europe.In 1939, Germany had

been responsible for one-fif th of all Europe’s industrialproduction.

Allied to all this was a severe agricultural and finan-cial crisis in Europe.European wheat production fell in1947 to less than half its 1938 level. In 1946, some 125million Europeans were living on 1000-2000 calories aday,and this was to worsen. A measure of the financialinstability can be gauged from the fact that wholesaleprices in France in 1946 were rising at the rate of 80 percent per annum.30 The USA’s own productive capitalemerged from the war relatively untouched, indeedeven strengthened.

Relative to its markets the productive forces were


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burgeoning. In 1945 the USA manufactured half theworld’s products. In 1946 it accounted for half theworld’s income. In short, it occupied a position of dominance in the world economy unparalleled sinceBritain of the 1850s. However the boom in the USAeconomy was facing the prospect of a major reversal if it allowed the stagnation in the markets of Western andEastern Europe to continue.

Stalin’s hold in Eastern Europe and the spectre of revo lut i on in the we s t , c a ll ed forth the Tru m a nDoctrine – the doctrine of containment,not immediatewar against the USSR,backed up by massive economicaid for anti-communist governments.Greece proved tobe the launching pad for this new policy. Rapidly crum-bling as an imperialist power, Britain refused to finan-cially underwrite Greece in February 1947, then in themidst of civil war.

Fearing a communist (ELAS) victory, the US madean unconditional commitment to the right-wing gov-ernment. More than $300m was given immediately.On12 March, Truman elaborated before Congress: “ Itmust be the policy of the United States to support freepeoples who are resisting attempted subjugation byarmed minorities or by outside pressure.” 31 The eco-nomic complement of this doctrine was the MarshallAid Programme and the plans to introduce a new cur-rency unity in the imperi a l i s t - occ u p i ed zones of Germany.

G en eral Ma rs h a l l had rep l aced Byrnes as USSecretary of State in January 1947. His Plan was calledthe Truman Doctr ine in Action and was announced inJune though it was to take nearly a year to be ratified byCongress. It was not a programme of relief but of reconstruction, entail ing some $17bn to Europe in

return for massive US influence in domestic and for-eign policy. Sixteen countries had applied and acceptedits terms by September 1947.

With this twin attack the US codified its Cold Warstance; to draw the line on USSR influence in Europe,to burden the Kremlin with sole responsibility forreconstruction in its own “spheres” and to eradicate itsinfluence in the imperialist spheres. These events threwthe Kremlin and the National Communist parties intoa turmoil . In Western Europe the Stalinists were uncer-emoniously dumped from the bourgeois coalition gov-ernments. It was the social instabili ty arising from the

economic crisis that forced the French and Italianbourgeoisie to tolerate the Stalinists in government,since they could control the working class. In MayMarshall wrote to De Gasperi , head of the Christian-Democrat Government, urging the expulsion of the CPand promising to underwri te their financial needs.

In Eastern Europe, where the levers of polit icalpower were in their hands, the Stalinists were com-pelled to choose whether to confront the imperialistoffensive or retreat and concede to it.

Consistent with their attempt to construct a strate-gic alliance with capitalism, several of the national com-

munist parties were prepared to accept Marshall Aid.The Marshall Aid Plan was formally open to the USSR,

but this was merely a deliberate ploy to put the onus onthe Kremlin to make the split. Molotov attended thepreliminary discussions briefly before withdrawing.

The Czech and Polish Cabinets showed a positiveresponse to the Plan, including the Stalinists. But theywere soon forced to decline by USSR pressure. As acounter measure the Kremlin drew up a set of impro-vised trade agreements (the Molotov Plan) for EasternEurope. If the road of the Marshall Plan had beenaccepted then sooner or later Stalinism would have lostcomplete control in Eastern Europe and imperialismwould have stood knocking on the door of the USSRitself.

The Kremlin and Stalin were not prepared to riskthis fate and so risk their own necks. Stalin tightenedthe reins of power and ordered the elimination, fromabove, of the economic roots of the bourgeoisie, andtheir political representatives in the state who couldhave been a potential point of departure for rebuildingtheir power in the future.

Count er-revolut ionary social overt urns inEast ern Euro pe

A preparatory and necessary step to the bureaucraticliquidation of bourgeois power in Eastern Europe wasthe complete bureaucratic control of the national com-munist part ies over the working class. Primarily thismeant the destruction of the influence of the Social-Dem oc ra tic parties over the working class wh i chriva ll ed and in most cases out s h one that of t h eStalinists. This was especially so in Poland, Hungaryand in what was to become East Germany.

The method was usually the same; intimidations,

purges and forced fusions. In September 1944, a newpro-Stalinist leadership was foisted on the Polish social-ists (PPS) with a view to securing unif ication. The rankand file continuously refused to endorse this so inDecember 1947, it was done anyway, a further 12 lead-ers being removed and 82,000 members expelled. Theterm “salami tactic” was used by Hungarian Stalinist,Rakosi, to describe what was done. Persistent resistancefrom the Hungarian socialists (SDP) was finally over-come in February 1948 when the pro-Moscow minori-ty in the SDP convened a Congress without the centreand right under the protection of the secret police and

in June the merger was announced.32

Despite the risks this policy held for the future of “detente”, the Kremlin reckoned that not to take thisroad was to risk its own destruction. Not only wouldthe USSR have had to give up the enormous productivepotential of Eastern Europe to imperialism, but itwould have seriously threatened the continued exis-tence of the bureaucracy itself. Faced with this extreme-ly disadvantageous turn in the relationship of “peacefulco- exis ten ce”– the Kremlin dec ided everywh ere inthese countries to economically and poli tically destroythe bourgeoisie. Everywhere the pattern was the same.

Leading bourgeois figures were arrested or executedand opposit ion gradually banned. In Poland, the oppo-


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sition leader, Mikolajczyk fled in 1947 to escape fromthe tightening hold of the Stalinists. In Romania KingMichael was deposed in December and in early 1948the now Stalinist dominated United Workers Party tookcontrol. The leader of the Agrarian Party in Bulgaria,Petkov, was arrested in June 1947 and executed inSeptember.

20,000 were arrested and opposition papers closedfor good. In Hungary, Kovacs, the former Smallholdersleader, was arrested in May by the SAF. The PrimeMinister fled to the USA in May. New elections inAugust saw the CP dominant, though they continuedthe facade of a coali tion until the fusion with the social-ists in 1948.

After 1947-48 the destruction of capitalism in thesecountr ies was undertaken bureaucratically from aboveand was combined with repression against the van-guard of the proletariat. One of the ways this repressionocc urred was thro u gh purging of the Commu nistParties themselves. This was continuous after 1947 butreceived new momentum after the Stalin-Tito split inthe summer of 1948.

In Poland, for example, between September andDecember 1948 30,000 members were expelled. TheG en eral Sec ret a ry, G omulka was impri s on ed . InBulgaria, the vast majority of the leadership and 92,000of the rank and file were expelled up to 1950. InCzechoslovakia, where the spirit of independence hadlong been nurtured via Czech nationalism, 100,000were expelled between February and August 1948, TheStalinists were already in control of the polit ical andrepre s s ive app a ra tus and could utilise this poweragainst the bourgeoisie and its agents.

Only in Czechoslovakia, during February 1948, didthe Stalinists mobilise forces outside their own securityapparatus to overthrow the bourgeoisie. The period of dual power, an exact and precarious balance in theCzech Cabinet, came to a decisive end in late February1948. On 20 February a dispute over Cabinet control of the police resulted in 12 non-CP ministers offering thebourgeois head of government, Benes, their resigna-tions. It was understood that they would be refused,and was designed as an offensive against the KSC.

But the KSC staged mass demonstrations culminat-ing in marches of armed trade union mi litia on 23February. No independent organisations were thrown

up; the demonstration was kept within str ict limitsdesigned to put pressure on Benes to accept the resig-nation which he did. The KSC was asked to form a gov-ernment which it did comprising only the KSC and itsallies.

The May elections went ahead under great repres-sion, with one slate of candidates and a decree that ablank ballot paper was “tantamount to treason”, theresults gave a juridicial seal to the “coup”.

Elsewhere demonstrations and rallies were usedmerely to legitimise the bureaucratic overturn in theeyes of the Stalinists base.

During this period the Stalinists did not constitute

a “revolutionary workers’ government” acting underthe pressure of the masses to take decisive measuresagainst the bourgeoisie and its property.

The government was not a government of strugglebased on independent workers’ organisations – mil itiasand soviets. Instead the overturn was the work of aStalinist bureaucratic anti -capitalist workers’ govern-ment which had ensured that the masses were so disor-ganised, and that the state force at its own disposal wasso considerable as to prevent the working class carryingout the expropriation of the bourgeoisie itself andreplacing it with the forms of revolutionary dictator-ship of the proletariat based on workers’ councils and aworkers’ mili tia.

Such a prospect would have both challenged theprivi leges and authority of the bureaucratic caste thathad been coalescing in these countries between 1944and 1947 and stood to challenge the political rule of theStalinists in the USSR itself.

The qualitative transformation of these bureaucra-tised states into a bureaucratically degenerate form of

the dictatorship of the proletariat takes place at thatpoint when the regimes have expropriated the bour-geoisie economically and set out to subordinate andcurtail the operation of the essential law of the capitalisteconomy – the law of value-and organise their nation-alised economies on the basis of the planning principle– albeit in a bureaucratically deformed manner.

None of this is possible without the prior existenceof nationalisation, the monopoly of foreign trade andthe polit ical expropriation of the bourgeoisie. But inthemselves the existence of these features do not neces-sari ly consti tute a form of the dictatorship of the prole-tariat, i.e. a state based on post-capitalist propertyforms.Total planification and the complete eliminationof the bourgeoisie was necessary on top of these fea-tures before a post capitalist economy could be estab-lished. This aspect of these degenerate workers statesand their method of creation distinguishes them fromthe period of a healthy workers state in the USSR creat-ed by the October revolution.

The characterisation of Russia as a workers’ state in1917 flows from the fact that state power was in thehands of the working class organised as ruling classwith its own organs of class rule the soviets and theworkers militia . This preceded nati on al isa ti on and

planning in the USSR. In Eastern Europe the workers’states Established as a result of Kremlin policy-weredegenerate from birth. From their inception a politicalrevolution against the bureaucratic caste was the pre-requisite for the working class to take political powerinto its own hands. With the introduction of the FiveYear Plans in the Bu f fer Zon e s : Bu l ga ria 1948,Czech o s l ovakia 1949, Hu n ga ryt 9 5 0 , Poland 1950,Rumania and GDR 1951, the process of the creation of bureaucratically degenerate workers’ states was com-plete.

We reject the term “deformed workers state” for the

states created by the post World War II overturns.Terminologically “deformed” does not adequately sug-


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gest the qualitative difference between such states andproletarian dictatorships where the working class holdspolitical power. In the former case there may existsevere bureaucratic deformations – as Lenin admittedexisted in Russia in 1921. But in this case the bureau-cratic polit ical counter-revolution sti ll lay in the future,as does a political revolution to remedy it.

The post-war bureaucratic anti-capitalist revolu-tions were at the same time counter-revolutionaryex propriations of the pro l et a ri a t’s poli tical power.Therefore we designate such states degenerate workers’states as degenerate from birth.

Thus we identify these states in all fundamentalswith the degenerated workers’ state in the USSR, therebeing only the latter’s origin in a genuine proletarianrevolution to distinguish them.

Wherever it occurs and whatever form it takes,Stalinist bureaucratic social revolutions are counter-revolutionary. They are carried through against theprevailing level of consciousness of the forces necessaryfor the proletarian revolution in the country – i.e. the

working class. They occur on the basis of a bureaucrat-ic-repressive limitation of independent action of theworking class and therefore devalue the very notion of “ revo lut i on”, “s oc i a l i s m”, “ workers’ ” s t a te and theplanned economy in the eyes of the oppressed masses.

They retard the development of a revolutionaryconsciousness within the world proletariat. They createa congenitally bureaucratised state in which the work-ing class is politically expropriated. The bureaucraticregimes represent an obstacle in the path of the worldworking class in the struggle for socialism and commu-nism. The measures carried through by the Stalinists inthe course of the social overturn (expropriation of thebourgeoisie, statification of the means of production),whilst them s elves revo lut i on a ry in ch a racter, a reachieved in a mil itary bureaucratic fashion. This meansthat during the bureaucratic overturn, revolutionariesorganised as an independent force, struggle to t rans-form that overturn into a direct fight for proletarianpower.

It was Trotsky himself who witnessed and recordedthese things in the first case in which Stalinist expan-sion coincided with a bureaucratic social overturn –Poland and the Balt ic states during 1939-40.Under thedirect threat of invasion by German imperialism the

Kremlin felt compelled to secure the Western flank of the USSR by invading those countries. This adventurewas kept within the str ict l imi ts of a bureaucratic-mili -tary straitjacket and was followed by generalised repres-sion against the working class and the poor peasantr y.This invasion led to the incorporation of these coun-tr ies into the USSR and the destruction of the privateproperty relations within them. Trotsky summed up hisunderstanding of the nature of these overturns thus:

“ The primary political criterion for us is not the

transformation of property relations in this or anoth-

er area, however important these may be in them-

selves,but rather the change in the consciousness andorganisation of the world proeltariat, the raising of

their capacity for defending former conquests and

accomplishing new ones. From this one, and the 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.” 35

Footnotes

1.cf. L. Trotsky, Europe and America, (NewYork, 1972).

2. For a selection of his most prescient statements on this theme see“Uneven

and combined development and the role of American Imperialism”, in Writings

1 9 3 3 - 3 4 , ( New York , 1 9 7 5 ) , pp. 1 1 6 - 1 2 0 , Ma rch 1933; “ Hi t l er and

Disarmament”, ibid., pp.246-57, June 1933; “Hit ler’sVictory”, ibid., pp.133-7,

March 1933;“Hi tler the Pacif ist”,ibid., pp.144-8,November 1933.All these arti-

cles are full of a profound grasp of the central strategy of Hitler in Europe in

his struggle against the Versailles Treaty and the USSR as well as an excellent

insight into the diplomatic and military tactics that Hitler would have to

employ to secure his aim. But perhaps the most perceptive estimate of the

tempo and line up in the approaching war is to be found in “On the threshold

of a new World War”, Writings 1936-7 , (New York, 1978),pp.379-96. Trotsky

also predicted the Stalin-H it ler pact after the downfall of Czechoslovakia in

1938, and because of that pact, the inevitability of war between the USSR andGermany.

3.“I n either case the war wil l lead to Stalin’s downfall.” (Trotsky) Depending on

which of Trotsky’s writ ings one reads,one can find sharp or guarded statements

on the “ inevitability” of the destruction of the Soviet bureaucracy in the war.

For the former see for example “War and the Fourth International”, Writings

1933-4, (NewYork, 1975), Thesis 48,pp.316-7; or for one of the innumerable

briefer passages on the theme see “The Kremlin’s role in t he European

Catastrophe”, Writings 1939-40, (New York, 1973), June 1940,pp.290-1. For a

more guarded and considered view see “The USSR in War”, in In Def ence of

M arx ism , (NewYork,1973) ergo“War accelerates the various poli ti cal process-

es. It may accelerate the process of the revolutionary regeneration of the USSR.

But i t may also accelerate the process of its final degeneration.” (p.21).

It may appear an obvious point, but against those who have taken this progno-

sis as an example of Trotsky’s one-sided “catastrophi sm” it needs to be stressed

that Trotsky always saw these questions from the point of view of programme,

that is, the need to out line to his supporters the main confl ict ing tendencies in

order to orientate them for action to bring about the desired end.

4.Quoted in Y. Gluckstein, Stalin’s Satellites in Europe, (London,1952). Leading

member of the Fourth International, E. Germain also noted the widespread

demonstrations and strikes throughout Romania and Bulgaria in the Autumn

of 1944. See“The Soviet Union after the War”,September 1946 in the In tern al

Bu lleti n of th e In tern ati ona l Sec retari at of th e Fou rth In tern ati ona l,p.7.

5.cf.J.Bloomfield, Passive Revolution, (London,1979),pp.50-51

6. For one such account, see E. Mort imer’s article on France in Communist

Power in Europe 1944-49,(ed.M. McCauley, London,1977)pp.151-3. He con-

cludes that 1944 “was the most favourable moment for a revolutionary i nsur-

rection...”. In It aly the defeat of the German troops occurred in 1945 and they

were also accompanied by massive workers’ str ikes. Allum and Sassoon in i bid.,

show that in this period there was not a factory in the North and a few in the

centre that was not armed.Churchil l summed up the problem facing the impe-

rialists in West Europe at this time in a letter to his Foreign Secretary Eden, in

November 1944:“...every country that i s liberated or converted by our victories

is seething with Communism and only our influence with Russia prevents her

actively stimulating this movement”. Quoted in R. Douglas, From War to Cold

War 1942-48, (London, 1981 ),p.61.

7 . c f . G erm a i n , op. c i t . , pp. 2 - 3 , and D. Yer gi n , Sh a t tered Pe a ce,

(Harmondsworth,1980),p.64.


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8. Germain, op.cit.,p.3.

9.Quoted in Yergin, op.cit., p.55.

10. Quoted in I bid., p.473.

11. Quoted in I bid., p.58.

12. Quoted in I bid.,p.91.

13.Quoted inlbid.,p.120.

14.Trotsky fi rst recognised thi s in his analysis of the soviet i nvasion of Poland

in 1939:”Thi s overturn was forced upon the Kremlin oligarchy through its

struggle for self-preservation under specific conditions. There was not the

slightest ground for doubting that under analogous conditions it would find

itself compelled to repeat the very same operation in Finland.” Trotsky, In

Def ence of M arx ism , op.cit., p.175.

15.See Germain, op.cit ., p.7; C.Georges, “Russian Economic Policy in Eastern

Europe”, in SW P (US) In ternal Bulletin vo113, no.8,p.10; L. Schwartz, “USSR

and Stalinism”, in In tern ati on al In form ati on Bu lletin SW P( US ) , vol.1 ,no.2; C.

Harman, Bu reau cracy an d R evolu tion in Eastern Eu rope, (London,1974), pp.49-

53.

16. Quoted in Harman,op.cit., p.31.

17. P. Zinner in Revolution in Hungary, (NewYork, 1952), gives details of the

factor ies returned to private owners.See also Schwartz, Germain and Harman.

In Romania, Patrascanu, the Communist Minister of Justice, drew up a law

allowi ng industrialists, businessmen and bankers to escape punishment as war

criminals.

18 cf. Bloomfield,op.cit., Chapter 6.

19. Quoted in ibid., p.89

20. cf.Schwartz, op.cit., pp.32-33.

21. Quoted in Harman, op.cit., p.35.

22. L. Trotsky, Hi story of th e R ussia n Rev olu tion , (London,1977), p.225.

23. The SAF reached it s maximum size in May 1945, at the moment of

Germany’s defeat and the height of the independent actions of the workers and

peasants, when it stood at an enormous 11,365,000. Demobil isation began in

June and in early 1948 it was estimated at 2,874,000, stil l twice the size of the

imperialist troop presence in Europe. The role of the SAF in Eastern Europe

was uneven between nations. In Czechoslovakia in late 1946 Bri tish intell igence

believed that only 5,000 troops were in the country. Short ly after the “Prague

coup” in 1948 American intelligence thought there were as few as 500 USSR

troops left in the country. In other words, the strength of indiginous Stalinism

enabled the construction of native securi ty forces that was not possible else-

where.Poland’s securi ty, on the other hand, depended heavily on the SAF and

the Soviet Securit y Corps (NKGB). The latter were parti cularly notorious, hav-

ing been granted full control 'over civil iansecurit y in the Soviet Army’s rear' by

the Committ ee of National Liberation, see McCauley,op.cit.,p.270, and Yergin,

op.cit.,pp270-348.

24. J. Degras, The C omm unist International 1919-1943, (London, 1971) vol.1,

p.421.

25. L. Trotsky, On France, (NewYork, 1979),p.193.

26. Ibid., p.201.

27.Degras, op.cit ., p.427.

28. L. Trotsky, The H istory of the Russian Revolution, op.cit.,p.231.

29. L. Trotsky, In D efen ce of M arx ism , op.cit., p.18.

30.Yergin, op.cit ., pp.303-310.

31.Quoted in Douglas, op.cit ., p.153.

32.cf. Harman,op.cit .,p.36,and McCauley, op.cit .,p.102 33.cf. Harman,op.cit.,

p.54.

34. For the relevant passages see Trotsky , In D efen ce of M arx ism , op.cit., pp.8-

20,26-29,56-59,81-90, 130-137,170-178.

35. Ibid., p.19.

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The precondition for the establishment of proletarianproperty forms is the destruction of the machine

used by the capitalists to defend their property forms –the state. The Marxist programme is clear that the taskof smashing the capitali st state belongs to the proletari-at. It calls for the fulfilment of this task through the useof armed, directly democratic, workplace organisationsworkers’ councils or soviets. These councils in turn arethe antithesis of the capitalist state. They are the organs(legislative,executive and coercive) of the workers’ state.

The bureaucratic anti-capitalist revolutions that have

occurred in Eastern Europe, Asia and Cuba did not wit-ness the destruction of the state by the proletariat organ-ised in armed workers’ councils. Yet when the actualstages of these revolutions are examined it becomes clearthat the abolition of capitalism by Stalinist parties didnot contradict the Marxist theory of the state. The capi-talist state was smashed in each bureaucratic revolution,but in a manner not envisaged by Marx, Engels or Lenin,nor in a manner that is at all desirable from the stand-point of revolutionary communism.

The bour geois st ate and t he Marx ist

programmeThe state, fundamentally, is the oppressive apparatusused by the ruling class to defend its economic domi-nance in society.

Thus, we define the class nature of a state, not by itsform (which for all states can vary tremendously), noreven by the specific features of its apparatus, but by theeconomic regime, the mode of production, that itdefends. We recognise that the common feature of allstates that have ever existed is the presence of a publicforce – bodies of armed men whose job it is to defendthe given mode of production.As Engels noted:“We saw

that an essential characteristic of the state is the exis-tence of a public force differentiated from the mass of the people.”1 Or as Trotsky expressed it: “FriedrichEngels once wrote that the state, including the democra-tic republic, consists of detachments of armed men indefence of property; everything else serves only toembell ish or camouflage this fact.” 2

From this it follows that all social revolutions neces-sari ly involve the passing of state power from one classto another: However for the bourgeoisie,during its rev-olutionary struggle against feudalism, it was not neces-sary for i t to smash the feudal state or its public force.By

virtue of its economic dominance prior to its achieve-ment of political power it was possible for the bour-geoisie to merely capture the allegiance of the public

force, of the whole state machine (through its influenceand wealth). In other words the bourgeoisie capturedand perfected the old state machine. It did not smash it :

“All revolutionaries perfected this machine instead of

breaking it. The part ies that contended in turn for

domination regarded possession of this huge state edi-

fice as the principal spoils of the victor.”3

But the nature of the proletariat as a class and thetask of its revolution – the conscious construction of acommunist society – require that the proletariat organ-ise itself as a ruling class with unique and part icular

state forms. Unlike all “hitherto existing revolutionaryclasses” the proletariat cannot achieve its historicalobjective by laying hold of the existing machinery andform of state – its army, bureaucracy and officialdom –and use it to implement its programme.

This was the principal lesson that Marx and Engels

drew from the experience of the Paris Commune of

1871: “But the worki ng class cannot simply lay hold of

the ready made machinery and wield it for their own

purpose. The political instrument of their enslave-

ment cannot serve as the political instrument of their

emancipation.” 4

The goal of Marxists is the abolition of classes andtherefore also of all states. This is to be achieved in thefirst phase by the dictatorship of the proletariat; a stateto be sure, but one that is, properly speaking only asemi-state:

“As soon as there is no longer any social class to be

held in su bjection, as soon as class rule, and the indi-

vidual struggle for existence based upon the present

anarchy in production, with the collisions and excess-

es arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing

more remains to be held in subjection – nothing

necessitates a special coercive force, a state. The gov-

ernment of persons is replaced by the administrationof things, and by the conduct of processes of produc-

tion.The state [i .e. the workers’ state -Eds] is not ‘abol-

ished’. It withers away.”5

Because the proletariat’s seizure of power inaugu-rates the transition to socialism, because the dictator-ship of the proletariat is the first act in the very wither-ing away of the state itself (i.e. of a form of coerciveapparatus), the proletariat must smash the state of thebourgeoisie and replace it with a state of a new sort.Lenin, against the opportunists, made the necessity of this action clear: The supercession of the bourgeois state

by the proletariat is impossible without a violent revo-lution. The abolition of the proletarian state i.e. of thestate in general, is impossible except through a process

Bureaucrat ic social revolut ionsand the Marxist theory of thestate

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of“withering away”.6

If the essential characteristi c of the state is the exis-tence of bodies of armed men in defence of property,then the essential el em ent in the smashing of the state isthe destruction of the armed power of the bourgeoisie.This is a fundamental law of proletarian revolution. Bysmashing the state we mean fir st and foremost smashingits armed apparatus. Marx left no room for doubt onthis question:

“Paris could resist only because in consequ ence of thesiege, it had got rid of the army and replaced it by a

National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of work-

ing men. This fact was now to be transformed into an

institution. The first decree of the Commune, there-

fore, was the suppression of the standing army, and

the su bstitution for it of the armed people.” 7

The Bolsheviks later codified this lesson into theirprogramme:

“When the proletariat is fighting for the power,against

whom and what is it f ighting?In the first place against

this bourgeois organisation [ the state-Eds].Now when

it is fighting this organisation its task is to deliverblows that will destroy the organisation. But since the

main strength of the government resides in the army,

if we wish to gain victory over the bourgeoisie the first

essential is to disorganise and destroy the bourgeois

army.” 8

The armed bodies of the bourgeoisie – its police andstanding army – must be abolished and replaced by amilitia of the armed proletariat. This repressive elementof the state must be smashed, prior to or in the processof, the proletariat achieving state power. The degree of violence involved in that seizure of power will be deter-

mined by the degree to which the bourgeoisie have lostcontrol over, and allegiance of, the coercive apparatus of the state. As long as the bourgeoisie’s armed powerremains at all intact then the proletariat still faces thetask of destroying it. Otherwise it will be used to crushthe proletariat itself.

But, in addition to its armed forces the capitaliststate maintains itself by alienating the mass of produc-ers from the administrati on of society by means of ahuge and powerful bureaucratic apparatus (civi l service, judges etc.) This is directly and indirectly linked to thearmy and police etc. Thus the smashing of the state

must also involve the destruction of this bureaucracy.The highest ranks of the executive bureaucracy – the topcivil servants, the judges – must be immediately abol-ished by the proletariat revolution and replaced byresponsible, recallable representatives of the proletariat.In this way the bourgeois executive is smashed.

This is vital for reasons made clear by Marx andEngels in The Communist Manifesto : “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for the managing of the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” 9

The bureaucracy of the modern state however, alsoconsists of large numbers of lower ranking officials who

possess administrative skills that would be vital to thefunctioning of a young workers’ state. Therefore, the

bureaucracy in its entirety would not be smashed.Rather the ranks of the lower officialdom would beheavily purged and placed under the control of theworkers themselves. Lenin, for example, distinguishedbetween the smashing of the key elements of theoppressive apparatus and the need for the workers’ stateto maintain certain el em ents of the administrativeapparatus bequeathed it by the bourgeois state. Hemade this clear in advance of the seizure of state in “Canthe Bolsheviks Retain State Power?”:

“In addition to the chiefly ‘oppressive’ apparatus the

standing army, the police, the bureaucracy-the mod-

ern state possesses an apparatus which has extremely

close connections with the banks and the syndicates ...

This app a ra tus must not, and should not, be

smashed.”10

The tasks of book-keeping,accounting and so forthwould be fulfilled by those sections of the bureaucracythus retained by the workers’ state. The Marxist tradi-tion maintained that such initial acts as limiting the payof all officials to that of a skil led worker, subjecting thea pp ara tus to workers’ control, were in themselves ,preparatory to the gradual disappearance of adminis-tration as a distinct element in the social division of labour separate from and set against the producersthemselves. The task facing a proletarian state was toprogressively eliminate the separate caste of full timeadministrators on the road to building a communistsociety. This task was always seen, however, as distinctfrom the immediate act of smashing the bourgeoisie’soppressive machine.

Prior to the October revolution Lenin outlined thetasks of the Bolsheviks in this sphere of the state appa-ratus thus:

“Power to the Soviets means radically reshaping the

entire old state apparatus, that bureaucratic apparatus

wh ich hampers everything dem oc ra ti c . It means

removing this apparatus and substituting for it a new,

popular one, ie a truly democratic apparatus of sovi-

ets, i.e. the organised and armed majority of the peo-

ple – the workers, soldiers and peasants. It means

a ll owing the majority of the people initiative and

independence not only in the election of deputies,but

also in state administration in effecting reforms and

various other changes.” 11

In addition to the destruction of the bourgeois state

machine Marxists also insist that the proletarian revolu-tion involves a positive action – the consolidation of astate of a completely new sort which is in the process of withering away from its very inception. In other wordsthe organs of destruction (of the bourgeois state) are, inturn, the organs of reconstruction, of a workers’ state.The workers’ state itself will disappear with the advent of communism that is with the disappearance of classes.Marx and Lenin were clear the building up of the work-ers’ state was a process that took place after as well asduring the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the seizureof state power by the proletariat.This process constitutes

the final element of the smashing of the state. It consti-tutes the continuation of class struggle even after the


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conquest of power by the proletariat:After the overthrowof the exploiting classes Lenin “repeats and explains inevery chapter of State and Revoluti on the proletariat willshatter the old bureaucratic machine and create its ownapparatus out of employees and worker.” 12

The victo ry and defeat of Soviet p ow er

The October revolution marked the passing of statepower to the proletariat organised to wield that power

with new distinctively proletarian state forms – theworkers’ militia, the factory committees and the sovietsof workers, soldiers and peasants’ deputies.

The police and army of the Russian bourgeoisie hadbeen smashed as instruments upon which the bour-geoisie could rely in order to defend its class rule. Thelast significant attempt of the Russian bourgeoisie todeploy the army in defence of its interests crumbledwith the defeat of the Kornilov coup in August 1917.After that – in the struggle against the Moscow uprisingand in the form of the White Guards of the civil war, thebourgeoisie could only deploy armed force as an instru-

ment of counter revolution-against a victorious prole-tariat. In all of the major industrial centres the standingarmy and police force was replaced by the armed powerof the workers’ militia. The most essential aspect of thesmashing of the capitalist state was completed – i.e. thebourgeoisie was deprived of its powers of coercion.

The executive power of the bureaucracy – its civilservice chiefs and judges – was smashed by the sovietpower. But the young proletarian state faced the task of building new forms of administration and regulation onthe basis of the arm ed power of the pro l et a ri a texpressed in the soviets. It faced that task in conditions

of extreme material backwardness and, increasingly, of International isolation. In order to ensure the very sur-vival of proletarian power the young proletarian statewas forced to maintain, and even reintroduce, capitaliststate forms in a workers’state. A standing army was cre-ated, material privileges were granted to officials withparticular invaluable skills and experience and a stand-ing bureaucracy had to be maintained in order to pre-side over the unequal distribution of goods in a situa-tion of extreme shortages :and disruption of produc-tion. Lenin and Trotsky both noted and explained thisinevitable development. First, Lenin:

“Bourgeois law in relation to the distribution of theobjects of consumption assumes, of course, inevitably

a bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an appa-

ratus capable of compelling observance of its norms.

It fo ll ows that under Communism not only will bour-

geois law survive for a certain time, but also even a

bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie.”

And for Trotsky:

“For the defence of ‘bourgeois law’ the workers’ state

was compelled to create a ‘bourgeois’ type of instru-

ment – that is the same old gendarmes although in a

new uniform.”14.

By the death of Lenin the old administrative appara-tus overwhelmingly determined the functioning and

administration of the new soviet state. Lenin talked of Soviet Russia as a workers’ state with profound bureau-cratic deformations. The administrative apparatus inRussia was not replaced by a state of a new sort in anypermanent or lasting form. But, in our view, the formsof the state were not decisive.Despite its reversion to oldforms of administration, the state was based on thedefence, and that t ime part icularly, the extension of newforms of property.

The possibility of different forms of the dictatorshipof the pro l eta riat has alw ays been anti c i p a ted byMarxists, whose method is based on a dialectical analy-sis of concrete reality and not on the rigid application of schematic norms to reality. Thus Bukharin perceptivelycommented, against Kautsky:

“In his [Marx – Eds] analysis of capitali st production

he took capitalist economy in its ‘pure’ form i.e. in a

form uncomplicated by any vestiges of the old (feudal)

relations of production, or any national peculiarities

and so on, and he treats the question of the dictator-

ship of the working class in the same way, as a ques-

tion of the workers’ dictatorship in general, that is to

say a dictatorship which destroys capitalism in its pure

form. And there was no other way to consider the

question i f he was to do i t in abstract theoretical terms

ie if he was to give the broadest algebraic formula for

the dictatorship.Experience of the social struggle now

permits concrete definition of. the question along the

most diverse lines.”15

Likewise Lenin had not expected the dictatorship tohave a universal form:

“Bo u rgeois states are most varied in form, but their

essence is the same; all these states, whatever their

form , in the final analysis are inevi t a bly the

Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie.

The transition from capitalism to communism is

certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and

va ri ety of po li ti cal form s , but the essen ce wi ll

inevitably be the same; the dictatorship of the prole-

tariat.”16

The degenera ti on of the Russian Revolution and theBolsheviks increased the diversity of these potentialforms of the dictatorship of the proletariat with tragicconsequences for the Soviet and international workingclass, leading Trotsky to comment:

“ In the interim between the conquest of power andthe dissolution of the workers’ state within socialist

s oc iety the forms and methods of proletarian rule may

change sharply depending on the course of the class

struggle internally and externally.”17

What for Lenin and Trotsky had been a temporaryretreat or truce in the direction of strengthening bour-geois state forms in order to consolidate the workers’state, was embraced as a permanent and conscious goalby the Stalinists. They strove to consolidate and extendelements of the capitalist state form in the USSR as abase for their own material privileges and as an obstacle

to the proletariat’s realisation of socialism. In that theSoviet state defends bourgeois norms of distribution, in


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that it maintains a massive standing bureaucracy, armyand police force against the masses, it retains key fea-tures of the state of the old, bourgeois type.

In that it defends, albeit in the manner of the privi-leged bureaucracy, the property relations of October itretains a proletarian character. Within the degeneratedworkers’ state bourgeois state forms continue to presentthemselves to the prolet ariat as an obstacle to the tran-sition to socialism. The political revolution will destroythe power of the bureaucracy and, in so doing, eitherdestroy completely bourgeois state forms or,where nec-essary,place them under the strict controls of the organsof the healthy workers’ state.

However, from this we do not conclude that thereare two types of state co-existant in the USSR. Wedescribe the degenerate workers’ state as one that has adual, contradictory nature. It defends proletarian prop-erty forms but it does so with coercive instruments nor-mally assoc iated with capitalist states. It does thisbecause the working class have been politically expro-priated by the bureaucracy. Trotsky described the dualnature of the USSR thus:

“The state assumes directly and from the very begin-

ning [i.e.even in its healthy period – Eds] a dual char-

acter; socialistic, in so far as it defends social propert y

in the means of production bourgeois, in so far as the

distribution of life’s goods is carried out with a capi-

talistic measure of value and all the consequences

ensuing there from.”

This dual character remains right up to today butwe should add that the bureaucracy have a monopoly of political control over the bourgeois aspect of the stateand it serves first and foremost their interests. TheStalinist programme is historically committed to themaintenance of bourgeois state forms and the suppres-sion of proletarian state forms even should bourgeoisproperty rela ti ons be overthrown.

The bureaucratic w orkers’ g overnment

When we look at each of the post war overturns we cansee that in no case did the Stalinists permit the old bour-geois state to be replaced by a state of a new sort basedon workers’ councils and a workers’ militia. Throughoutthe process they tried as best they could to strengthenand maintain bourgeois state forms – a standing army

and police force, a bureaucracy separate from, and inopposition to, the mass of toilers.

The realisation of this element of their programmeplaced the Stalinists alongside the bourgeoisie in thestruggle to break up the embryonic organs of a healthyworkers’ state that emerged, in some form, prior to thecreation of degenerate workers’ states in each case, ie inthe period 1944-47.

Whi le this was the case – and the new workers’ stateswere therefore created in a form bureaucratically degen-erate from birth – in each case the armed bodies of menof the old ruling class were smashed and broken up

either by the entry of the Red Army into Eastern Europe,by Stalinist led partisans as in Yugoslavia, Albania and

later China or, in the 1959-60 by the politically pettybourgeois July 26th Movement in Cuba. These coercivebodies were smashed to the extent that the bourgeoisiewere no longer able to deploy armed force in defence of their remaining property rights, just as the coercivemachinery of the Russian bourgeoisie its army andpolice – disintegrated prior to the direct seizure of powerby the proletariat and,to that extent,was smashed beforethe October revolution. Thus it i s indisputable that thearmed power of the bourgeoisie was physically smashed

prior to each of the bureaucratic revolutions that markedthe expansion of Stalinism in the post war period. This isdec isive in understanding why apparen t ly pe acef ulbureaucratic revolutions were able to take place. Theessential element of the smashing of the bourgeois statehad, in fact, already been completed.

In each case the outcome of this initial act of smash-ing was – as had been the case in Russia during theprocess of the disintegra ti on of the Russian bour-geoisie’s enormous standing army – a highly unstableperiod of dual power. In each case there coexisted:

a) the forms of a reassembled /reasserted bourgeoisstate kept in viable existence by the continuing directlinks between the particular native bourgeoisies and thearmed power of world imperialism, but in each case inneed of decisive external aid in order to reconstruct anddeploy armed power in defence of its property of itsown accord;

b) the embryo of degenerate workers’ states – in theform of the Red Army itself or of Stalinist – led armedbodies, not inevitably forced to, but in exceptional cir-cumstances capable of, resolving the contradictory dualpower period through the medium of a bureaucraticworkers’ government should either the interests of the

Kremlin bureaucracy or the interests and privileges of anascent Stalinist bureaucratic caste based on nationalproletarian forces come under threat in circumstanceswhere the balance of forces between the Stalinists andthe imperialists is unfavourable to the latter.

The Comintern recognised two types of “workers’governments”: ostensible workers’ governments – lib-eral and Social Democratic – that were in reality bour-geois governm en t s ; and workers’ governments thatcould act as a bridge to the dictatorship of the proletari -at. To the three types of the latter category: workers’ andpeasants’ government, workers’ government in which

communists participate and governments in whichcommunists predominate, the experience after 1945obliges us to add a fourth type: the bureaucratic work-ers’government. In this new type Stalinists are political-ly dominant. The government has the programme of anti-capitalist measures constituting the expropriationof the bourgeoisie whilst simultaneously depriving theworking class of political power.

Thus it prevents the formation or development of organs of proletarian struggle, self-organisations anddemocracy (soviets) with methods which range frompolitical misleadership to outright military repression.

Where the working class has a history of conscious revo-lutionary struggle, has an alternative revolutionary lead-


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ership, the element of repression, of breaking the prole-tariat's advance,of smashing and bureaucratising its par-ties, soviets and trade unions, will generally precede theformation of a bureaucratic workers’ government.

Where the proletariat is weak in numbers or whereits class consciousness is obscured by petty bourgeoisillusions, the process may take place whi le the masses aremobilised for non-socialist tasks but before clear classgoals and the political forms are created to achieve anddefend them, exist. In the latter case the element of repression, of Stalinist dictatorship may be attenuatedfor a whole period. However, what defines a bureaucrat-ic workers' government i s that i t is not under the controlor conscious pressure of the organs that can form thebasis of a full political dictatorship of the proletariat. Itis thus anti-capitalist but a bridge to a degenerate not ahealthy workers' state.

Thus in Eastern Europe and in degenerate workers’states created since the late 1940s the bourgeoisie isoverthrown by an anti capitalist bureaucratic workers’government. Such an overthrow of the bourgeoisiecould only take place, in each case, after the potentialorgans of a healthy workers’ state had been either phys-ically destroyed or rendered mere appendages to theStalinists. In Eastern Europe what remained of thebourgeoisie's administrative apparatus, in each case waseither deliberately maintained or rei n stituted . Theadministrative apparatus – composed largely of the per-sonnel of the old regime – was purged and key positionswithin it occupied by the Stalinists and their allies.

This utilisation of the capitalist state’s administrativeapparatus (suitably purged) for the purposes of socialrevolution would have been impossible had the capital-ist class not been deprived of their control of armed

force. The armed power of a degenerate workers'’state(as in Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and later Cuba,Stalinist-Ied peasants armies) can be said to have com-pleted the first and essential stage in the smashing of thecapitalist state. This alone facilitated the later completepolitical and economic expropriation of the bourgeoisie.

The resolution of dual power in each case did notoccur on the basis of the programme of revolutionaryMarxism. The Stalinists moved against the bourgeoisie,having already destroyed their armed power, with thefull intention of maintaining a state profoundly similarto that of the old bourgeois type,not of replacing it with

a state of a new soviet type. The creation of new work-ers’ states was the work not of the working class actingin its own name and through its own democratic organ-isations but of a counter revolutionary caste based onthe working class. This process was complete only afterthe liquidation of the bourgeoisie and the establishmentof proletarian property forms. At every stage in theprocess the programme of the working class would haveremained the seizure of power by the working class itself and the establishment of a state of a new type based onsoviets and the armed workers.

This process does not contradict the Marxist theory

of the state. It demonstrates that the capitalist state canbe destroyed by counter revolutionary workers’ parties

only to the extent that these new states no longer defendcapitalist property rel ations while retaining most of thefeatures of bourgeois type states. They are therefore anobstacle to the socialist transform ation of s oc iety. Thecreation of a healthy proletarian state, a genuine semi-state, remains a task of the working class political revo-lution against the bureaucratic caste.

This does not mean that workers’ states can be cre-ated without the smashing of the capitalist state. Thebureaucratic revolutions were only possible because ineach case the coercive apparatus of the bourgeoisie hadbeen smashed. The Eastern European overturns were toprove that the historical and material preconditions forthe creation of workers’ states had been revised andextended as a direct result of the creation of the firstworkers' state in October 1917 and its consequentdegeneration.

The Russian revolution mapped out the only con-scious and revolutionary road for the overthrow of cap-italism and the building of communism. The healthyworkers' state will be the revolutionary product of theindependent actions and organs of the mass of theworking class, headed by a revolutionary Trotskyistparty, which seeks to preserve the revolution by itsextension internationally.

However, the degen era ti on of the Ru s s i a nRevolution has meant that in certain exceptional histor-ical circumstances, the preservation of the remaininggains of the October Revolution, together with concernfor its own privileges, has driven the Stalinist bureau-cracy or Stalinist parties to overthrow capitalism in acounter-revolutionary manner which retards the work-ing class struggle for socialism and communism.

Footnotes

1. F. Engels, The Origin of the Fam ily, Private Property and the Stat e, (London,

1972),p.180.

2. L. Trotsky, W hither France, (London, 1974),p.108.

3. K. Ma rx , M arx and Engels Collected W orks, (London,1979) voI.11,p.186.

4. K. Marx, M arx and Engels on the Paris Com m une, (Moscow,1976) p.202.

5. F. Engels, An ti- Du hring, (Peking, 1976), p.363.

6.V.I.Lenin, Collected Works, (Moscow,1964), vol.25,p.400.

7. K. Ma rx ,The Civil War in France, (Moscow, 1972),p.53.

8 . N . Bu k h arin and E. Preobraz h en sky, T h e A BC o f C o m m u n i s m ,

(Harmondsworth,1970),p.128.

9. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, (London, 1976),vol.6,p.486.

10.V.I.Lenin; Collected Works, (Moscow,1964),-vol:26,pp.105-6:

11.Ibid., vol.25,p.368.

12. L.Trotsky, The Revolu tion Betrayed , (New York, 1972),p.50 (our emphasis).

13.V.I. Lenin, op.cit., voI.25,p.471.

14. L.Trotsky, op.cit., p.53.

15. N. Bukharin, The Politics and Econom ics of the Transition Period , (London,

1979),p.37.

16.V.I.Lenin,Op.cit.,vol. 25,p.413.

17. L. Trotsky, Wri tings 1934-35, (New York~974),p.172.

18. L.Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed , p.54.

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The cre a ti on of a degen era te workers’ s t a te inYu go s l avia ex h i bi ted the nece s s a ry gen eral and

defining features of the bureaucratic social revolutionsthat occurred in Eastern Europe. First, the limitation of a revolutionary opposition to imperialism to actionsshort of genuine proletarian revolution. Secondly, thebureaucratically controlled liquid ation of capitalismu n der the hegem ony and directi on of S t a l i n i s m ,Thirdly, the incorporation of Yugoslavia, albeit onlypartially and temporarily, into the political and eco-nomic orbit of the USSR simultaneous with the cessa-tion or massive curtailment of its economic and politi-cal ties with imperialism.

Yet the particular form of the bureaucratic social

revolution in Yugoslavia showed certain differences tothe pattern followed in the rest of Eastern Europe. Tosome extent Yugoslavia, during and after the war, com-bined elements of the pattern that was followed inEastern Europe and also anticipated elements that laterappeared in the Cuban revolution.

The struggle against imperialism and its local agentsin Yugoslavia was carried out not by the Red Army (withthe partial exception of the liberation of Belgrade), butby a massive petit-bourgeois nationali st partisan army(mainly recruited from the peasantry),numbering,at itspeak, some 750,000. The urban proletariat was largely

marginal to this movement although it gave it its sup-port.

This army was led by Moscow-trained Stalinists. AsIsaac Deutscher, in his biography of Stalin correctlypointed out:

“ It is not for nothing that Tito had been promoted to

his party’s leadership during his stay in Moscow at the

time of the great purges. The party’s previous chief

had just perished in those purges, and his orthodoxy

and bigotry had to be quite exemplary to earn him,

precisely at that moment, Moscow’s confidence”.1

Yugoslavia had been a German satellite between

1 9 3 8 - 4 1 , u n der Pri n ce Peter. A coup by Gen era lSimovich in April 1941 provoked Hitler into an invasionand after 10 days fighting,Yugoslavia surrendered on 17April. Following the surrender, the partisan movementlaunched a war of liberation that necessarily involved,between 1941 and 1944, a civi l war against the pro-German bourgeoisie. In essence there were three forcesin that civil war – the pro-Axis Yugoslav bourgeoisie, theforces of the pre-war monarchy (Chetniks) and the par-tisans. The hostility of the Chetniks to the partisansmade any form of antifascist national front impossible –a factor that accounted for the independence from the

bourgeoisie of the YCP.After the invasion, the country was spli t up into var-

ious parts. Slovenia and Montenegro were divided

between Italy and Germany. Bulgaria and Hungaryreceived neighbouring pieces of terri tory. Croatia was

administered by the pro-axis monarchist group – theUstase – led by Pavelich,and Serbia by the German pup-pet General Nedich.

The Chetniks were ori ginally a group of officers andmen of the defeated army formed in the mountains of Serbia under Colonel Mihailovich. He was a Serbiannationalist with little regard for the rest of Yugoslaviaand a fierce anti-communist. The Chetniks fought asmuch against the Partisans as against the occupationtroops, more so as Tito’s forces and influence grew. Theinfluence grew precisely because unlike his en emiesTito, with the YCP as an instrument of control, could

appeal to the broad masses of people on a nationalistbasis. With this support Tito, from 1941 onwards, builtup People’s Committees as a basis for his future rule.Indeed in 1943,much to the consternation of Churchilland Stalin, he declared a Provisional Government.

This independent base was later to prove crucial inthe relatively rapid consolidation of a degenerate work-ers’ state and in its survival despite the split withMoscow.

For its material aid in the struggle against Germanimperialism and the collaborator bourgeoisie, the YCPwas largely self-reliant in the period 1941-43, and after

this period was reliant on the aid of Allied imperialism.Between 1941-43 the imperialists were wary of Tito andsupported the Chetniks.But since their over-riding con-cern was to defeat Hitler,and since the Part isans of Titowere the only effective fighting force against Hitler inYugoslavia, the Western Allies shifted their supportaround. Up to June 1943,Tito received a total of [check]

tons of aid from the all ies! But in the first six months of 1944, Britain dropped 15,000 tons of supplies by air andsupplied tanks and planes by sea. 2

Only after 1944, and increasingly so between 1945and 1947, was the YCP heavily dependent on the aid

from the USSR. The first mil itary mission of thePartisans to Moscow to ask for aid took place in the latespring and summer of 1944.

The leader of that mission, Milovan Dji las, recalledthat they asked for a loan of $200,000.Eventually aid wasforthcoming and the USSR set up a supply base in Italy.3 The Kremlin felt able to give this aid to the YCP, despiteits signs of independence, because it believed that itcould, in the last analysis, control the YCP. In the mean-time the YCP was useful as a means of tightly controllingthe mass movement in Yugoslavia so that it would notthreaten Stalin’s plans for a deal with imperialism.

Stalin wanted the YCP to agree that Yugoslaviashould accept the role that was allotted to the rest of Eastern Europe between 1944-1947,namely a bourgeois

Marshal Tito and Mao Zedong:disobedient Stalinist s

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state in which the YCP could oversee the plunder anddecimation of the Yugoslav economy to the advantage of the USSR.

However the plan was jeopardised by both the scopeof the anti-imperialist movement, and by the relativeautonomy that the YCP was able to en joy because of this. The YCP leader Djilas perceived the nature of Stalin’s dilemma:

“Because of the conditions of war, the Yugoslav revo-

lution had been wrested from his control, and theforce that was generating behind it was becoming too

conscious of its power for him to be able simply to

give it orders. He was conscious of all this, and so he

was simply doing what he could – exploiting the anti-

capitalist prejudices of the Yugoslav leaders against the

Western states. He tried to bind these leaders to him-

self and to subordinate their policy to his”.4

Stalin was never fully successful in thi s aim duringthe war. The YCP- led movement was based above all onthe peasantry. Its ambition was limited to the achieve-ment of n ati onal independence and democratic land

reform. The control of the People's Committees by abureaucratic caste headed by Tito served to limit thepossibility of the movement passing out of the controlof the YCP. Nevertheless the development during thewar of a stable administration in the hands of theStalinist bureaucratic caste meant that this structurepres ented itself as an enormous obstacle to the reintro-duction of the national bourgeoisie into the administra-tive apparatus and economy on any meaningful scale.By the close of the war the repressive appa ra tus of statepower was fi rmly in the hands of the YCP Stalinists,notof the Red Army as elsewhere in the buffer zone.

The gradual advance of the liberation movement inYugoslavia had been accompanied by increasing nation-alisations of holdings of the collaborator bourgeoisieand a limited agrarian reform.

This proceeded apace up to the middle of 1944 atwhich point some 80 per cent of industry had beenna tional ised. This process was arre sted during thecourse of 1944-45 under the pressure of Stalin andChurchill who sought to stabilise the situation by theconstruction of a more openly coalitionist governmentand a halt to the nationalisations.

Churchill and Stalin brought Tito and the bourgeois

leader Subasich together in June 1944 to agree on acoalition government. This agreement was signed on 16June 1944. The declaration, issued at the time said:

“We are therefore, underlining once more that the

leadership of the National Liberation Movement in

Yugoslavia concerns itself with the only and most

important aim – the struggle against the invader and

his aides and the creati on of a democratic, federative

Yugoslavia, and not the establishment of communism

as some of our enemies claim.” 5

The coalition government was actually formed inMarch 1945. It lasted only eight months. After the

break-up of the coalition in October the Stalinists tookcomplete control of the government. In the period 1944

to late 1945, therefore, the Yugoslav government can becharacterised as a Popular Front presiding over a situa-tion of dual power.

The short-lived nature of this dual power period canbe explained by the strength of indigenous Stalinismand its mass base, relative to both the Kremlin’s influ-ence in Yugoslavia and the strength of the native bour-geoisie. The latter were a defeated class, discredited inthe eyes of the masses.However, like the Kremlin and itsagents in other countries in the buffer zone, the YCPused the period of dual power to demobilise the masses.The dominance of the YCP and the strength of the par-tisan army made possible the creation of an undividedstate power in Yugoslavia. Yet Tito refused to take thisroad until he was certain that the masses could be pre-vented from taking matters into their own hands.

The sharing of power wi th the capitalists was there-fore a necessary, if brief, stage in the bureaucratic socialrevolution. In this period the Stalinists were able toensu re the mass mobilisations of the resistance periodwere curtailed and that the key levers of state powerwere in the hands of the bureaucratic caste that hadbeen welded together by Tito and the YCP within thepartisan movement.

At this point, the immediate interests of the YCP didnot conflict with those of the Soviet bureaucracy on anyfundamental matter. The state remained capitalist incharacter. But the Yugoslav bureaucratic caste did haveits own interests and, unlike its counterparts in thebuffer states, it did have the means to assert themagainst the policy directives of the USSR. This Stalinistcaste aspired to monopolise state power, emulate theUSSR’s planned economy and hegemonise the Balkansvia the cre a ti on of a Yu go s l av - dom i n a ted Ba l k a n

Federati on with Albania – a plan fi rmly opposed byStalin. When Tito decided to push ahead with thesegoals early in 1946, the basis was laid for his later con-flict wi th the Kremlin.

In carrying through the political and economicex propri a ti on of the bo u rgeoisie du ring 1946, t heYugoslav Stalinists did not act as direct agents of theKremlin. The YCP could not accept a client status forYugoslavia and wanted to stabilise its rule and extend itsown privileges within Yugoslavia on the basis of anexpanding economy.Unique in the buffer zone, the YCPwas actually in a position to resist Stalin’s plans. Stalin’s

aim in 1946 was to fulfil the “ f i f ty - f i fty ” deal inYugoslavia that he had made with the British. He wouldcontrol a friendly capitalist state, while Britain would beguaranteed access to Yugoslavia’s ports and resources.

The major factor in forcing the YCP’s hand was theneed for a defensive reaction to the Kremlin’s plans. Thepressure of the masses was not the real cause of the YCP’saccelerated moves against capitalism.That pressure hap-pened to coincide with, and serve the bureaucracy’sstruggle for, its self-preservation against the immediateplans of both imperialism and the Krem lin. TheYugoslav bourgeoisie was bureaucratically eliminated by

the spring of 1947. As Yugoslav Stalinist Kidrich put it:“In 1946...the Central Committee put an end to the


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continual discussion. Our state apparatus was reor-

ganised, as well as the economic institutions. We

began to lay down the foundations of the socialist

organisation of our economy, of accumulation and of

a financial plan. The principle form of the ... assault

delivered at the main capitalist positions in our econ-

omy were the trials brought against the reactionary

criminals which were throughout regularly concluded

by the confiscation of their goods”.6

Du ri ng this proce s s, begun early in 1946, t h eStalinist monopolised government was a bureaucraticanti-capitalist workers’ government. The bourgeoisiewere expropriated while, at the same time, the Stalinistsensured that the. working class and poor peasants couldnot replace their rule with the organs of the revolution-ary dictatorship of the proletari at – soviets and workers’militias.

The expropriation of the Yugoslav bourgeoisie rep-resented a break with the interests of imperialism butonly a partial break with the Kremlin. While passivelyresisting the overturn at first, the Kremlin faced with avirtually accomplished fact, did supply material support

in the decisive period of the overturn and the consoli-dation of Stalinist rule.

By the spring of 1947, with the inaugura ti on of thefirst Five Year Plan, the process of the creation of abureaucratically degenerate workers’ state in Yugoslaviawas complete. That the Yugoslav Stalinists were able tocarry through this overturn was due, in the last analysis,to the inability of imperialism to reassert itself inYugoslavia and to the relative strength of the SovietUnion in the world balance of forces in the immediatepost war period. This allowed the Yugoslav Stalinists toeconomically and politically expropriate the bourgeoisie

while maintaining the political expropriation of theYugoslav working class.

From this, it is clear that the Stalin-Tito break of 1948 was a break between two already existing bureau-cratised workers’ states. It did not represent the creationof a genuine proletarian state. Stalin’s designs forreas s erting the hegemony of the USSR in EasternEurope cl ashed with the interests of the Yugoslavbureaucracy.Despite its demagogic socialist rhetoric thefinal character of the YCP’s break with Moscow was abreak in the direction of imperialism. This was exempli-fied by its consolidation of trade links with the west, its

declaration of “unaligned” status, and its support forimperi alism in the Korean war.

While the bureaucracy strengthened its indepen-dence vis a vis the Kremlin by forging a new alliancewith imperialism, to this day, no qualitative change inthe character of the state has taken place.

It is not the case, as Michel Pablo argued, that Titoceased to be a Stalinist “under the pressure of the mass-es”, and became instead a centr ist who led the proletari-at and peasantry to power in a “deformed ” (but onlyquantitatively) proletarian revolution which can betransformed into a healthy workers’ state by a pro-

gramme of reform. 7

The workers’ management committees instituted inthe aftermath of the split with the Kremlin, represent nomore than a means employed by the bureaucratic casteto strengthen their social base amongst the ranks of themanagerial and skilled sections of the labour force.Most representatives on the town and regional commit-tees are not actually workers 'but are rather expertselected on the “advice” of the party and the unions.Theydo not represent a deformed form of proletarian politi-cal power. It is clear that programmes for the reform of

the Yugoslav state apparatus are hopeless utopias. Theyignore the reality of the bureaucratic nature of theYugoslav revolution and they involve a complete revi-sion of the Trotskyist conception of Stalinism and therevolutionary party.

The Chinese Revolution

Although it developed on a longer time scale the ChineseRevolution – the creation of a degenerate workers’ stateby 1953– exhibited many of the features of both theEastern European and Yugoslav revolutions. As in the

latter case a peasant based army was used by a StalinistParty, which was largely independent of Moscow, todestroy the political rule of the bourgeoisie.After a peri-od of maintaining capitalism via a popular front theChinese Communist Party (CCP), under pressure fromboth external and domestic forces, moved to destroy theproperty relations of capitalism. At the same time, as inboth Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, this overturn was,at every stage , bu re a u c ra ti c a lly contro ll ed by theStalinists under Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlaiand Deng Xiaoping to prevent the working class andpeasantry from playing any independent or leading role.

The history of the CCP as the leadership of a peas-ant based and largely guerrilla army began with the his-toric defeats of the Chinese proletariat in the years 1926-30. The CCP had entered the Nationalist Party, theKuomintang (KMT) in a subordinate role in 1923-24having been under pressure to do so from representa-tives of the Communist International (CI) since 1922.On 20 March 1926 Chiang Kai-shek led a coup d’état inCanton, at that time the centre of CCP influence.Through the coup Chiang, with communist compli-ance, disarmed the workers’ militia controlled by theC C P- led Hong Kon g - Ca n ton Gen eral Stri keCommittee.

He also forced the CCP to relinquish its posts in thegovernment and KMT administrations. In March 1927,Chiang’s troops entered Shanghai, after the workers hadsei zed the city. Again Chiang disarmed the workers andagain the CCP called for acceptance of this measure. On12 April Chiang’s troops aided by the underworld gangsof Shanghai, unleashed a pogrom against the workers’districts in which thousands were killed.

Under CI instructions, the CCP launched a series of insurrections. Each of these, at Changsha, Nanchang,Canton and Haifeng was put down by Chiang’s troopswith great loss of life amongst the CCP and the workers.

The CCP responded to these defeats by withdrawing theremnants of its forces to the isolated and mountainous


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Chinese interior.

The changed material circumstances of the commu-nist forces after they had fled from the towns, togetherwith the disastrous consequences of attempted urbaninsurrections (e.g. Changsha 1930), were the materialbasis for the development of that variant of Stalinistclass co llaboration identified with Mao Zedong.

The Maoist current, initially centred on the FrontCommittee in the Soviet Base Area in the Jing Gang

Mountains and opposed to the Shanghai based CentralCommittee, rationalised the rural and distinctly non-proletarian base of the CCP. They developed a strategyfor fighting the imperialists and “compradors” that cen-tred on the mobilisation of the peasantry, rather thanthe proletariat, within the framework of the Stalinistpolicy of the bloc of four classes.

From November 1930, Chiang led a series of fiveextermination campaigns against the communist-heldSoviet Base Areas. The first four of these failed signallybut the fifth, with the assistance of German adviserssuch as Von Seeckt (later Nazi commander of Belgium)

and a force of a mil lion well armed men,forced the CCPto leave the Jiangxi Soviet and undertake the perilousLong March.

This 8,000 mile trek across some of the worst terrainin China under almost daily attack, in which 70,000 of the ori ginal 100,000 com munist troops were lost,brought the remaining 30,000 to the future Maoiststronghold of Yenan in North West China. After theconfused and demoralising first stage of the Long Marchthe Maoist current gained control of the Party from theclique around Stalin’s protege Wang Ming at the ZunyiConference of January 1935.

The establishment of the Maoist forces in the alreadyexisting Yenan Base Area marked the consolidation of the hold of the Maoists within a continuing period of territorial dual power in China that constantly threat-ened to develop into civil war and which lasted until1949. Although land reform and other much neededreforms were carried out in the Base Areas in the early1930s and later in Yenan, private property as such wasprotected.

This was an essential element in the Maoist strategyand conception of the Chinese Revolution:

[ Ch eck] “the spearhead of the revolution will still be

directed at imperialism and feudalism, rather than atcapitalism and capitalist private property in general.

That being so, the character of the Chinese Revolution

at the present stage is not proletarian-socialist but

bourgeois democratic.”8

This commitment to a “stagist” conception of therevolution, the first stage being purely “bourgeois-democratic”, defined the CCP’s relations with the KMTand the Chinese bourgeoisie.

Fo ll owing the policies pioneered by Stalin andBukharin in the mid-1920s, the CCP viewed the bour-geoisie as a fundamentally revolutionary class, which

was committed to a struggle against imperialism. Itwould therefore make an important component of a

long term political alliance involving the proletariat,peasantry and petit-bourgeoisie – the “bloc of fourclasses” which were welded together by their commonhosti lity to imperialism.

However as sections of the bourgeoisie were clearlycolluding with the imperialists, it was necessary to dis-tinguish between “good” national sectors of the bour-geoisie and “bad” comprador or bureaucratic sectors.Which of these sectors a bourgeois grouping or partybelonged to depended largely on whether it was willingto enter into an alliance with the CCP.

Trotsky attacked this notion of the revolutionarynature of the bourgeoisie in imperialised countries inhis polemics on the Chinese question. He pointed outthat the bourgeoisie of an imperialised country mightwell enter into a struggle with the imperialists in defenceof its own interests, in order to “deepen and broaden itspossibilities for exploitation”, but such actions would besporadic and aimed at compromise.

The willingness of the bourgeoisie to enter such astruggle depended on the degree of threat to its power

posed by the proletarian and peasant mobilisations nec-essary to confront the imperialists.Without the massesbehind it this bourgeoisie had no chance of defeatingimperialism. With the masses aroused its very powerwas threaten ed, inevitably leading it to go scuttling backinto the arms of imperialism.

It was this understanding of the cowardly and feeblenature of the bourgeoisie of the imperialised countriesthat led the still revolutionary Comintern to develop theAnti-Imperialist United Front, not as a long term, gen-eral agreement with the bourgeoisie, but as a series of ep i s od i c , practical agreem ents with def i n i te aims.Agreements entered into which did not for one momentmean abandoning the independent position and pro-gramme of the communists – the overthrow of capital-ism and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie.

In contrast for the CCP, (as for all the Stalinist par-ties in the imperialised world) the “united front”, thebloc of four classes, meant precisely abandoning, “forthe time being”, the communist programme in order towoo the bourgeoisie into an alliance. It meant holdingback the peasantry from pursuing too radical reformsand explicitly committing the CCP to defend capitalism,to limit its fight to the goal of a bourgeois democraticphase. This of course was not a united front but a pop-

ular front, an alliance which subordinated the indepen-dent demands of the workers and peasants, and the pro-gramme of socialist revolution, to an alliance with thebourgeoisie on its programme. That this alliance wasnot completely fulfi lled in China was not the fault of theCCP, which conscientiously carried out its side of thebargain,but because of the hostility and treachery of theKMT.

In September 1931, the Japanese began an invasionof Manchuria from bases established in the 1920s. On 9March Pu Vi, the last Chinese Emperor and himself aMan chu , was install ed as the Japanese puppet in

“Manchuguo”. During the following five years repeatedincursions and raids into North China signalled Japan’s


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intentions but Chiang refused to send his troops to thedefence of North China, preferr ing to maintain hisblockade of the CCP held areas. This antagonised manynationalists in China. The long expected full-scale inva-sion of China by Japanese imperialism in 1937 provid-ed ample proof of the continuing Stalinist nature of theMaoist CCP.

As in the 1920s the CCP strategy was to subordinateeverything to the formation of an alliance with ChiangKai-Shek and the KMT.To this end the CCP dropped allthe radical elements of its programme, including landreform, renounced the class struggle against the KMT,accepted the dissoluti on of its armies into theNationalist Army and recognised the leadership of theKMT in general and Chiang in particular.

In the original version, later withdrawn, of Mao'sreport to the sixth plenum of the Central Committee,hewrote:

“Without the KMT it would be inconceivable to

undertake and pursue the war of resistance. In the

course of its glorious history, the KMT has been

responsible for the overthrow of the Oing (Ch'ingDyn as ty -E ds ) , the establish ment of the Rep u blic,

opposition to Yuan Shih-kai,establishment of the three

policies of uniting with Russia, the communist party

and with the workers and peasants,and the great revo-

lution of 1926-27. Today it is once more leading the

great anti-Japanese war. It has had two great leaders in

succession.Mr Sun Yat-sen and Mr.Chiang Kai-shek.”9

So important was Chiang in the CCP’s schema that,in Xian in December 1936 they saved him from execu-tion by his own troops who were enraged by his refusalto move against the Mongolian allies of the Japaneseand his attempt to send them into battle against theCCP. In exchange for acceptance by Chiang of the self-effacing “united front” of the CCP, Zhou Enlai securedhis release.

The popu lar f ront against Japan

The Second United Front between the CCP and theKMT was used by Chiang in precisely the same way asthe first, to prepare his forces for an attack on the CCPand the workers and peasants of China. Once again theCCP maintained the alliance and kept quiet aboutChiang's “excesses”. In Spring 1939, for example, Chiang

attacked the CCP bases in Hunan, Hubei and Hebei. Inearly 1941, the new Fourth Army (a renamed commu-nist unit) attacked and defeated the Japanese in Anhui,thereby allowing access to the lower reaches of theYangzi, China's largest r iver system. Chiang, comman-der in chief of all forces, ordered them to retreat throughenemy held territory and, when they nonetheless man-aged to return to their base,attacked with his own forceskilling several leading commanders and cadre. Despiteits policy toward the KMT the CCP did wage a deter-mined and increasingly effective war against Japaneseimperialism. By the end of the war the Party and itsforces contro lled nineteen regions of China, led an armyof three mill ion regular and militia troops drawing sup-

port from a population of some 100 million in a totalarea of 950,000 square miles – an area approximatelytwice the size of France.

Although the CCP opposed land redistribution in itsareas during the Second United Front, its policies of reducing rents and interest rates, of establishing a new,efficient and honest local administration, of strengthen-ing traditional forms of seasonal cooperation in agricul-ture into mutual aid teams throughout the year,of bas-ing its anti-Japanese militia on these teams and of elect-ed local government,won the support of the vast major-ity of the population in these areas.

Communist control of these elected bodies wasensured by the “ three-thirds” system whereby one-thirdof the elected had to be party members, one-third sup-porters and the remaining third, “middle of the road-ers”. By comparison with the KMT-held areas wherepunitive taxation went alongside blatant corruption andeven collaboration with the enemy, the “ liberated zones”were a shining example of the “New China” and attract-ed considerable numbers of youth and intellectuals tothe com munist ra n k s . With the su rren der of t h eJapanese in August 1945 the CCP continued to pursueits aim of an alliance with the bourgeoisie.

Now,with the defeat of the Japanese, this meant thepriority was to establish a Popular Front Government.All efforts were bent to establish a stable coalition withthe KMT, with the Americans acting as mediators. TheCCP launched its political offensive under slogans call-ing for internal peace and national reconstruction. ByOctober 1945 the Chongqing Negotiations had achievedan agreement. The CCP would withdraw from eight lib-erated zones in the south and reduce its army to twentydivisions (a tenth of its strength). In return it was agreed

that a Political Consultative Conference would be con-vened , which would be open to the Communists andcentre parties e.g. the Democratic League.

This policy was fully endorsed and encouraged bythe USSR which was firmly convinced of the need forthe Chinese to make virtually any compromise toachieve a coalition with the KMT. At the end of the warthe Government had immediately signed a friendshiptreaty with the KMT. A delega ti on of CCP leaders whowent to the USSR at the end of the war were told in nouncertain terms by Stalin what was expected of them, ashe later recounted to Dimitrov:

“after the war we invited the Chinese comrades to

come to Moscow and we discussed the situation in

China. We told them bluntly that we considered the

devel opm ent of an uprising in China had no

prospects, that the Chinese comrades should seek a

modus vivendi with Chiang Kai Shek, that they should

join the Chiang Kai Shek government and dissolve

their army.” 10

Stalin even complained, when the CCP was forcedby KMT attacks to take up arms, that they had not fol-lowed his instructions. But in 1948 when the conversa-tion with Dimitrov took place and the communists were

clearly winning the civil war he could ruefully admit:“Now in the case of China we admit we were wrong.” 11


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Again it was the KMT, with American connivance,which reneged on the agreements. The Japanese wereordered in August to surrender only to the KMT and to“keep order” until KMT forces arr ived. In Autumn 1945shortly after the Political Consultative Conference met,Chiang reissued his 1933 Manual on the Suppression of Communist Bandits and launched offensives againstseveral communist bases.

Poli tical repression con ti nu ed, s tu dent meetingswere broken up, Democratic League offices were raided,Com munists newsp a per offi ces were des troyed . InMarch 1946 the KMT central committee disavowed theConsultative Conference resolutions which called for adem oc ra ti c constitution and the convening of a nation-al assembly. Despite this the CCP clung to its policy of alliance until the summer of 1946 when the KMT start-ed moving its troops into Manchuria, in clear violationof the agreements, as Russian forces withdrew.

After the failure in June 1946 for a joint commissionincluding American representatives, when the KMTdemanded the CCP hand over all the areas it controlledfirst, the CCP was subject to an all-out attack by Chiang’sforces. The Americans stepped up their aid to the KMTconsiderably. After the war, in what the American supre-mo, Wedemeyer, called “ the greatest air and sea trans-portation in history”12 the UStransported 540,000 KMTtroops into formerly Japanese held territory. In additionall the supplies and munitions of the 1.2 mil lion strongJapanese army were handed over to Chiang. On top of this 56,000 US marines joined the KMT armies as advi-sors. Between 1945 and 1948, the US gave Chiang somethree billion dollars in direct cash aid.13

With this support Chiang's armies rapidly gainedcontrol of former Soviet Areas,even including their cap-

ital,Venan, as the CCP withdrew before them.

This policy of retreat did allow the CCP to avoidgreat losses and to regroup in Northern China. DespiteUSwarnings of the consequences, Chiang followed theretreating communist forces, thereby severely over-stretching his lines of su pply and communication. Inpreparation for what would be the final offensive of thecivil war, the CCP now reintroduced land reform whichhad been held back during the agreements with theKMT. Although the expropriation of the landlords wasmost extensive in the communist held North, it was notconfined to this area, and was not, even in the North

entirely under Communist control.In June 1947, the CCP led People’s Liberation Army

(PLA) now reinforced with new recruits and the Japanesearmaments seized by the armies of the Soviet Unionwhen they entered Manchuria in 1945,abandoned guer-rilla warfare and began to advance southwards. By thistime disaffection had penetrated into the KMT itself. Anumber of prominent generals, such as Li Jishen had leftthe KMT and fled to Hong Kong, there to establish theRevolutionary Committee of the KMT on a programmeof coalition with the CCP to oust Chiang and the estab-lishment of a republic based on a mixed economy.

Indeed, General George Marshall, the US specialenvoy, expressed the opinion that,”No amount of mili-

tary or economic aid could make the present ChineseGovernment capable of re-establishing and then main-taining its control over China.”14 Dem onstrations andstrikes swept all of Na ti onali st China at this time. InShanghai, a virtual general strike raged as workersfought to maintain a sliding scale of wages to protectthem from hyperinflation. The price index that hadbeen 100 in 1937 rose to the staggering level of 10,300,000 by mid-1947 and was to continue upwardsuntil it reached 287 million before the final victory of

the CCP/PLA in 1949.

KMT repression kept pace with the escalating mili-tancy and inflation:

“Suspected communists and others believed to be

conspiring against the state were dragged before drum

head courts and then out to some public place to be

shot through the back of the head. Scenes of this kind

were a daily occurrence in Shanghai, the busiest street

corners being invariably chosen for the execution of

the victims, who were nearly all young men.” 15

At the same time the corruption of the Four Great

Families (the Soong,Kung, Chen and Chiang familiesowned a large proportion of modern industry in China)became ever more blatant. In October 1947, one of Chiang’s principal economic advisers (and brother-in-law) T. V. Soong, bought the governorship of CantonProvince with a donation of ten million dollars to theKMT (of which, of course, he was a leading member).Are s o lut i on passed by the Na ti onal Federa ti on of Chamber of Commerce in November 1948 summed upthe feelings of those capitalists who were excluded fromthe inner circle of the KMT:

“ . . . our people have lost confidence in our govern-

ment leaders who are only interested in their personal

gain at the expense of public welfare.We businessmen

stand firm and united in fighting against corruption

and despotism."16

In a clear attempt to win over the petty bourgeoisieof the cit ies and to hold back the tide of peasant revolt,the CCP reversed its policy on expropriation of thelandlords. In a report to the Central Committee inDecember 1947, Mao criticised the land reform alreadytaking place as,“Ultra left and adventurist.” In Februaryand May 1948, furt her directives were issued whichcalled for greater moderation in the newly conqueredareas of central China. The movement for land reform

was stopped entirely when the CCP/PLA took control of Southern China where the landlords were, traditionally,verly closely connected to the urban bourgeoisie.

On 1 May 1948, the Central Committee of the CCPformally called upon all anti-Chiang parties to take partin a new Political Consult ative Conference at which theform of a future coalition government could be dis-cussed and decided upon. The call was primarily aimedat the Revolutionary Committee of the KMT and theDemocratic League.17 Both these parti es accepted theinvitation and preliminary work began. An agreementwas signed in November 1948 which provided for a

preparatory committee to be established prior to theconvening of a national conference.


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The Chinese degenerat e w ork ers’ st ate

By Spring 1949, the PLA had reconquered China Northof the Yangzi river. After the collapse of the KMT armiesin Manchuria in late 1948, most KMT-held territoryand towns were surrendered without any fighting. FuTso-yi, for example,surrendered Peking in January 1949as soon as the PLA advanced towards the city, indeed, he joined them in the march South.

In April 1949, after the expiry of a last deadline for

Nationalist surrender, the PLA crossed the Yangzi andentered South China.

They met little resistance and disarmed some twomillion KMT troops in a period of six months. InSeptember, the Political Consultative Conference met inPeking and established a central government headed byMao Zedong, leader of the CCP, Zhu De, a principalcommander of the PLA, Soong Ching-ling (the widowof Sun Yat-sen and sister in law of Chiang Kai-shek), LiJishen, leader of the Revolutionary Committee of theKMT (and the butcher of the Canton Commune in1927) and Zhang Lan, President of the Democratic

League.The CCP had achieved its aim of establishing a pop-

ular front coalition government. Mao Zedong had out-lined the policy that such a government would follow in1945:

“The task of our New Democratic system is to pro-

mote the free development of a private capitali st econ-

omy that benefits instead of controlling the peoples’

livelihood, and to protect all honestly acquired private

property.”18

This was the policy which was followed between1949 and 1952, which meant both defending capitalism

and containing and if necessary repressing the demandsof the workers and peasants. When in 1952 the CCPdecisively struck out at the bourgeoisie, expropriatingtheir property, it was a moment not of the CCP’schoosin. It was a vital defensive measure forced on theStalinists by the onslaught of US imperialism. As Maowas to declare in 1957 “socialism”:“came to our countrytoo suddenly.” 19

The economic li fe of China at the time of the acces-sion to power of this government was only one stepaway from complete paralysis. The collapse of the cen-tral administration, soaring inflation and the displace-

ment of millions of people from the areas of militaryoperations were accompanied by floods and droughtsthat affected 20 million acres and threatened 40 millionpeople with starvation. Coal production stood at 50 percent of its previous highest point, iron and steel weredown by 80 per cent, cotton goods down by 25 per cent,grain 25 per cent, raw cotton 48 per cent and livestock16 per cent.

To make matters yet worse the railway network wasout of operation with 50 per cent of the track destroyedand most of the mari time fleet was in Hong Kong,Taiwan or Singapore.20 The first priority of the People's

G overn m ent was ex pre s s ed in the Com m onProgramme of October 1949:

“A policy that is concerned with private and public

interests, that benefi ts the bosses and the workers, that

encourages mutual aid between our country and for-

eign countries in order to develop production and

bring prosperity to the economy.” 21

In other words, the existing framework of capitalistproperty relations was to be maintained. The policy of tolerance and encouragement extended to the “nation-al” capitalists was not extended to the “bureaucratic”capitalists. Their possessions were immediately nation-alised, giving the state control of nearly one-third of allindustr ial production.

While the state had majority holdings in heavyindustry (70 per cent of coal, 90 per cent of steel and 78per cent of electricity)22 heavy industry was historicallychronically underdeveloped in relation to light industry,much of which was often dependent on imported mate-rials.23 It was in light industry that the “national” capi-talists now dominated along with the distribution andtransport networks. This group owned two-thirds of allindustr ial capital in 1949.24

The modern sector of the economy was, however, asmall percentage of the economy as a whole. In 1945 ithad been calculated at between 10 and 15 per cent.25

Largely because of its years of control in the “liberatedzones” the CCP/PLA already had within it a relativeexperienced administrative cadre. However, with thepartial exception of those who had been in Manchuriathis cadre lacked experience of urban and industrialadministration. This lack was partly made up by theentry into the CCP of ex-officials of the KMT regimeand educated elements of the middle classes in the cities.At the time of liberation, a sample of 6,000 cadres hadthe following composition: 2,500 middle class, 1,150 ex-

KMT officials, 400 liberal professionals,150 members of the privileged classes, 140 from the working class.26

Workers made up a mere 2 per cent of party mem-bers in 1949.27 With a membership of this sort it waspossible for the CCP-dominated government to takestate capitalist economic measures such as nationalisa-tion and statification,primarily aimed at the universallyhated “bureaucratic” capitalists,so long as this remainedwithin the general framework of capitalist propertyrelations.

In March 1949, the state formed six major tradingcorporations for the distribution and procurement of

Food, Textiles, Salt, Coal, Construction materials and“miscellaneous” goods. In addition, a network of stateowned retail outlets was established. These two mea-sures, coupled with the introduction of a new currency,a sliding-scale of wages linked to the monetary value of essential foods, an enforced loan at 5 per cent interestfrom capitalists and the state distribution of goods thathad been hoarded by the KMT and its supporters,a ll owed a rapid improvement in the living conditions of the masses and brought inflation under control. Bymid-1951 it was down to 20 per cent and prices wereessentially stable in 1952.

That, despite this statification of essentials, the pop-ular front government was anxious not to scare the


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“national” bourgeoisie into fleeing,can be seen from theassurances given them by Chen Yun the Chairman of the Financial and Economic Commission, in August1950, “ . . . i ndustrial investments undertaken for a longtime by the national capitalists, if they remain progres-sive in character, will be useful to the state and the peo-ple.”28 The Agrarian Reform of June 1950 shows thesame clear intention of maintaining friendly relationswith the capitalists in order to maintain production.Article 4, dealing with whose lands could or could not

be expropriated, said:

“ Industry and commerce shall be protected from

infrin gement, industrial and commercial enterprises

operated by landlords, and the land and other proper-

ti es used by the landlords directly for the operation of

industrial and commercial enterprises, shall not be

confiscated.” 29

The new land reform was only applicable in thesouth where, as we have noted, the ties between land-lords and the urban bourgeoisie were stronger than inthe north. In addition to the strictures on landlords’lands,it was also expressly forbidden to confiscate all the“surplus” lands of the wealthiest peasants and that of the“richer middle peasants” was to be left alone entirely.Mao explained why at the third session of the CentralCommittee, 6 June 1950:

“. . . our policy towards the rich peasants ought to be

changed. Their excess land must no longer be confis-

cated, but their life must be preserved to speed up the

restoration of production in rural areas.”30

Despite these limitations imposed by the state, theland reform did involve a massive transfer of land inSouth China,some 7 mill ion acres out of a Chinese totalof 17 million. On average all individuals over sixteenheld one-third of an acre after the reform.31 As in thecountry generally,so in the cities the chief priority of thenew government was to re-establish order Far from util-ising the entry of the Liberation Army to ensure a pro-letarian takeover of the towns and industrial plant, UnBiao, commander of the Fourth Army, issued the fol-lowing proclamation in January 1949:

“The people are asked to maintain order and to con-

tinue their present occupations. KMT officials or

police personnel of provincial, city, county or other

level of governmental unit distri ct , town, village, or

Bao Jia personnel32 are en joined to stay at their posts”.33

In addition, whilst granting statutory rights to work-ers’ organisations the People’s Government showed inits Labour Law of 1950 that its interest lay solely in reg-ularising the labour-capital relationship, not in abolish-ing it. With regard to disputes, for example, it laid downthe fo ll owing procedures:

“ the first step in procedure for sett ling labour disputes

shall be consultation between the parties the second

step shall be mediation between the parties by the

Labour Bureau [a state department-Eds] and the third

step shall be arbitration by the arbitration committee

established by the Labour Bureau.” 34

The nature of the unions set up by the government,

and modelled on those of the Soviet Union, can be judged from the fact that one of the Vice Chairmen of the All China Federation of Trade Unions was ChuXuefan, previously the head of the yellow unions of theKMT, the Association of Labour.35 In addition, theMinister of Labour, U Lisan was simultaneously vice-president of the ACFTU. The Chairman of this bodymade perfectly clear what the priorities of the govern-ment were:

“The immediate and sectional interests of the working

class must be subordinated to the long term and over

all interests of the state led by the working class.” 36

That “ subordination” was to be taken absolutely lit-erally was shown by Un Biao when he sent his troopsagainst the workers of the Sun Sun Textile plant inShanghai who had occupied their plant to prevent itsremoval to Manchuria, under the government’s policyof thinning out industry. Ten workers were killed orwounded in the clash.37 While capitalist representativesshared the government with the CCP,between 1949 and1951 and the policy of that government was clearly todefend capitalism, the repressive apparatus of the state-the police, army, secret police etc., remained firmly inthe hands of the Stalinists.

This special form of dual power already witnessed inEastern Europe and Yugoslavia, continued to exist untilit was resolved decisively against the capitalists. Thepopular front period played an important role for theChinese Stalinists in demobilising the aroused workersand peasants. At the time when capitalism was at itsweakest and the mobilisations of the workers and peas-ants at their strongest, the CCP acted to limit thosemobilisations and to restrain them within the limits of capitalist property relations. The dangers of this policy

of maintaining and strengthening the capitalists swiftlybecame apparent. The utopian goal of the Stalinists – astable New Democ racy where capitalists and Stalinistsworked in harm ony was never a po s s i bi l i ty. Th eonslaught of American imperialism in the Korean warproduced a growing threat of capitalist counter-revolu-tion inside China amongst sections of the remainingbourgeoisie. America and Chiang Kai Shek were readyto act as their heavily armed allies.

This forced the CCP towards the close of 1951 tomove swiftly to resolve the situation of dual power in itsfavour through a bureaucratic, anti-capitalist workers’

government. As in the other Stalinist social overturnsthis necessitated striking out at both the capitalists andsuppressing the last remnants of the independent work-ers’ movement.

The immediate cause of the change of policy and,eventually, the nature, of the government, was the out-break of the Korean war in June 1950. As Americanarmies (supposedly UN) advanced towards the YaluRiver (the border between Manchuria and Korea) underthe rabid anti-communist, MacArthur, the People’sGovernment was forced to change its policy both i nter-nationally and domestically.

The initial victories of the PLA under Peng Dehuai,which forced the USback beyond the 38th parallel, were


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met by Washington with the rearmament of ChiangKai-shek and the delivery of considerable economic aidto Taiwan. The US Seventh Fleet took up stati onbetween Taiwan and the mainland, thereby forcing theChinese to divert troops from Korea to the coastalprovince of Fu jian. In addition a total economic block-ade of China was instituted.The New York Times ,5 April1951, reported that, “MacArthur favours a Nationalistsecond front on the Chinese mainland and is convincedthat the fate of Europe will be decided in the war against

communism in Asia.” 38 Now, under both economic andmilitary pressure from imperialism and fully aware of the potential alliance between foreign, Taiwan based anddomestic capital, the CCP took steps to mobilise themasses against the “national” capitalists. In the country-side, the Agrarian Reform was accompanied by thebuilding of the People's Tribunals, organised by theParty cadres with the purpose of applying a degree of terror and intimidation to the landlords. Although thecampaign was limited to the terms of the AgrarianReform, the wave of executions, fines and expropria-tions both broke the class power of the landlords and

served to bind the peasantry yet closer to the regime.At the same time the control of the CCP ensured

that this did not go beyond its own predetermined lim-itations. Indeed, so bureaucratic was the procedure forratifying redistribution of land that, in Canton provinceit still had not been completed by December 1952.39 Aparall el movement was set in train in the cities for sim-ilar purposes. The so called “three anti’s” campaign,introduced alongside the “ five anti’s” campaign at theend of 1951, was aimed at CCP and government func-ti on a ri e s . The masses of members who had beenrecruited to the CCP on the basis of its popular front

programme, were now considered unreliable – a mas-sive purge took place in the party, involving the expul-sion of over one million members (a fifth of the party)between 1951 and 1952.40 It was also in this period thatthe Stalinists stru ck out against the lef t . Ch i ne s eTro t s kyi s t s , m a ny mem bers of the 'ntern a ti on a l i s tWorkers Party had been active leading str ikes in Cantonand Shanghai.They had suffered repression before 1952at the hands of the CCP, but at the end of that year anation wide raid by the secret police completely deci-mated the Chinese Trotskyists – two or three hundredwere thrown into ga o l41. Le ading mem bers Chen gCh’ao-Un and eleven others were only released 27 years

later in June 1979.42 The “Five anti’s” campaign whichran parallel with the “three” was aimed at weakeningand intimidating the bourgeoisie. Mass meetings wereheld throughout the country to whip up feelings againstthe capitalists. Businesses were investigated for fraudand corruption. In the first six months of 1952 nearlyhalf a million businesses were inspected and over threequarters found guilty of infractions.43

Many were heavily fined, contributing $850m tostate coffers.Those who could not pay were nationalisedinstead. By these bureaucratic methods, albeit backedup by mass mobilisations and denunciation sessions,

the CCP-led government, a bureaucratic anti- capitalistworkers’ government came to control 64 per cent of

wholesale trade and 42 per cent of retail trade by mid1952.44 Initially, this led to a fall in production as thebourgeoisie retaliated by closing down plants. BetweenJanuary and February 1952, at the height of the cam-paign, production fell by 34 per cent and the state wasobliged to slow down the campaign.45

Once again Chen Yun offered reassurance: “Privatefactories will, according to concrete conditions, be guar-anteed a profit of around 10,20 or up to 30 per cent ontheir capital.”46 Once again private capital survived inChina, but i t was now severely curtailed in its freedom,state control of orders placed with private industry, forexample, was a powerful weapon for ensuring that thecapitalists did not step out of line.47 This respite wasshort lived however and in 1953 at a government con-vened National Congress of Industry and Commercethe remaining capitalists were told that the first aim of the government was to have a fully socialist economy inwhich pr ivate industry would have no place.48

After 1951 primarily under pressure from imperial-ism, the popular front government was transformedinto a bureaucratic, anti-capitalist workers’ governmentwhich removed the foundations of the class rule of thecapitalists, “not by decree but by relentless, high-pres-sure gradualism”. In this way it ensured that its primeen emy, the indepen den t ly or ga n i s ed revo lut i on a ryworking class, remained firmly excluded from politicalpower within China. Because the fundamental bastionof the bourgeois state – its bodies of armed men – hadalready been smashed, the CCP was able to carry out themilitary-bureaucratic overthrow of the Chinese bour-geoisie relatively peacefully.

It was against a background of economic blockade bythe West, ma jority state control of heavy industry and

effective control of trade in the modern sector that thegovernment of the People's Republic moved against theessential foundations of capitalism with the introductionof planning in 1953. At first this took the form of annu-al plans for 1953 and 1954, these were then incorporatedinto,and used as a basis for, the First Five Year Plan 1953-57. This was not published until late 1955.

The introduction of planning in 1953 on the clearbasis of subordinating the operation of the law of value,marks the establishment of a degenerate workers’state inChina. The plan was modelled on the Five Year Plans of the Soviet Union. Planners exhorted plant managers to

take careful heed of the “advanced experience” of theSoviet system. The ability of the plan to even begin theindustrialisation of China was, in a large measure,due tothe aid provided by the USSR. Since 1950 China hadbeen in receipt of an annual $300m loan from the SovietUnion. In March 1953 this was added to by a commer-cial agreement with the USSR, supplying China withmany of the materials necessary for industr ial expansion.

The plan revealed the dynamic lodged within thepost capitalist property forms,and,at the same time, theway in which the bureaucracy acts as a fetter on the fullrealisation of this dynamic. The bureaucracy claimed

that 1953 saw a 13 per cent increase in industr ial outputover the 1952 level, while in 1954 output rose a further


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17 per cent higher than the total for 1953.

However, the exclusion of the masses from politicalcontrol of the plan meant that these advances wereundermined by the bureaucracy’s tendency to planblind. In 1955, when the collection of statistical datatook place on a national scale, the figures often dis-guised the problems of the plan. In 1956 these su rfaced.On March 18th 1956 the People’s Daily was forced toadmit that only just over 50 per cent of the capital con-struction programme had been fulfilled. Shortages, par-ticularly in construction materials, began to block thefulfilment of targets. Inflationary pre ssures mountedand the bureaucracy was forced to reduce its targets inheavy industry.

As usual with bureaucratic plans the fulfilment of targets did not mean that the goods produced were of ahigh quality.

The tyranny of the “target” in fact meant that work-ers often took little care with their products, and endedup producing shoddy goods, but at a faster rate! Thesefeatures of bureaucratic planning have been apparent in

the Chinese economy since 1953.They are an inevitableproduct of a regime under which the working class isexcluded from political power. In China the economicpower of the bourgeoisie was destroyed,bureaucratical-ly, through induced bankruptcies and, after 1955, bystate purchases of ma jority shareholdings. In 1956 themodern sector of the Chinese economy was virtually100 per cent nationalised, and the bourgeoisie as a classwas eliminated. But perched at the top of this workers’state was a Stalinist bureaucracy, ruling over the work-ing class.

The independent base of the CCP, built up overyears of war, provided the Chinese Stalinists with themeans to pursue their own policy, independently of Stalin, at certain decisive moments. This did not meanthat the CCP was not Stalinist.

It merely confirmed the ability of certain indigenousStalinist parties to prosecute Stalinist polices in spite of the wishes of the Kremlin. The initial hosti lity of Stalinto Mao’s seizure of power was in reality a hostility to anindependent Stalinist force, similar to Tito's YCP. TheSino-Soviet split in 1963 brought these hostilities oncemore to the surface. It il lustrated the tendency of Stalinism to fracture along national social patrioticlines. In no way was it a sign of the CCP’s transforma-

tion into a non-Stalinist party.

Footnotes

1. I.Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biogra phy , (Harmondsworth 1966) p.577 23.

Chesnaux, op.cit. p 45.

2. D.Mountfield, The Partisans, (London 1979) pp.131-4 24. Ibid,p48.

3. M.D jilas, Conversations with Stalin , (Harmondsworth 1963) p.17 and p.54

4. Ibid, p.68 26. Ibid, P 10.

5.Quoted by Germain i n, The Yugoslav question , T he Q uest ion of th e Sov iet Buffer

Zone and the ir I m plications for M arxist T heory

6.Ibid,p.34

7. For Pablo’s most thorough exposition see M.Pablo,“On the Class

Nature of Yugoslavia”, In ternational In form ation Bulletin

8. Quoted in S.R.Schram, The Political Thou ght of Mao Tse Tung system,9. Ibid,

p 228..

10. F. Claudin, From Com intern to Com in form (Harmondsworth 1975)

11.Ibid,p 551.

12. H.A. McAleavy, A M odern History of China (New York 1967) p 320.

13.J. Chesnaux, F. Le Barbier, Marie-Claire Bergere, China from . ?

14.A. Thornton, China: The Struggle for Power (1976) p 210.

15.McAleavy op. cit. p

16. Cited in Y. Gluckstein, M ao' s Ch in a (London 1957) p 192.

17. The Democratic League was formed duri ng the war to oppose the corrup-

tion and authoritarianism of the KMT.Originally based on intellectuals and the

professional classes, it had some 50,000 members by 1949

18. Quoted in C. Brandt., D ocum en t ary Hi s tory of Ch inese Com m unism

(Cambridge. Mass. 1952) p 303.

19.J. Chesnaux, China: T he People's Repu blic 1949-76 (Sussex 1979) 1951

20. Ibid p 17. 1953 63

21.Ibid, p 9.1954 79

22. In 1937 only about 9 per cent of the industrial resources of China could be

classified as capital or heavy industry. Most of this was concentrated in

Manchuria - see Hughes and Luard, The Economic Development of China 1949.

Ecksteln op. cit. p 217. .

23 [FIND}

24

25.Ibid,P 19.

26

27.A. Eckstein, China's Econom ic Revol u tion (Cambridge 1977) p 168

28. Gluckstein, op. cit. p 89.

29. J.Guillermaz, The Chinese Com munist Party in Power (Westview 1976). p 26

(New York 1949)

30. Eckstein op. cit. P 68

31.Gluckstein op. cit. p 212.

and M.Pablo,"Yugoslavia and the Rest of the Buffer Zone", ibid (New York,1950)

32. The Bao Jia was the name of the KMT secret police and their net work of

inforners modelled on the Nazi (and Stalinist) model, i.e. one informer per

housing block.

(Harmondsworth 1969) p 230.

33. Gluckstein, op.cit. p 214.p 551,

34.Ibid, P 235

35.Ibid,p 235.

36.Ibid,P 235.

37.C.L.Liu,“China,An Aborted Revolution” in Fourth International (New York

January / February 1950) p 6.

38.H. Foster Snow, The Chinese Com m unists (Westport Connecticut

Revolution to Liberation (Sussex 1977) p 331. 1972) P 385.39. Gluckstein op.ci.t. p 92.

40. Chesnaux, Op. Clt. P 35. .

41.Wang Fan. HSI, Chinese Revolu tio nary (Oxford 1980).

42. In terconti n ental Press (New York October 1st 1979).

43. Chesnaux, Op cit. p 50.

44. Gluckstem op.cit. p 197 .

45. The percentages of private sector output ordered by the state were:

1950: 29, 1952: 56, 1955: 82 (Cited by Gluckstein, op.cit. p 197).

46. Figures from Guillermaz op. cit.

47. ?1960 (London 1961) p 15.

48.Hughes and Luard op. cit. p 91.


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For over thirty years the Vi etnamese masses stru g-gl ed against imperiali st control of their co un try -

by the Ja p a n es e , the Bri ti s h , the Fren ch and theAmericans. This pro tracted anti-i m perialist struggl eended with the creation of a degenerate workers’ s ta tein Vietnam. The heroic stru ggle of the Vietna me s emasses influ en ced a secti on of the Trotskyist move-m ent to ignore the counter-revolution ary nature of t heStalinist leadership of this stru ggle.

Du ring the 1970s the majori ty of the Un i tedSec reta riat of the Fourth Intern ational (USFI) deni edthat the Vi etnamese Communist Party (VCP) was

Stalinist and opposed the programme of po li tical rev-o luti on for North Vi etna m .1 Ernest Man del argued:

“Because for us the Yugo sl av, Chi nes e , Vietnam ese,

Korean revo lut i on a ries are distorted socialist revo lu-

tions led by bureaucrati cally distorted working clas s

parties we prefer not to call the parties which led

these revoluti ons ‘Stalinist Parties’” 2

The USFI’s Vietnam “expert” Pi erre Rou sset takesthis point further:

“O f a ll these parties’ [ i. e. Yu go slavi an , Greek andChinese – eds] the Vietnamese has travell ed furthest inthe directi on of a rediscovery of the principles of

Ma rx i s m” 3

However, the history of the VCP in the co urse of this struggle , and the nature of the social revolutionsthat have occurred in Vietnam, stand in sharp con tra-di ction to this opportunist assessment by the USFI.The Vietnamese revolut i ons were carr ied throu gh andbetrayed by a thoro u gh ly Stalinist leadersh ip.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second Worl dWar as the Japanese armies retrea ted from Vietnam theS ta li nist-led re sis ta n ce movement - the Vietminh -took power.

The Vietminh, whose full t it le, “ The Vietnam DocLap Dong Mi n h”, means the League for theIndepen dence of Vi etn am , was fou nded by the VCP,under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh in May 1941. Itwas a classic popular front em bracing bou rgeois andpetit bour geois nati on a li s t s , and announced a pro-gramme str i ctly limited to national independence. TheVCP even dropped its slogan of “Land to the Till ers” inorder to woo the bourgeois nationa li s t s , it su pportedthe Alli ed war effort – supp lying the Americans andBri tish with inform a ti on about Japanese movements -and received aid and wea pons from Chiang Kai Shekand the Am erican Office of Stra tegic Services.

In the North it was in con trol by 20 August 1945and then after out manoeuvring the South ern Un ited

National Front (whi ch cons isted of various nati on alistgrou pi ngs and a section of the Vi etnamese Tro t s kyis tmovem ent) it establis h ed a “ Provi si onal Exec uti veCom m ittee of So uth Vi etna m” in Sai gon. The inde-pen dent and united Dem oc ra ti c Repu blic of Vi etn amwas declared by Ho Chi Minh on 2 September, at thist i m e , a p a rt from the armies of the Stalinist- ledVi etm inh , no coercive state appa ra tus exi s ted.

The Fren ch had been disarm ed by the Japanese in1 945 . The Japanese forces were in comp lete disarray.The British expedi ti on ary force that was to re - e st abl ishorder on beh al f of the French had not yet arrived .Thus

the Vi etmin h, as a re sult of the “August Revo lut i on”were in total con tro l. Yet in these extremely adva nta-geous circ um st an ces the VCP proceeded to attack theVietnamese working cla ss, th eir revolutionary leaders(the Trot skyists) and lay the basis for a pact with impe-rialism that reopen ed In do - China to imperi a l i s tarmies of occu pation for another 30 years. Such a his-toric betrayal underlines the Stalinist natu re of t h eVC P. It reveals it as a co un terrevo luti ona ry party.

The August Revolution, at least in the So ut h , a ndp art i c ula rly in Saigon posed the objective po ssi bil ity of the crea ti on of a healthy workers state in Vi etn am .

Fo llowing the defeat of the Jap an e se, the workers in theSouth, often acting under Trot skyist leadershi p4 estab-l ished some 150 “Peoples Com m it tees”, these comm it-tees or ga nised many thousands of workers, th ey wereembryonic Soviet s.5 Th ey stood as a potential govern-m ental altern ative, and thus a second power, to theVi etminh coalition (wi th the ex - Em peror Bao Daiinclu ded in i t by Ho!) The spectre of in dependen tworking class power terrified the Stalinists.Their pro-

j ect was for a nego ti ated sett lem ent with imperia li sm ,a i m ed merely at the guara n tee of i n depen den ce .Bour geois property and the bou r geois state in Vietna mwere to remain intact. As the Stalinist leader in the

South, N g uyen Van Tao decla red :

“Our government I repeat is a dem oc ra tic and mid-

dle class government, even though the Com muni s t s

a re now in power.” 6

Thus , i n s te ad of basing themselves on the Peop lesCommi ttees, t hey proceeded to smash them. Ho Ch iMinh based the con s ti tut i on of his Dem oc ra ti cRepublic on the bo u rgeois Am eri can Declara ti on of Indepen dence (it opened with a sentence from thatDecl a ra ti on foreshadowing similar ut terances fromFi del Castro). Five days after this decl ara tion by Ho,the Stalinists issu ed a decree on 7 September , outl aw-

ing all arm ed bodies except their own. This was a directatt ack on the armed workers .

Vietnam’s long revolut ion: ahistory of war, compromiseand bet rayal

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Ten days after the decl aration of independen ce on12 September 1945, the Stalinists welcomed GeneralGracey, chief of the British ex ped itionary force, in toVi etn am . In order to forestall organised working cla s sresi st an ce to this treach ery, the Stalinists arrested andmu rdered the leaders of both the Tro ts kyist or ga n i s a-ti on s . The Peoples Com mit tees, robbed of t h eir lead-ers , were effectively cru s h ed by the Bri ti sh and thenewly-retu rned French in heavy figh ting in Sa igon.

The Stalinists’ bloody servi ces earn ed them litt lethanks from the imperialis ts . Prepa ring for the returnof Fren ch troops to Vietnam was always the aim of theBri t is h. G en eral Gracey had brought some Frenchtroops with him. He armed French troops who hadbeen interned by the Japanese decla red martial law inSai gon, forbade publica ti on of Vi etnamese languagepapers and allowed French troops and officials to takeover all Vietminh -h eld public bu il dings in Sai gon on23 September. Having crus hed the Sa igon resi st an ce tothis restoration the Bri ti sh then stood aside leaving aclear field for the French Gen eral Lecl erc to launch ac a m p a i gn for the recon quest of the whole of

In dochi n a.Thus the Stalinist collabora ti on with the British

resu lted , in effect, in handing the South over to theFren ch . The attem pt to prevent this in October 1945was doom ed .The Sai gon rising called by the Vi etm inhwas abortive and the Fren ch, British and -Japa ne setroop s, rearm ed by the Bri ti s h, quickly massacredm any of the insur gen ts . Ho, s ti ll in control in theNort h, then compounded his earli er treach ery by see k-ing a negotia ted pact with the French . The fruit of thi swas the 6 Ma rch 1946 agreement with the Fren chwh ich allowed them (with 25,000 troops) to enter

Han oi and the North . Having ga ined this en ormousadvant age the French repaid Ho by shelling the north-ern port of Hai phong in November 1946, del iberatelyprovoking the Vi etminh into war. Only wh en given noo t her opti on by imperiali sm did Ho sanction a wara gainst the French by the Vietminh – a cos tly war maden eces sary by the actions of the Stalinists in Augu s tSeptember of 19 45.

Ho Chi Mi nh negot iat es defeat

From the March set tlement throu gh to the shell ing of Ha iphon g,Ho had been busy negotiating. In May 1946

he went to Pa ris in a bid to sec ure a referen dum oni ndepen dence in the South . The status of the So ut hh ad been the outstanding problem in nego tia tion swith Fra nce since March. In September Ho and theSocialist Mini ster of Overseas Fran ce, Ma rius Mo ulet,s igned a “m odus vivendi ” in a bid to keep the nego ti a-ti ons open De spite this, the French imperi ali sts had nointention of giving up their “ ri gh t” to Vietna m. InNovember, fo ll owing the form a ti on of an army, underVa Nguyen Giap by Ho, the Fren ch Gen eral in Saigon– Va ll ay – tel ephon ed the Fren ch com m a n der inHa i ph ong and gave him the foll owing message:

“Attempts at conciliation ... are out of seas on. Themoment has come to give a severe lesson to those

who have treacherously attacked yo u . Use all the

means at your disposal to make you rself com plete

mas ter of Haiphong and so bring the Vietn a mes e

army around to a better understanding of the situa-

tion.” 7

On 23 November 1946, the town was shell ed andsome 20,000 Vi etnamese were ki ll ed . Desp ite this, on20 December Ho made yet another appeal (to LeonBlum) for nego ti a ti on s . However, it is unl ikely that theappeal reach ed him – the Fren ch generals held it up inSa igon. Ho was thus forced into a war of l iberation bythe imperial is ts .

These events demonstrate clearly that it is not thecase that the Stalinists will inevitably carry through asocial overturn whenever their repressive apparatusholds sway,and that of the capitalists has disintegrated.

Th ere are two major rea sons for this Vietnames eva riant on the pattern el sewh ere after the establ ish-ment of the armed hegem ony of the Stalinists. Firs t ly,the Soviet bureau cracy had agreed to French imperi al-ism’s claims for the re-e s t ablishm ent of its co l on i a l

power in Indoch ina. Vietna m, l ike Greece, h ad beendef ini tively signed over to imperialism by the Kremlin .The imperialists could act with conf idence to re - estab-lish their state app a ra tu s , knowing that the Sovietbu rea u c racy would not re si s t .

The second re a s on was that the Vi etn a m e s eStalinists could not break with Stalin’s plans – as hadthe YCP and the CCP (however parti ally) .This was duein the last analysis to the strength of the Vietnames eworking cl ass . Far more immed iately than in Ch inaand Yugos lavia , the Stalinists were faced wi th the rea lthreat of the establishm ent of genuine workers’ power.Their influence was rivalled by that of the Tro ts kyists,at least in the So uth. To have resi sted the re-in troduc-ti on of imperialist troops would have unleashed forcesthat the Stalinists would not have been able to contai n .The Stalinist programme for the pol itical expropria-tion of the working class had to be carried through inbloody alliance with imperial is m.

The Vietnamese experi ence in 1945-46 shows howut terly false it is to beli eve that the Stalinists are com-pell ed by some sort of objecti ve process to econ om i-ca lly and pol itically expropria te the bourgeois ie. I t iscom pletely false to ch aracterise any regime wi t hi nwhich the Stalinists have achieved armed hegem ony as

a workers’ state, or even a workers’ st ate in the processof form ati on . This posi ti on pre sumes that Stalinism isinevit ably compell ed to establi sh workers’ states and istherefore both expan s ionist and progre ssive.

In the war that raged from the end of 1946 throughto Ju ly 1954, the Vietminh pursued a strategy identi c alto that of Mao’s CCP/PLA. The Vietminh wit h drew itsforces from the cities and began a str i ct ly rural guerr i l-la war, leaving the small but, as 1945 had shown , stra te-gi c ally important working class of Vietnam in centre sli ke Sai gon, at the mercy of the French. It is true thatthe north ern cit i e s, es pecially Han oi, were return ed to

the Fren ch only after very fierce figh ti n g. However,once defea ted in the cit ies , the Vietminh made no fur-


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t her attem pt to base their war effort in any way on theu rban pop ul ati on ,u nti l they had actua lly ach ieved vic-tory.

Agai n , as in the war against the Ja pa nes e , t heStalinists fou ght on a purely nationalist progra mme.The struggle was called a “na ti onal dem oc ra ti c” strug-gle and Ho repe ated many times that his aim was unityand independence on a capitalist basis and under thea usp ices of a coalition regime. In deed , in the areas lib-erated by the Vietminh land reform – the crying needof the peasants who supported Ho’s army – was notgran ted unt il 1953.

The appeal of n ati onalism was very real in a cou n-try wh ich had been directly con trolled by the Fren chsince 1888. This domi na ti on squ ee zed every section of Vi etnamese soci ety including the national bourgeois iewhi ch controlled only 5 per cent of private capital inVietna m, and that mainly in the low profit agricultur-al sector.

In the cou rse of the war the Stalinist leadership of the Vietmi nh, the VCP maintained them s elves and

t heir army by means of a tax on agri c u l tu ral producein the libera ted area s . The Vi etminh levied such a taxt wi ce a yea r. It had 41 scales, ranging from 5 per centto 45 per cent, depending on income . A trade tax( m ax imum of 28 per cent on net profi ts) was alsolevi ed . The Party bra nch in each vi ll a ge was responsi-ble for the co ll ection of taxes. They were also able toretain a porti on of the taxes co llected to use for loc alpu rposes .

During the 1956 Rectifi ca tion of E rrors campaign ,m any party cadres admi tted to having “persuaded”peasants to pay more tax than they should have done .This taxati on sys tem was crucial in explaining the crys-ta ll i sa ti on of a Stalinist bureau c racy in adva n ce of thec re a ti on of a degenerate workers’ st ate in Vi etn am .

This bu re aucratic caste had at its head Ho ChiMinh,Va Nguyen Giap, Pham Van Dong,Hoang QuocVet and Tru ong Chinh the establish ed leadership of t h eVCP since the 1930s. Their bri ef en joym ent of govern-m ent in 1945 had wh et ted the appeti te of t h e s eburea ucrats for power, their depen dence on a tax onthe peasants who su pported them and their Vi etm in ha rmy provi ded a materi al base for the res tora tion of that power. Th eir programme was aimed at achi evi nggovern mental power, but not at smashing capitalism

and the capitalist state in Vietnam.They were genu ine-ly willing to co-exist with capitalism. Upon achi evi ngpower, however, the brutal real ities of imperialis mexpo s ed this proj ect as not only a re actionary one, butalso an absolute utopia.

Fren ch imperialism em er ged from the Secon dWorld War a consi dera bly wea kened world power.Their re-entry into Vi etnam was only as a re sult of Bri tish intervention and a guaran tee of n on - interven-tion by the Sovi et Un i on . Their early vi ctories were acon sequence of the Vietm inh’s self - defeating tre acheryto the working class and the Vietnamese People in

19 45. However, by the late 1940s the French werebeginning to lose the war. A series of defeats enabl ed

the Vi etminh to launch an offens ive in 1950.

The ability to launch this offensive was grea t lyf ac i l i ta ted by the victory of Mao in Chin a, who of fi-c i a lly recogn i s ed Ho’s Dem oc ra tic Rep u blic of Vi etnam on 16 Ja nu a ry 1950 and su pp l i ed theVietminh with arms . Moscow only recogni s ed theD RV after Mao had – on 31 January. No significant aidto the Vi etminh was forthcoming from Mos cow. Th eoffensive was however defe ated because in May the USdecided to give military aid to the French. An xiou safter Mao’s victory they were very concerned to keepAsia under imperialist control – via the Fren ch inIndochina and thems elves direct ly in Korea . In Ju ly1 950 , the first American military mission arrived inVietnam. De spi te American aid, whi ch was not exten-s ive enou gh , French imperialism was not able to sus-tain a successful war ef fort. In 1952 a second of fen s iveby the Vietminh bega n.This culminated in the deci sivedefeat of the French in 1954 at Dien Bi en Phu.

This defeat gave Ho Chi Minh absolute control of the North and consi derable pres tige and support in theSouth . Once again imperialism was at a tremen dou sd i s adva n t a ge . O n ce again the VCP preven ted theVietnamese masses from cons ol id ating a final victory.

U. S. imper ial ism fi l ls t he bre a c h

Prior to the fall of Di en Bi en Phu , the USA, Brita in ,France and the Kremlin had conven ed a peace con fer-en ce in Geneva .

This open ed on 26 Apr il 1954. The US Secret ary of St ate John Fo ster Dulles made clear that the US wasnot interested in a negotiated peace with Ho Chi Mi n h.Im m ed ia tely after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the then

vice-pre si dent Ni xon announced that i f the French left,the US would move in. When the Gen eva accords weres i gned ,dividing Vietnam at the 17th para llel , recogn is-ing the Dem oc ra tic Rep u blic of Vietnam in the Northand providing for el ecti ons thro u gh o ut a unifiedVi etnam in 1956, the US simply ref used to sign .

They had stren gthened their economic hold on theSo uth, h ad install ed a pro - Am erican prem ier in June1954 – Ngo Dinh Diem – and had incre ased their mil-itary aid to the Fren ch and the Saigon governmen t’sforces. Their intenti ons were clear and yet Ho ChiMinh , with massive su pport through out the country,

with an army whose victories meant its morale wash i gh , refused to move against the puppet Di em andi ns tead signed the Geneva Accords on 21 July 1954.8

This was the Stalinists’ second historic betrayal inVietn am, and one wh ich , like the firs t, was to lead tom a ny more ye a rs of war and su f fering for theVietnamese masses.

As his part of the bargai n, Ho agreed not to moveagainst capitalism in the North . He maintained thegoal of ach ieving a capitalist dem oc rac y, de s pi te thehegemony of Stalinist armed forces in the Nort h .However, i f, in 1945 it was the spectre of working cla ss

power that led the Stalinists to compromise with impe-ria l is m , between 1954-56 the intra n sigence of US


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im perial is m’s puppet Di em forced them in the direc-ti on of overth rowing capitali sm by means of a bureau-cratic social revolution. Within months of the GenevaAccords, it became clear that Di em wi th the backing of the world ’s most powerful imperialist nati on – theUSA – had no inten ti on of a ll owing elections to takeplace.

Di em set abo ut hu n ti ng out and kill ing allSo ut h ern Vi etminh activi s t s . He began mili tarym anoeuvres at the 17th para ll el to provoke the North.At the same time the US blocked French aid to theDRV, and began an economic blockade of the Nort h.In Ju ly 1955 Diem decla red that South Vietnam hadnot sign ed the Gen eva accords and did not thereforerecognise them. In the foll owing October he decl aredSouth Vietnam a Repu bli c . This happen ed under thec areful eye of the US. In November 1954, GeneralCo lli ns , Eisenh ower ’s special Amb ass ador to So ut hVi etnam arrived in Sa igon to give Di em backingagainst the French who rem ai ned sceptical of Diem. InJa nua ry 1955 the (US started to give mili tary aiddi rect ly to the South Vietnamese army instead of via

the Fren ch , and a press campaign in the US, began inpraise of Diem. The fo ll owing month the US mili tarym is s ion took over t raining of the South ern Army fromthe French.

In these circ um st an ces Ho was forced to ch an gecourse.There was now no threat of independent work-ing class power in the North . The wave of mass su p-port that had fo ll owed Dien Bien Phu had largelyreceded. It was safe for Ho and the Stalinist caste thathe repre s en ted to move against capitalism usingbure au cra tic means in the North. At the end of 1 955French businesses in the North were nationa li s ed and

a land reform programme was launched. A nati on a lplanning board was set up and at the beginning of 1957 it implem ented a one year plan. This was qui ck lyfo llowed by a three year plan:

“ To liqui date capitalist own ership of the means of

produ ction in indu stry and trade” 9

By 1960,no purely private enterprises rem ai ned inNorth Vietnam. De s pi te the miniscule size of theindus tr ial base in the North (in 1954 there were on lyseven large-scale – Fren ch - owned – plants in theNorth ), the drive to liqui date capitalism and plan theecon omy was fac i l i t a ted by aid from Peking and

Moscow. On 7 July 1955, Moscow con clu ded an aiddeal with Han oi with the establi sh ment of a plannedeconomy at the beginning of 195 7, North Vi etnam canbe said the have become a degenerate workers’ s ta te.On the basis of its planned property rel a ti on s , Nort hVietnam was able to expand indus tr ial outp ut sign if i-c an tly. In 1955 state industries acco un ted for 40 percent of total non-a gricu ltu ral producti on (not includ-ing handicraft industries) . By 1960 this had r i sen to 90per cent of total non - agri c ultural produ cti on .10

Bet ween 1954 and mid-1955 the governm ent inVi etnam was a Stalinist-contro lled bo urgeois workers’

governmen t . It acted , con sciously in the interests of capitalism even though there were no bourgeois par-

ties in the governmen t. Bao Dai, who fled to the So ut hin 1949 had been Ho’s main hope for a coal ition .Between the second half of 1955 and 1957 however theblock ade and sabota ge of US imperialism and theactions of their puppet, Di em in So uth Vi etn am ,forced this government onto the road of systematicanti -capitalist measu re s , c arried thro ugh bu re a uc ra ti -ca lly.

Vietminh cadres , not independent workers andpe asa nts’ or ga n i sa ti ons stri ctly contro ll ed the national-i s ations and land reform . The regime at t his stage wasa bure au c ra tic workers’ governmen t. In the period upto the second half of 195 5, this govern ment presi dedover a situation of dual power. Its even tual reso luti onwas in the interests of the Stalinists, as had happen edin Eastern Europe, Yugosl avia and Chi na . In this peri-od , revoluti on a ries would have sought to break thebu re a uc ra tic stra nglehold on the liqu i d ati on of cap i-talism and landlordi sm , by transforming it into astruggle for genuine workers’ power based on sovi ets , aworkers’ m il itia. The bl oody liqu ida ti on of Vi etnam e seTro t s kyism had en su red that no such leadership exis t-

ed.The establ i s h m ent of post-capitalist propert y

forms in North Vietnam was achieved with counter-revo lut i on ary cons equ ences in both the North and theSo ut h . In the Nort h, the working class was robbed of pol itical power in the state by the Stalinist bu re aucra-c y. In the So uth the struggle against imperialism suf-fered an enormous setback. Another 18 ye ars of openwar were inflicted on the Vietnamese masses, Nor thand So ut h , by the com bin ed effects of Stalinist treach-ery and the US imperiali st stra n gl eho ld.

By 1957 the US bad repl aced the Fren ch as imperi-

alist masters of South Vietna m . By 1957-58 US aidf un ded all of the South’s armed forces ; the US funded80 per cent of a ll other governm ent expen diture and90 per cent of a ll imports into the So uth were from theUS . In add ition, more than1,000 of ficers and menfrom the US were in the South training Diem’s army.

Diem’s state was vital to them as a bastion of anti -commu nism, a prop to the whole str ing of US semi -co lonies in South-East Asi a. It was a check to the“fa ll ing domi n o” ef fect that the Am ericans fea redwould result from a communist takeover in I n dochi na .With this backi ng, Diem was in a strong posi ti on to

s tep up his repre ssi on against the Vietminh elements inthe South. In 1957 captu red Vietminh cad res wereth rown into a network of concen t ration camps. Diemfu rther antagonis ed the masses by carrying throu gh a“land reform” programme that was ex plicitly de s i gn edto benefit the small number of catholic landlords wh osupported the catholic cli que around Diem.

Prior to the land reform there were 600,000 land-less peasants in the So ut h . Over 50 per cent of the landwas owned by 22 per cent of the total number of landowners, while 70 per cent own ed a meagre 12 percent of the land. The land reform launched by Di em

did not give land to the landle ss. It merely int rodu ceda maximum rent of 25 per cent of the crop harvested .


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G iven that a majority of peasants had been paying norent du ring the war, this was in fact a guara n teedincome from rents to the big (catholic) landlord s .

The repre ssi on and the mass oppos ition to Di emforced the Southern Vietminh (led by the VCP) intowar. In 1957 the second In dochina war began . Th es o ut h ern Na ti onal Libera ti on Front was of f i c i a ll yform ed in 1960, but the army that com prised it hada l re ady been figh ti ng for three years. That army hadfo ught du ring that period wit h out any material sup-port from the Ha noi governmen t . Desp ite Diem’sobvious contempt for the Geneva Accord s, Ho Ch iMinh was determ in ed to remain loyal to them . It wason ly in 1960 after three years of s eeing his supportersf i gh ting a difficult and bloody war against an imperi al-ist backed dicta torship that Ho call ed for the com-m encement of a stru ggle in the So ut h . Even then, how-ever, the aid that Hanoi gave to t he NLF, im peri al istpropa ganda notwith st andi ng, was minimal. Pen ta gonf igures reve al ed that of the NLF we apons capturedbetween 1962-64, on ly 179 (less than 1 per cent) weren eit her home made nor from the US – i.e. could have

come from the Nort h.The Am ericans had no su ch qualms as far as their

p uppet was concern ed . They poured aid into So ut hVietn am.Wh en Diem became an international emba r-ras sm ent, af ter the brutal suppression of a Bud dh is trising in 1963, the US backed a military coup thatrep laced Di em with an equa lly barba rous dicta torshi p,but one that included Buddhists to offset the char gesof reli gious repression that had been aimed at Diemand his US-backers. However, in st abi li ty rei gn ed in theSouth. A gen eral strike in Sai gon bro u ght down Di em’ssucces sor. In the 20 months succeeding the coup (1

November 1963), nine governm ents came and went.By 1965, the US decided that dras tic measu res weren eeded . More troops were po u red in and on 7Febru ary the US began bombing North Vietnam.

Am erican invo lvem ent had escalated sharp lytowards the end of the 1950s. Before Di em’s fall ,Washi ngton was giving him $1.5m doll ars a day tosmash the NLF. After Diem’s fall, troops were pouredinto the South . By August 1965 there were 125,000 UStroops involved in the war. By 1966 this had ris en to400 ,00 0, and at the hei ght of the war in the late 1960s,half a mill ion US troops were involved.

The Pop ular Front is launched again

By 1960, the VCP was able to launch the N LF havi ngal re ady moulded the libera tion movement in the pop-ular frontist image of the Vi etm in h. As with it s fore-runner the NLF was domina ted by the Stalinists. Theycontroll ed its strategy (captu ring the cities by a ruraltakeover) whi ch was always purely military and neverso ught to link the war with the stru ggles of the urb anpro let ariat in Sai gon and elsewhere.

The famous Tet Offensive of 196 8, while serving asan example of the co u ra ge and determ i n a ti on of theN LF, also underlined the centrality of this non pro le-

ta rian pers pective. It left the urban masses as passivespecta tors of a rural mil itary con flict .

The NLF’s programme repeated all the formula-tions of that of the Vietminh. It promised to guaranteecapitalism and limit the revolution to a national demo-cratic stage.11 The appeal of this programme to the massof the peasantry was strong. In the same way as theVietminh had based i tself on the peasant ry, so the NLFfol lowed suit. On this basis they were able to sustain thewar despite meagre aid from their “ all ies” in Moscow,Peking and Hanoi. By the early 1970s, it became clearthat America could not win this protracted war. Theanti-war movement in America and elsewhere wasmassive. Morale amongst American troops was low,whilst the prestige and morale of the NLF was high.Fora thi rd t ime the possibil ity of completely ousting impe-rialism and its puppets from Vietnam was on the agen-da.

Yet for the third ti me, the Stali nists chose to sit atthe nego ti a ting tabl e . In Ja nu a ry 1973 the Pa ri sAccords were sign ed , c alling a cea s efi re and recogn is-ing the legitimacy of the Southern state now rul ed byG en eral Th ieu. The Stalinists hailed these accord swh ich allowed Nixon and Kis s inger, the bombers of Indoch ina, to pre sent thems elves as peacema kers a vic-tory for the masses

The need for an agreem ent was also due to the ter-ri ble deva s t ati on the North was suffering as a re sult of Am erican bombin gs. A tactical agreement (recogn isedas such) with imperia li sm , to gain a breathing spacewould be en ti rely legi tima te for a workers’ sta te tou n dert a ke . However, this should not then bea nno u n ced to the workers as a revo luti ona ry victory.The Bo lsheviks for examp le, did not regard Brest-

Li tovsk as a victory.

Th ere was no way the Pa ris Accords could berega rded as a victory they were vi ewed as a strategicp act with imperialism of coa rse this is precisely whatthe Stalinists were aiming for – a goal that could onlyhave profo undly re acti on a ry cons equ ences for theVi etnamese masses.

Gen eral Thieu had no such intention s. Havingga in ed a re spi te he regro uped his forces and, agai nwith Am erican aid, launched an attack on the NLF andthe DRV.In July 1974, the Thi rd Indochina War began.However, it was to be even more short lived and sel f-

destructive for Thieu, than was Chiang Kai Shek’s 1945offen sive.

As vi ctory for the com bi n ed NLF/DRV force sapproach ed , the Stalinists again sought a comprom is ethat would have left Thieu’s su ccess or, G eneral Min h,in power in Sa igon , in coaliti on with the NLF. Theirstra tegy rem ai ned the implem en ta tion of the GenevaAccords. However, Minh was int ransi gent and in April19 75, as the last panicky US officials scram bl ed ,aboa rdt heir helicopters , the NLF/DRV forces entered Sa igon .

The pattern established by the Stalinist takeovers inE astern Europe , China and North Vietnam was clo selyfo ll owed in the So ut h . Despite the co llapse of the cap-


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italists armed forces and the hegemony of those of th eSt al in is ts , the VCP ref u sed to move against capitalism.Instead, one of the first radio announcements madeaf ter Sa igon fell was a plea to the Sai gon workers, wh oh ad struck to greet the NLF/DRV forces, to return towork at once. The immedi ate pretext for keeping capi-talism intact was the need to secure $3.25bn in aidfrom Fran ce and Am eri c a. Wh en the imperialist pow-ers found pretexts to withhold the aid they had

prom ised, the Stalinists had no altern ative to carryi ngt ho ugh a bureau cra tic social revolution.

The Provis ional Revolutionary Governm ent, e s t ab-li sh ed in June 1975, was a Stalinist con tro lled bour-geois workers govern ment wh ich was quick ly drivenunder the pre ssure of an imperialist blockade and adeva st ated economy on to the road of an anti capitalistbure au cra ti c workers governmen t.

In August of 197 5, this govern m ent nationalis edthe So uthern banks, and took control of all sout hernin du stry. In Septem ber it ra ided the houses of thewealthiest inhabitants of the Cho lon areas of Saigon .

The peri od of dual power bet ween the VCP and them ainly comprador bou rgeoisie ended very qu i ck ly,because that bourgeois ie, detached from its lifeline toimperialism had little cause to colla borate with theSta li ni st s.

For their part the en ormous deva s t a ti on that theStalinists inherited forced them to act against theextens ive black market prof iteeri ng, which the com-prador elements had engaged in. This way the VC Phoped to offs et a developing state of chaos that co u lde asi ly have produ ced their own down f a ll . The move toliquidate capitalism was imposed on the Stalinists by

the need to pre serve their newly - won govern m entalpower.

During the course of 197 6, the overtu rn of c api t al-ism was con s ol id ated by, first, the geographical assim-ila ti on of the So uth into the North, a nno u n ced on 25April 1976; s econ dly, the inaugura ti on of the five-yearplan in the summ er of 1976 for both North and South;and thridly, the conso li dation of an aid deal fromChina in 1976 followed by a series of aid deals with theUS SR.

In no sense was the overtu rn the action of t hemasses themselves . The key moves against capitalism

occ u rred after the dec i s ive mobi l i s a ti ons of t h eSouth ern working class in April 1975 had abated . Themass dem on s trations that did occur in the period fromlate 1975 to sum m er 1976 (the peri od of the bureau-c ra tic workers’ government) did ref lect the desi re of the masses, af ter thirty years of c ivil war, to effect af un damental change.

Neverth eless they were not mobi l is a ti ons based oni ndepen dent or gans of workers’ power. Th ey wereor ganis ed and ti gh t ly contro lled by the arm ed forces of the NLF/DRV.

Al tho ugh the capitalist Cholon merchants exi sted

as a very important force in South Vietnam up to 1978( when they were ex propriated by governm ent ed i ct ),the launching of the plan in 1976 and the unificati on

with the degenerate workers’ st ate in the Nort h, can besaid to be the point at whi ch all of Vi etnam became adegen era te workers’ state .

This bu re a u c ra ti c social revo lut i on , c a rr i edthrough in a cou nter revolutionary manner, invo lvedthe po litical ex propr i ation of the Vietnamese work in gcl ass . The po li tical revo lut i on against the Stalinistrul ers of Vi etna m , with the defence of the co un tryagainst imperialism and its res torationist agen ts , is the

central tasks facing the Vi etnamese working cla s s.

The case o f ‘ D emoc rat ic’ Kampuchea

While the cre a ti on of a degen era te workers’ s t ate inVi etnam pre s ents no theoretical probl ems forTro ts kyists the same is not true of the genesis of Dem oc ra tic Ka m p u ch e a . If this was a degen era teworkers’ state, th en careful consi dera ti on is needed of its dynamics and the means by wh ich it came into ex is-ten ce in order to explain the horrendous crisis thatgri pped the co un tr y in the late 1970s. Here was adegenerate workers’ st ate wh ich ex hibited, app aren tly

as its defining features, an absolute econ omic auta rchy,genoci de against its own population and perpetua lfa min e . How is this to be exp la in ed?

In 1970 a military coup in Phnom Penh bro ught topower a US puppet regi me , h eaded by Lon No l, inKam puch e a. In the same year the So uth Vi etna m e seregi m e , with full backing from the US, en teredKam puchea to help Lon Nol crush the Khm er Rouge(the military wing of the Kampu chean Commun istPa rty, CP K ). The CPK, un der ground since 1963, hades ta bli sh ed a base of support amongst the pe asa ntry inthe late 1960s. With this support behind it , the CPK

moved into war against Lon Nol and alli ed i tself withhis predeces s or, Prin ce Sih anou k. The Kamp u chea nNa ti onal Un ited Front (FUNK) was form ed to pro se-cute the war. It was descri bed by one leading CPKmem ber as, “ the largest united front in the world – allthe way up from the peasants to the former king of t hecou ntry.” 12 Indeed, the purpose of this “un ited front”was to bring to power the Royal Govern m ent of Na ti onal Uni on of Kam puchea (RGNUK) .

From the earl iest phase of the 1970-75 war aga in stLol Nol and his South Vietnamese and US all ies , theanti imperialist figh ters were gro u ped toget her in a

popular fron t .The Stalinist CPK (whose leading cad re had been

edu c ated in Pa ris and by the French GP) qu icklymoved into an alliance with Sihanouk after his fall,de spite the fact that it had been Sihanou k’s repre ssi onwhich had ori gi n a lly driven them into the co un trysi de .In Kam puchea itself , the Stalinists were the over-whel m i n gly dominant force in the popular front,Prin ce Sihanouk being unable to field many troopsand relying on Chinese support for influ en ce with inthe alliance. The real weakness of his po s ition wass ha rply reve al ed after the fall of Lon Nol in April 1975

– he was at fi rst kept out of the co un try altoget h er andt hen eventu ally forced to res ign as head of s ta te by theCPK in March 1976.

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gates”, 112 army repres ent atives and 14 FUNK dele-ga tes , all of whom were loyal to the CPK. Fu rt h ermorethe RG NUK simply ceded real power to the Angka r(whi ch means “ revo lut ionary or ga n i sa tion” - a shad-owy body which was in fact always the leading cad re of the CPK - Leng Sa ry,Saloth Sa r, also known as Pol Po t,Son Sen , Khi eu Sa m pha n, Leng Th irith etc. ), no evi-dence exists that any non-CPK figures held any minis-terial power. The “popular front” was not a govern-mental alliance so much as a diplom ati c ch arade that

was de s ign ed to win and to further international cred-ibility.

Sihano uk, the nominal head of s t ate, was actuallykept out of the country by the CPK until it had got acom pl ete grip on the country. This govern ment must,th erefore , be defin ed by its pol ici es.

The at t empt t o f u l f i l l a re a c t i o n a r yd ream

The economic policies of the Angkar were based on thedoctoral thesis of Kh ieu Sa m pha n. In essence the pol i-

cy con s is ted of : m obilising the en er gy of the pea santsto recon s tru ct the co u n tr y, in the fir st place vi ahydraulic management and incre ased ri ce produ ction;s econdly, im posing aut archy to reduce foreign compe-ti ti on and the penetra ti on of the economy by foreigncap ital. Success with these two policies was supposedto cre ate a sound basis for indu s tr ial developmen t.Leng Sary summed it up thus:

“Af ter our total vi ctory we ex ten ded to all

Kam puchea the econ omic policy which had alre ady

been app lied in the libera ted zon e s. This policy con-

sists of cons idering agri c u lture as the base and indus-

tr y as the dominant factor. Our obj ective is toman oeuvre our country a modern agricultural and

in du str ial co u ntr y.” 15

This schema was a reactionary utopian on e . It wasthe Stalinist conception of Socialism in One Co un try,m i xed with va ri ous pet ty bo u r geois nati on a l i s tno ti on s , ta ken to extreme xenophobic length s. As inRus s ia , a ba ndonment of i nterna tionalism could on lylead to coerci on of the masses on a hu ge scale, t herebycreating new contrad icti ons that would in fact under-mine the planned economy.

The fi rst steps taken by the An gkar involved depop-

ul ation of the citi es and a pop ula tion tra n s fer (mainlyto the co u ntr ys ide) of mas sive proporti on s , a dr ive tom anage the water supply, vital for increa sed rice pro-du ction, via the building of d am s, re servoi rs, ca na lsand irrigati on ch ann els and, l astly, the coll ectivi sationof agri c u lture and its or gani sa tion into cooperative soften up to 10,000 strong (on the model of the Chi n e seCom munes ). This poli cy was carr ied through rap idlyin early 1976, and invo lved total co ll ectivi s a ti on ,including the co llectivi s a tion of cooking utensils! Itwas carri ed thro ugh against the wishes of the mass of pe a s a n t s , going far beyond the simple com mu n alorga n is ati on nece ssa ry for rice cultivation .

At the same t i m e , h owever, by breaking the small-

holding sys tem it did cre a te the con d i ti ons forimproved harvests which, according to Western andYu go s l av diplomats did come abo ut in 1976-77.However, achieved by coercion, it also led to new con-trad icti ons and sparked upris ings in 1977 in the Westof Kampu chea together with a steady flow of ref ugeesto Thailand and Vietna m .

In addi ti on to the measu res outl ined above, a l lindus try and foreign holdings (such as rubber planta-ti ons) were nati ona li sed.

Kamp u chean industry had always been a minorcomponent of the co un try’s economy, as it was in theo t her co u n tries of Indo-Ch in a. Bet ween April 1975and late 1976, the regime kept it that way. Industria lproduction was used only to serve the agricul tural ‘rev-olution’ that was taking place. However, it was neverdestroyed . In the early days Pol Pot talked of ma in tain-ing indus try, not of destroying it or expanding it. On26 September 1975, the Far Ea stern Econom ic Review

reported that some 70 factories (mainly small work-s h ops) in Phnom Penh were on ce again work ingal tho ugh key install ations, such as the oil ref inery atKompong Sam, were not.

By mid-1976, with the full co ll ectivi s a ti on of agri-c u l tu re more or less com p l ete ; the Far Ea s tern

Economic Review Asian Ye arb ook for 1977 reportedover 100 factories back in operation. At the same timea con s tructi on drive re sulted in the restoration of theKompong Som to Phnom Penh railway, the co un try ’ss even airports and a tra ffic-wort hy road system.

In 1977-78, a shift in industrial policy appea rs toh ave taken place and figures indicate that, comp aredwith its pre1975 level s, i n du s try underwent a l imi tedexp a n s i on . The New China News Agency reported inAugust 1977 that for the first time new factories werebeing buil t in Ka m pu che a .

These inclu ded a shipbuilding yard, an acid work s,a motor vehicle plant and a number of machine too lshops. That this is not fiction is borne out by tradi ngf igures for 1977. These show a dram atic increase ascomp ared to previous yea rs in the import of raw mate-rials and steel products for con stru ction purpo ses. Inthe fi rst six months of 1977 , Hong Kong and Jap ansu ppl ied $13m worth of steel products , sp are parts, ca rgen era tors , ru bber processing plant, ri ce hu s k i n gmach inery and medicine trade with Hong Kong Ja pa n

and Singapore rose to $19m in 1978. These two figurescom pare with a mere $2.5m of total trade with thesame co un tr ies in 1976.

All of these indicators show a hesitant growth of the Kampuchean econ omy between 1976 and 1978.Trade with workers’ st ates was carried out from 1975onw a rd s . All trade with the capitalist world wasmon opo lis ed by the state via the Ren Fung trad ingcomp any, b as ed in Hong Kong. Trade with otherdegen era te workers’ s ta tes was absolutely decis ive inall owing the Ka mp uchean econ omy to grow at all.China , in parti c ul ar, supp li ed 4,000 technical advi sors

and in 1975 alone gave $1bn worth of aid . Trad ingdeals favourable to Kam puchea were also carri ed out


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with Yugoslavia , Rumani a, North Korea and Al bani a.

These measures compris ed the programme of thegovern m ent of Ka mp uche a. Th ey were carr ied out bythe An gk a r, acting as the central authori ty, with instru-ments of its rule acting at local and regi onal level in thenum erous commi ttees of the coopera tives. From mid-1976 the Angkar had def ini tely centrali sed planning ini ndus try, agricul ture and trade , a ll of which wereu nder its control .

It did this via a Nation al . Devel opment Pia whi ch ,l ike the plans in other degenerate workers’ s t ates , s eti ts el f wild targets for agric u l tu ral producti on and forindus tr ial developm ent (e.g. 3 tons of rice per hecta refor each crop, a quota that would have severelyex ha usted an already overworked pea santry ). In nosense was the plan (referred to by CPK leaders wit hrega rd to water conserva n cy, rice produ ction , controlof malaria and indu strial exp an sion) a dem oc ra ti con e. It was a bureaucratic plan that, in fact , confli ctedwith needs of the masses.

However, it was a plan for an economy that exhib-

i ted none of the fe atu res of ca pi ta li sm .The law of va lueh ad been su ppre ssed thro ugh the state direction of inve stment and the abo l i ti on of an internal curren c y( wh i ch resul ted in some barter but not in a bartereconomy). All industry and agricu ltu re was in stateha nd s, there was no pr iva te property at all and nobo urgeoisie left in ei ther the economy or the state . Allforei gn trade was con tro ll ed by the state. In otherwords the plan operated within a post-capitalist econ-omy.

The means by which this post capitalist econ omy, adegen erate workers’ s t ate , came about rough ly fo llowsthe pattern ex h ibi ted in China and Vietn am. In April1975 a Stalinist domi nated popular front came topower. Alth ou gh the form of the popular front wasm aint a ined until January 1976 (wh en Dem oc ra ti cKa m p uchea was decla red) the establ ishm ent of di rectrule by the An gka r, that is the CPK, in di cates that fromMay 1975 to mid-1976 a bu re aucra ti c anti - c apit al istworkers’ government was in power. It destroyed capi-tali sm and i t de s troyed all the aspects and the person-nel of the previous state machi ne . In doing this it alsoacted against the masses, riding rou gh shod over theirneeds and eit her killing or causing the deaths of ma ny,ma ny thousands. L ike all such governm ents, its acti on

a gainst capitali sm were far outweighed by the co un ter-revolutiona ry manner in which they were carri ed out .

Th ere was no dual power situa tion in Kamp u che aafter May of 197 5 , prior to that dual power on a terri -torial basis had existed between the KPNALF and theLol Nol regime. The bureaucratic workers’ govern mentvery quickly ended this.

With aid from China and the or ga n i sa ti on of atra n s ferred pop u l a ti on into coopera ti ve units, t h eAn gk a r, by mid 1976, was able to implem ent itsNational Plan. With the commen cement of this planwe can say that a degenerate workers’ s ta te was cre ated

by the bureaucratic anti -capitalist workers’ govern-ment .This degen era te workers’ sta te made po ssi ble the

econ omic growth that we have det ail ed .But it ach ievedthis by coercing the masses and depriving them of m any basic needs . As su ch it built up new con tradi c-ti on s . The masses began to resi st. Revolts took placeand there was passive resistance as well.

The regime tr i ed to play the card of a n ti -Vietnamese ch auvinism and moved into a border warwith the Hanoi regime whi ch was anxious for itsWestern borders. In deed , the long term goal of th eHanoi Stalinists was the cre ation of an In do-Chinesefederati on under their contro l. The crisi s, into wh ichthe Pol Pot regime ran because of its pol ici es, providedan opportu ni ty for them to take a step in this direc-ti on . Th ey rel a ted to a wing of the fractu ri n gKamp uchean bu re aucracy around Heng Sam rin, awing histori c ally sympa thetic to them , and used i t as acover to legitimise their inva s i on . In late 1978, t h eVi etnamese Army sent its best regi m ents intoKampu chea .

The most battle-harden ed army in Asia encoun-tered li t tle dif ficulty in establi shing i ts con tro l .However, the fact that the war between the KhmerRou ge guerri llas and Vi etnam is sti ll raging four ye arsla ter indicates that Heng Sa m ri n’s pro - Vietn ameseregime is far from stabl e.

Sin ce Heng Samrin came to power the co ll ectivi sa-ti on scheme has been rela xed and a free market par-ti a lly re s tored , but the econ omic sys tem has notchanged in any fundamental sense since the inva sion .The measu res taken by Heng Sa m ri n’s regime did endthe internal coerci on of the Pol Pot govern m ent and, inthat sen se, did temporarily offs et the ex pl osive cri sisi n to wh i ch bu re a u c ra tic planning was lead i n gKampuchea.

The nature of the Kampu chean bu re au cra tic anti-capitalist revo luti on had a nu m ber of specific fea turesthat shaped the fortunes of the workers' state but, ines s en ce , this revolution was no different from the on e sc arried out in China or Vi etn am. The CPK leadershipdeci ded to emu la te the CCP. They adopted wh ol e sal ethe volunt arism and xen oph obia that Maoism ex hibit-ed during particular periods of its histor y (Great Le apForward, Cul tural Revo lut i on ) .

In China the disastrous cons equences of these po li-cies became appa rent to the CCP leadership before theChinese economy was plu nged into utter chaos. In

Ka mp uchea these policies were carried out in a coun-try proporti on a tely more deva s t a ted by war thanChi na , with a far small er pop u la tion, with far fewern a tu ral re sou rces and a less well developed indu str i aland agri c ultural infras tructure than Ch ina. In ad ditiont h ey were not checked by the CPK leadership and in ama tter of months the hesitant revival of the economyseen by 1976 was facing constant crisis in 1977.

The immedi ate cause of the crisis was that the statewas forced to ex propriate all the pe asa nts’ rice in orderto finance trade and indu str i alisa tion plans. Thi s, intu rn ,meant starva ti on and, t herefore, the re s is ta nce of

the peas an tr y. This crisis led to a fracturing of thebureaucracy in 1977 – along pro- and anti-Vietna m


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lines . The way was paved for a second de s tructive warwith Vietnam and entirely sui ted to Ha noi’s purpos-e s. / We can say that the degen era te workers’ sta te of Ka mp uchea began its spiral tow ards total disintegra-tion far more qu ickly than had been the case, so far,with any of the other degenerate workers’ states. Th epec ul i ari ty of ' Ka mp uchea was the speed of this devel-opment . The tendency to disintegra ti on , however, is afeature of all economies where the plan operates bli n d-ly and bu re aucra tica lly and where the pro let ariat is

po litica lly ex propria ted.

The inva sion of Kampu chea by Vi etnam temporar-ily ch ecked the process of internal disintegration but,because this was done by a cou nter- revolutionaryStalinist bu rea u c racy (in Ha noi) and because it wasca rr i ed out by purely mili tary means and did noti nvo lve the masses of Kamp u chea at all , it has only of f-set the process of degeneration. It has not and cannotdef i n i tively ch eck it . The po l i t ical revo luti on inKam puchea is desperately needed. On ly by placing thepost capitalist economy under the political con trol of the workers and peasants can the masses put an end to

famine and war.The case of Ka mp uchea shows , in an almost chem-

i ca lly pure form, what is meant by the cou nter revo lu-ti on a ry nature of Stal ini s t - led burea ucratic anti-ca pi-talist revolutions. This dialectical formula was conc re-tised in Ka mp uchea when the de struction of ca pita l-ism led , within a mere three yea rs, to a process of degen era ti on the logical end point of wh ich wo uldhave been, thanks to the Stalinists, the rein troducti onof ca pita lis m, prob ably courtesy of an ASEAN inter-ven ti on - a course of action still being cons idered inManila and Ban gkok.

Footnotes

1 . The Vi etnamese Com munist Party has existed under va rious names

t h ro u gh o ut thi s peri od - In dochinese Com munist Pa rty, Peop l e ' s

Revolutiona ry Pa rt y, Ass oc iation for the Study of Marxism etc. For conve-

nience we will refer to it thro u ghout as the VCP.

2. In tern ational , (London ,1972) Vo l. 1 No.2 ,p.25

3. In tern atio n al , (Lon don 1974) Vol.2 No.3 , p.12

4. The Trot s kyi s ts: Th ough we aken ed as a result of Stalinist and imperialist

repres si on , the Vietnamese Trot s kyists had long en joyed consi dera ble support

a mong the masses, parti cu la rly in the Sout h. They were divided into two

grou ps. The Struggle Group was led by Tha Thu Thau, after a period of col-

labora tion with the Stalinists in the early Th irt ies it was attacked by them for

cri ticising the Popular Front Governm ent in Fra n ce . The other Trotskyist

group was the Intern ational Communist League which produ ced a daily paper,

The Spark, and played a major role in the People's Committees. Both groups

suffered massive repressi on and had their leaderships physi cally wiped out by

the Stalinists in 1945.

5 .cf. Stalinism a nd Trotsk yi sm in Vietnam , Sp a rt acist League Pa m ph l et p.21

6. Quo ted in D.Jenness, War and Revolu tion in Vi etn am , (New York 1965) p.8

7. Qu oted in E.Hammer, The Struggle for In do-China, ( Stanford 1954) p.183

8.To illustrate the degree of su pport for Ho as com pared with Diem i t is worth

comparing two bo urgeois assessments. Ei s enh ower said of Ho, "I have never

talked or correspon ded with a person knowled gea ble in I ndo-Chinese affairs

who did not agree that if elections had been held as of the time of the fight-

ing, po s s ibly 80% of the popul ati on would have voted for Ho Chi Mi nh".

Q u oted in I.Birchall, Wo rkers against the M on oli t h, (London 1974) p. 15

9 The Economist ma gazine said of Diem, “Diem's problem is that he is not a

leader who has been merely helped by the Wes t; he has been created by theWest ... The objectionable word, ‘p u ppet’ so often used by "both sides in a pro-

paganda wars was in thi s case li tera ll y tr u e.” Quoted in D.Horowit z,From Yalt a

to Vi etna m , (Harmono~worth 1971) p.14 9.Q u oted in Hoang Van Chi, Fro m

Colonialism to C o m m unism , (Lon don 1964) p.259

10.c f .C.Nyla nd,“Vietnam, the Plan/Market Con trad iction and the Tra nsition

to Socialism” in Journal of Co ntem porary Asia,Vo l.11 ,No.4, p.4 31

11 . Key clauses in the NLF programme were , “ It [ the N LF - Eds] has succe s s-

fu lly con solid ated it s base among the broad masses of the people ; at the same

time it has engaged in j oint acti on with many political and religious forces,an d

won over large numbers of m a nu factu rers and t raders , official functionaries of

the puppet ad m inis tra tion, and offi cers and soldiers of the puppet army.” '

Pro gramm e of the N LF (Giai Pu blishing Ho u s e). And, the NLF’s aim was to

establish... a broad democratic national union admin istra ti on ,build an inde-

pen dent , dem ocrati c, pe aceful , n eutral and progre ssive South Vi etnam." ibid)

For workers it promi s ed, “To sett le disputes between em pl oyers and emp loy-

ees thro u gh negoti ati on between the two sides and mediation by the nation al

dem ocra tic ad ministration.” ibid) In short this programme contai ned not a

whiff of in dependent working class power or of s ocialism or anyt hi n g

approaching i t. It was de s i gn ed to forest all su ch things in order t o appease the

capitali sts who were being robbed of their imperialist paymas ters .

1 2 . Q u o ted in G.Hi l debrand and G.Porter, C a m b odia: St a rva tion and

Rev ol u tion , ( New York 1976) p.65

13. L Tro tsky, On China, (New York 1976) p.527

14. M.G omes, The Ka m pu chean Conne ction , ( London 1980) p.4 0

15. Q u oted in Hi l debrand and Porter. Op. ci t. D.8 8

1 6. The following figures also suggest a significant degree of econ omic growth

within the countr y: 200 factories reported in opera ti on in 1977. a ru bber fac-

tory producing 15,000 bic ycle tyres a day; a Phnom Penh textile mill produc-

ing 14,000 metres of cloth a day; Battambang Bag Factor y – 10,000 bags a day;

ru bber processing plants -– 40-50 tons of cured rubber a day.Imports of med-

icinal compounds indicate a re- opening of laboratories in Phnom Penh.

E ach regi on possessing at least one reservoir wit h a capacity of 100-22 mill ion

cu bic metres of water. One-th ird of the co u ntrysi de made cult iva ble. A steel

mill under constructi on in 1978.

The Bor 3 Plastic factory at Chak An gee – 9,000 metres of p la s ti c sheet, 1,5 00metres of rubber hose and 100 fi fteen litre containers per day. The year 1977-

79 saw a pop u l a ti on increase ( the fi rst signifi cant one since the war) of

39 2,00 0, taking the pop ulation to a post war record of 7.8 mill ion .Exports to

Japan , Hong Kong and Singapore rose from USdo ll a rs 357,000 in 1976 to US

dollars 680,000 in 1977, including 130,000 tons of rice . F igures from Far

Ea stern Economic Review Year Book 1975

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The “unique” features of the Cuban revolution haveprodu ced en dless con f us i on in the “Tro t skyis t”

movement, ri vall ing the programmatic chaos and ensu-ing revisionism engendered by the Tito-Stalin split in1948. The fundamental problem the Cuban revolutionposes is how can a petit-bourgeois nationalist move-ment not only overthrow a pro-imperialist militarydictatorship (i .e. a polit ical revolution) but pass onunder the same leadership to overthrow capitalism andestablish a self-proclaimed “socialist state” indistin-guishable in t ype from China or Vietnam?

From this problem flow questions relating to thefundamentals of revolutionary Marxist theory. Doesthe experience of the Cuban revolution contradict the

Marxist notion of the historical limits of the petit -bourgeoisie as a class and of petit bourgeois national-ism as a programme for social revolut ion? Does theexperience of the Cuban revolution contradict theMarxist theory of the state?

The “adaptations” made to the fundamentals of rev-olutionary Marxism, by all sections of the movementwhich claimed to be ‘Trotskyist, to “account for” theCuban events were all , in fact, revisions of the fi rst mag-nitude. Permanent revolution is reduced to an objectiveforce, a historical process that works its will indepen-dent of the consciousness of human beings even with

regard to the socialist revolut ion. Its petit -bourgeoisagents can be“unconscious Marxists” or “unconsciousTrotskyists”. Therefore a revolut ionary party is a desir-able, but not essential, instrument of this process.Revolutionary workers’ governments can exist withoutthe “norms of proletarian democracy”, that is, withoutsoviet-type bodies to express and exert the revolution-ary pressure of the working class.Lastly, the proletariandictatorship can exist “without the norms of proletari-an democracy” yet be quali tatively a healthy workers’state – one not in need of a political revolution.

The positions developed by Joseph Hansen and the

SWP (US), which provided the basis for the re-unifiedUnited Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI),repeated in a starker manner the theoretical and theprogrammatic collapse that occurred after 1948. Theimportance of the Cuban revolution was realised in thecontext of the Nicaraguan revolution and the conse-quent split in the USFI (1979/80). The issues it raisesare not matters of idle historical curiosity, but have aburning relevance for the struggle for revolution today.

Cuba’s whole history prior to 1959 was dominatedby its colonial and then semi-colonial status. Frombeing a Spanish colony it passed into the hands of US

imperiali sm. Formal independence was an empty shellu n der both parl i a m en t a ry bo u r geois nati on a l i s tregimes and under repressive military dictatorships.

Attempted con stitutional “ revolution s” li ke that of 1933-34 were rudely aborted by US-backed military

coups. The underlying cause of this was Cuba’s integra-tion with, and subordination to, the US economy. Aswith all semi-colonies in the imperialist epoch, thisintegration had not transformed Cuba into a balancedand developed capitalist economy.

Cuba was dominated by sugar production for theNorth American market. At the beginning of the 1950ssugar production accounted for 36 per cent of Cuba’sGNP, for 80 per cent of its export revenues; and 83 percent of all cult ivated land was under sugar cane.

With 41 per cent of labour tied to agricultural pro-duction and 20 per cent to tourism, Cuba’s economy

was tied to the sweet tooth of the North American pop-ulace and the pleasures and vices of its bourgeoisie.This bourgeoisie directly owned a large part of theeconomy, 35 per cent of capital invested in sugar wasUS-based. In the late 1950s more than $1bn of US cap-ital were invested in Cuba.

A small class of lati fundists (less than 3,000 of themowned 70 per cent of the land) and a comprador andrentier bourgeoisie acted as the agents of US imperial-ism. Only a tiny fraction of the Cuban possessing class-es were capable of any sustained opposition to USimperialism and even these turned sharply against the

Castroite revolution as soon as it began to take limitedmeasures of agrarian reform. The Cuban revolutionconfi rmed to the hil t the Trotskyist assertion that in theepoch of imperialism the colonial and semi-colonialbourgeoisie are completely incapable of leading thestruggle for national independence and independent(capitalist) economic development. On the other hand,the popular classes were not dominated by a peasantrychronically deprived of land. Cuban society was moreurban than rural (57 per cent urban to 43 per cent ruralin 1959).

Moreover, the countryside itself was dominated not

by land hungry, small peasants but by rural proletarianssuffering from chronic and massive unemployment, job insecurity, low wages and appalling social condi-tions. The sugar refineries were well organised in tradeunions, as were the urban workers generally. The CTC(Cuban Trade Union Federation) unionised half thetotal workforce.

Cuba was possessed of a revolutionary nationalisttradition, that of Jose Marti and Antonio Maceo andthe insurrectionary war against Spain and then UScolonialism (1895-8); a tradition with parallels in theearly years of the imperialist epoch (in China, Mexico,

Turkey, Iran etc.) The island also had seen a reformist,consti tutional attempt to break with US dominance.

In 1933-34 the democrat Dr. Grau San Mart in was

Cast ro’s “ Cuban road” frompopulism to Stalinism

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brought to power and driven from i t 100 days later, bya military coup d’état engineered by Fulgencio Batista.Castro’s July 26th Movement was politically a continu-ation of these movements. There were no differenceswith Gra u’s Auten ti cos of the 1930s or Ch i b a s’Ortodoxos of the late 1940s.Fidel Castro was a memberof the latter party. The programme Castro was thuscommitted to was of political and economic indepen-dence and democracy.

H istory W ill Absolv e M e,Castro’s duly doctored (andre-written) speech from the court dock after the 1953attack on Moncada Barracks was pure“Chibasism” inits programme. It promised restoration of the 1940constitution,a“government of popular election”, a landreform to restrict large land holdings and nationalisa-tion of US-owned electr ic and telephone companies.ByDecem ber 1956, Ca s tro had even ren o u n ced thenationalisation of the uti li ties and declared “Foreigninvestment will always be welcome and secure here.” 1

His differences with the Chibas and the Ortodoxoparty, which carried on the tradition after Chibas’death, were that whereas they (and Grau and the

Autenticos before them) were bourgeois nationalistreformists, he was (l ike Maceo and Mart i) a bourgeoisnationalist revolutionary – that i s, he employed revolu-tionary methods of struggle not consti tutional ones.

The July 26th Movement (J26M) however, neverformulated a precise programme. It never held a con-ference or elected a leadership. It was in essence a mil i-tary apparatus for overthrowing Batista. It was itself aminiature popular front. On its left wing stood figureslike Raul Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara who werestrongly influenced by Stalinism and privately had noobjections to an overthrow of capitalism; and on its

ri ght wing stood the anti - com munist figures li keHubert Matos and Faustino Perez.

The July 26th Movement – a coalitionacro ss classes

In the cities the J26M leaders, known as “the Plain”(“ Llano”) were anti-communist bourgeois nationaliststo the core. Nor were they an insignificant force. FrankPais in Santiago and Faustino Perez in Havana con-trolled large movements of resistance and sabotage andsupplied the rural guerri llas with arms and money. The

Plain leaders were fiercely anti-communist and opendefenders of private property. Faustino Perez reflectedthe views of this group in his attitude to the “extremist”Castro when he stressed in spring 1958 Castro will notbe part of the Provisional Government:

“We shall create a climate of confidence and securi ty

for the investment of national and foreign capital” 2

On the left there were figures like Raul Castro, anex-member of the CP youth and resolutely pro-com-munist (Stalinist). Guevara probably considered him-self a Marxist from 1954 onwards.

Hi s ex peri en ce of the Am erican backed co u p

against Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and a reading of Lenin’s State and Revolution led him to reject the

“peaceful road” to revolution.

All wings of the J26M were highly suspicious of, if not hostile to the PSP, the Cuban Stalinists. The PSPhad a history of collaboration with Batista and openlycondemned the Castroites before 1958 as “adventur-ous”. But by the spring of 1958, Bias Roca, the veteranStalinist leader threw his weight behind Carlos RafaelRodriguez, leader of the pro-Castro wing of the PSPand against Anibal Escalante. A number of PSP cadresincluding Rodriguez were sent to the Sierra Maestra,base of Castro’s guerrillas,where a secret pact was madebetween the PSP and the Castroites in March 1958. It isclear that the J26M was not simply a petit-bourgeoismovement but rather a coali tion of bourgeois and pro-letarian (albeit politically petit-bourgeois i.e. Stalinistor proto-Stalinist) forces.

In January 1959,the two year long civil war betweenthe J26M, its “rebel” army and the Batista regime cul-minated in the overthrow of Batista. Batista had led acorrupt military dictatorship that had acted as an agentfor US imperialism in its Cuban semi-colony since1953. The 1959 revolut ion was not however a mereputsch or coup d’état. In the countryside it assumed,during 1958, the character of a serious movement of the rural proletarians and poor peasants. In the cities ithad the support of important sections of the national-ist bourgeois and peti t-bourgeois strata grouped in theDirectorio and the Civic Resistance Under attack fromsuch a wide spectrum of Cuban society and deserted byits US backers, Batista’s regime collapsed after the fail-ure of its summer offensive of 1958. A general strike inHavana assured the complete disintegration of the oldregime.

The high command and much of the officer caste of

the army, the judiciary and high state bureaucracy fleden masse. Castro subjected the remaining forces to a farreaching purge with hundreds shot and thousandsimprisoned. The units of the old army were integratedwith the Rebel Army and placed under J26M officersand commanders.

From January 1959 there was, as a result of this dis-integration, a specific form of dual power, a fragmenta-tion of the state power. The bourgeoisie’s hold on thearmy was very weak because of the loss of most of theofficer corps and the whole of the high command, butsubstantial sections of the air force and the old regi-

ments existed and would have formed a basis for areassertion of the bourgeoisie’s control over the army.On the other hand, was the 3,000 strong Rebel Army,which by January 1959 was made up of “three-fourthsto four-fif ths” of rural proletarians and small scalepeasant proprietors under the leadership of pro-PSP orpopulist and centrist tendencies.3

The effect of this where the left-wing of the J26Mwas in command (Raul Castro in Oriente for example)was an immed i a te push to grant pe a s a n t - workerdemands. In February, 22,500 families were awarded 67acre plots. In Camaguev on the other hand, rightists

under Hubert Matos and backed by figures like DiazLanz (head of the old air force) held up reform. The


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duali ty of power ran through the army and the J26Mitself. Fidel Castro played the role of a bonaparte – the“ lider maximo” balancing between, and obscuring, thisdivision.

However, the actual balance of forces was heavilyunfavourable to the bourgeoisie. Its real strength lay inthe pro bourgeois, class collaborationist poli tics of theJ26M, in Castro’s unwill ingness to break from theutopian proj ect of n a ti onal independent capitalistdevel opm ent for Cu b a . I t also lay in the Ra u lCastro/Guevara wing’s inabil ity to break with the “l idermaximo” and put themselves at the head of (and there-fore potentially under the control of ) the workers andpoor peasants. They refused to openly express classdemands against the bourgeoisie. They would not givevoice to the proletariat’s historic goal. Lastly it lay in thePSP’s popular front stagist programme which gave theweakened bourgeoisie pride of place in the popularfront. These forces, not the Cuban bourgeoisie’s intr in-sic strength, accounted for the nine-month period of dual power.

The Castroite project throughout this period was tomaintain the popular front whilst str iking at the work-ing class/poor peasant or bourgeois elements shouldeither of these classes attempt to decisively t ip the bal-ance in their own favour. A wave of str ikes and landoccupations in January and February caused a seriousbreach between the “Lider maximo” and the PSP (amili tary bloc had existed from March; a trade unionpact from November 1958).

In Apri l 1959, Ca s tro cl a s s i f i ed com mu n i s mPeronism and fascism as merely different kinds of “ totali tarianism”. Castro declared that the Cuban revo-lut ion was “humanist” – capitalism bred hunger whilst

communism “took away liberty”. The Cuban revolutionwas not red but “Olive Green”.4

Early in 1959, the J26M officered police stood by asmembers of the Havana Civic Resistance ransacked theoffices of “Hoy”, the PSP’s newspaper, an action whichled its editor, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez to declare thePSP had gone underground before and could do itagain.5 By May 1959, a vit rolic campaign was beingconducted in the pages of Re volu tion , the J26M’s paper,against the PSP. The Stalinists were denounced as “anti -revolut ionary”, similar to the counter revolutionaries.Particularly singled out for attack was their encourage-

ment of str ikes for wage increases, and their involve-ment in peasant land seizures in San Luis.6

Cast ro is forced t o break w it h his

bourgeois all ies

However, Ca s tro’s anti - com munist campaigninevitably encouraged the Cuban landowning bour-geoisie’s resistance to his own land reform. Although amoderate capitalist reform, its operation and imple-mentation lay effectively with the armed guerrillas of the Rebel Army in a situation where the peasants and

rural proletarian masses expectations had been arousedby the revolution. The fi rst attempt at nationalisation

and the methods used to enforce them touched the USand Cuban companies and land owners to the quick.Confirming the thesis of permanent revolution thatnone of the fundamental tasks of the bourgeois revolu-tion can be carried out in colonial or semi-colonialcountries under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, orany alleged “national” or “revolutionary” fraction of it,the Cuban landowning and capitalist class passed in i tstotality into the camp of counter-revolution. Castrowas forced to move against the most vociferous oppo-

nents of agrarian reform in his government.A group of bourgeois ministers were sacked in June. In July hemobilised the workers and peasants in a general strikeand mass demonstration, to remove the bourgeoispresident Urrutia and to purge the air force.

Castro’s reluctance to break his ties to the bour-geoisie can be seen in his hesitancy to purge all thebourgeois ministers. However, the activi ties of USimperialism and their agents in Cuba were to leave himno choice. On 11 June the US issued a strong protesta gainst the agrarian reform measu re s , dem an din g“prompt, adequate and effective compensation.” Castro

was faced with a choice: either concede on the agrarianreform and strengthen the bourgeoisie and its alliancewith US capital – thus alienating his peasant base – orpush ahead with the reform and strike out against theright wing.

He chose the latter. The day after the US note,Castro demanded the resignation of various bourgeoisministers – Sori Marin, Minister of Agriculture; ElenaMederos, Minister of Health; Luis Orlando Rodriguez,Minister of the Int erior, Angel Fernandez, the Ministerof Justice and Agramonte the Foreign Minister.

All these ministers were replaced by trusted mem-

bers of the J26M, often close intimates of Castro.Whilethe “political representatives” of the bourgeoisie werep u r ged , the “econ omic repre s en t a tive s” were lef tu n to u ch ed – bo u r geois fi gures like Cas Fre s qu et(Finance) and Bunilla (Commerce) remained in theirposts, while Pazos remained in charge of the Bank of Cuba.

These actions forced Castro into close reliance onhis own left wing and consequently back into a blocwith the PSP in October/November, counter-revolu-tionary activity by US and native Cuban capitalist sab-otage forced Castro to strike decisively at the bour-

geoisie outside and the J26M effectively ending the lat-ter as a popular front or indeed as a “movement” at all.Hubert Matos was arrested and J26M purged of “anti-communists”.The army was reduced by 50 per cent andren a m ed the “ Revo lut i on a ry Arm ed Force s”. Th eDefen ce Mi nistry was comp letely purged and putunder Raul Castro’s command. The organisation of amass arm ed mili tia of workers and peasants waslaunched and standing army was integrated with themili tia. Castro, forced to act with the left wing of theJ26M, his brother, Guevara and Rodriguez againstpoli tical and mil itary agents of the Cuban capitalists,

drove all the bourgeois ministers from the government.Fresquet at the Finance Ministry was the sole exception,


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took over the National Bank, and effectively economicpower and pol icy emanated from there. By November1959 the popular front had been ended, along with theduality of power.

These actions all necessitated a rapprochement withthe principal political force within the Cuban workingclass, the 18,000-strong PSP. Having ousted them fromthe CTC completely in February/March and formed abloc with the pro-bourgeois labour bureaucrats in theFrente Obrero Humanista, in November/January 1959-60,Castro was now forced to str ike a new all iance withthem and purge his former supporters.

The left wing of the J26M were now in the ascen-dant and the process of founding a uni fied party appa-ratus to replace the movement began in December1959.Whatever Castro’s differences with sections of thePSP leadership, he had now irrevocably cast in his lotwith the PSP. This process of fusion with a poli ticallypeti t-bourgeois Stalinist workers’ party did not howev-er immediately mean a break with US imperialism or aconscious and determined march towards socialism. If the Castro fusion with the PSP gave the government theappearance of a workers and peasants’ government, itwas not a revolut ionary workers and peasants’ govern-ment.

It was not anti-capitalist in its actions or pro-gramme,and it was not under the control of democra-tic armed organs of workers’ power i.e. soviets and ademocratic workers and peoples’ mili tia. It commencedits life as a bourgeois workers and peasants’ govern-m en t , but one born under special circ u m s t a nce s.Firstly, the bourgeoisie had lost all vestiges of control of its armed apparatus (the fundamental bastion of thebourgeois state had been smashed.). Henceforward the

bo u r geoisie could on ly recover it s rule by armedcounter-revolution, i.e. by. revolt from outside the statemachine. Secondly the bourgeoisie, aided and abettedby the right wing of the US bourgeoisie (Nixon and theCIA) were in fact renewing counter-revolutionary civilwar. Thirdly, the workers and peasants were beingarmed, and whilst they had no effective alternativeleadership to the left J26M/PSP leaders, they formed anarmed bulwark against capitulation and a pressure fordecisive measures against the counter-revolution.

This government was in effect a “government of theparties of petit-bourgeois democracy”. Its programme

and the intentions of its leaders did not go beyondbourgeois limits, its social roots were the urban andrural workers and poor peasants. It was in this sense abourgeois “workers’ and peasants’ government”, i.e. onewhich is described in the Comintern’s 1922 theses asbeing “tolerated by the enfeebled bourgeoisie in criticaltimes as a means of deceiving the proletariat about thereal class character of the state, or to ward off, with thehelp of corrupt workers’ leaders the revolutiona ryoffensive of the proletariat and gain time”.

However the growing class confl ict in Cuba, theincreasingly organised expression of the expectations of

the armed workers and peasants, the response via sab-otage and guerri lla activi ty of the Cuban bourgeoisieand its agents in the state bureaucracy, and the hosti le

blows of US imperialism forced this government “ to gofurther than they themselves wished along the road to abreak with the bourgeoisie”. 7

Attempts by this government to ease the strangle-hold of US imperialism over i ts economy by enteringinto a trade agreement with the USSR led to a dramat-ic worsening of relations with Washington. In June1960, US oil companies (and the European control ledfirm Shell) refused to refine Soviet oil . The Castro gov-ernment replied by nationalising them. In July, the USresponded by cancelling the agreement to buy the sugarcrop – only an agreement with the USSR and China tobuy sugar saved the economy from disaster.

Between August and October 1960, the governmentnationalised all the US-owned sugar mills, electr icityf ac i l i ties and tel ecom mu n ic ati ons indus try, all thebanks and all American and Cuban-owned large andmedium industrial concerns. By the end of 1960,80 percent of Cuba’s industr ial capacity was nationalised andthe agrarian reform had been dramatically speeded up.Under the pressure of imperialism, the Castro govern-ment had been faced with a choice: either to submit toimperialism, or take the measures necessary to breakthe power of imperialism and its agents in Cuba byexpropriating it.

While the Castroite government was forced to breakwith the bourgeoisie and take anti-capitalist measures,the form that this took was different to that envisagedby Trotsky. From the summer of 1960, the Castro gov-ernm ent had become a bu rea uc ra ti c anti- ca pitali stworkers’ government – a government forced to attackand break the economic power of the bourgeoisie, butthrough carefully contro lled bure au c ratic measuresand mobil isations. The Castro government was able to

c arry out this expropri ation rela tively “pe acefully”because it had already broken the political and militarypower of the bourgeoisie within the state, and was ableto use the Revolutionary Armed Forces and mili tiaagainst internal resistance.The major threat to the gov-ernment came from intervention by US imperialismeither directly with US troops, or indirectly througharmed Cuban counter-revolutionaries.

Cast ro f uses w it h t he St alinists

It was this threat that necessitated the controlled mass

mobil isations under the control of the Castroites (loy-ally supported by the PSP). The Committees for theDefence of the Revolution (CDRs) were set up inSeptember 1960 while the mili tia, integrated with theRAFs, reached 50,000 by the summer of 1960.The mili-tia, which was made up of workers who did militarytraining after work, had at i ts centre the purged rebelarmy, its officers trusted Fidelistas. The heads of themili tia in the provinces were often heads of G2, the mil-i t a ry - po l i tical intell i gen ce or ga n i s a ti on . The CRDswere headed by Jose Matar, a leading PSP member.

The militia was downgraded as the threat from US

imperialist intervention receded. After the defeat of theBay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, a divisional com-mand structure was reintroduced into the RA, and by

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1964, the mili tia was disarmed, leaving the RAF as thesole armed force of the state.

By November 1960, a US trade embargo was ineffect which completely cut off Cuba from its tradit ion-al markets of North and South America (80 per cent of Cuban imports came from the USA and from US oilcompanies in Venezuela). Only the support and aidfrom the Stalinist bloc (primarily the USSR) allowedthe Cuban government to develop a workable econom-ic strategy. At the end of 1960 Guevara led a trade del-egation to the USSR and the Eastern bloc, which result-ed in the entire 1961 sugar crop being taken up. At thesame time (end of 1960), a team of Czech technicaladvisors arr ived to help set up a planning agency.

In February 1961, the government departments andagencies were completely reorganised to fit in with thetasks of the new planned economy. JUCEPLAN wastransformed into the central planning agency, whichevolved the first plan which was in operation from thestart of 1962.

The massive nationalisations of 1960, the expropri-

ations of US holdings and of the Cuban bourgeoisie,and the establishment of the monopoly of foreign tradelaid the pre-conditions and established the necessity forstate planning. From the implementation of the firstfive year plan in 1962, we can speak of the creation of adegenerate workers’ state in Cuba.

The PSP cadres were central in the staffing of theadministrative apparatus of this plan and this increasedimportance, plus their vital role in maintaining disci-pline within the trade unions was recognised in thefusion between the J26M and the PSP in the IntegratedRevolutionary Organisation (ORI) in July 1961. Thisor ga n i s a ti on was later to become the Cu b a nCommunist Party in 1965.

The “ fusion” in fact took the form of a takeover of the Stalinist party apparatus by the Castroites,a projectwhich caused considerable conflict with “old guard”Stalinists. When the National Directorate of the ORIwas announced, it consisted of 25 members: 14 fromJ26M, 10 from the PSP, one from the RevolutionaryDirectorate.8 By October 1961, offices of ORI had beenset up in almost every town (100 out of 126 townships).

Anibal Escalante, the veteran Stalinist who had beengiven responsibil ity for organising the ORI, ensured

that trusted Stalinists staffed the leading positions inthe towns and provi n ce s . Recognising this thre at,Castro denounced Escalante for “sectarianism” and forc re a ting a “co u n terrevo lut i on a ry mon s tro s i ty ”, i nMa rch 1962. E s c a l a n te was ex pell ed from theDirectorate,having left hasti ly for Prague. A Secretariatof the ORI was set up with Fidelistas having fi ve of thesix places – Bias Roca being the only PSP member. PSPstrength was further reduced in 1964 when the trial of Marcos Rodriguez, who had spied for Batista in themid-1950s, but also worked for the PSP, was used toexpose PSP complicity with Batista, and led to furtherexplusions of PSP members.

When the Cuban Communist Party was set up in

October 1965, the strength of the Fidelistas could beseen in the fact that of the 100 Central Committeemem bers , 72 had mil itary ti t l es , i . e. were tru stedCastroites from the Rebel Army. The entire eight-manPoli tbureau were Fidelistas. From 1961, the Castroiteshad consciously set out to construct a Stalinist party intheir own image – taking over the PSP apparatus andpurging it of its old guard leadership. The struggle within the ORI explains the length of time it took to foundthe Cuban Communist Party.

By the summer of 1960, Castro had broken deci-sively with the remaining Cuban and US bourgeoisie.However, the absence of workers’ councils (soviets) anda revolutionary communist party comprising the van-guard of the proletariat, ensured that the outcome of these events was not a revolutionary workers’ govern-ment, i.e. a bridge to the full and direct polit ical powerof the proletariat, but a bureaucratic anti-capitalistworkers’ govern m en t . This govern m ent under theCastro faction and the PSP, with the material aid of theKremlin bureaucracy, became a bridge to a qualitative-ly bureaucratised workers’ state,one in which the work-

ing class and its va n g u a rd were from the out s etdeprived of polit ical power.

In a speech in February 1961, Guevara referredvaguely to “workers’ councils”, which could “approveplans and directives”.

These became technical councils which were to betransmission belts for government targets. In August1961, the trade unions were reorganised to expeditework co-operation in fulf il ling government productiongoals. By April 1962, Guevara was blaming the lack of l a bour discipline for the poor su gar harve s t . InNovember 1962, the CTC congress and union con-

gresses were held to “endorse” the government pro-grammes. Guevara stated that the reluctance of sometrade union leaders to en dorse the new contracts“would not be tolerated”.9

In 1962 identity cards were introduced for workersand stringent laws on labour discipline were instituted.A law of 1964-1965 enforced sanctions for breaches of labour discipline. The Grievance Commissions estab-lished in 1961 were abolished as being “too lenient”. Inthe words of Martinez Sanchez,Minister of Labour, thelaw would,

“strengthen labour discipline and increase produc-

tion and productivi ty. It will be applied to the kind of

worker who is a residue of exploiting society. We sti l l

find workers who have not taken the revolutionary

step and tend to discuss and protest any measure

coming from the administration.” 10

Whilst gains were made for and by the working class(the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, statified andplanned economy, a state monopoly of foreign trade),the Ca s troi te bon a p a rtist cl i que and a pr ivi l egedbureaucracy usurped power from the working class.TheCuban overturn had a predominantly counter-revolu-tionary character. It was not qualitatively different to the

overturns that created the other degenerate workers’states. In carrying through this programme, Castro


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proved himself a Stalinist.This regime from its founda-tion could only be removed by political revolution.

Many of the features of the petit -bourgeois populistorigins of the Fidelista movement remained hybridisedwith the essential features of a Stalinist dictatorship.The People’s Power committees and so forth were neverorgans of working class power or proletarian democra-cy. Whilst the origin of the regime in an anti-imperial-ist revolution gave Castro’s power an overwhelmingpopulari ty,not seen in the USSR or Eastern Europe, theavenues for a peaceful transition to the political powerof the working class do not exist in Cuba.

In this same period the Cuban supporters of theInternational Secretariat of the Fourth International(IS) were at first hounded out, then imprisoned by theCastroites and PSP. At the 1960 Youth Congress inHavana, the delegates identifying with “Voz Proletaria”,the paper of the Cuban secti on of the IS, weredenounced publicly in the PSP’s press as CIA agents. In1961, the paper’s press and the plates of Trotsky’sPermanent Revolut ion ,which was being published,weresmashed and the paper was suppressed. Later the sup-porters of Voz Proletaria were either imprisoned ordeported as “counter revolutionaries”.

Is t he pet it -bourg eosise a rul ing class?

The contradiction which might appear to exist betweenthe posit ions of Lenin, Trotsky and the great revolu-tionary Marxists with regard to the role of petit-bour-geois political formations dissolves if the full dynamicof the Cuban events is understood.

The petit-bourgeoisie cannot be a ruling class – i.e.it cannot establish a state power defending its own class

rule, just as petty commodity production cannot be adominant mode of production, but is always dominat-ed by a large-scale property belonging to another modeof production – slave, feudal or capitalist . The Cubanrevolution in no way contradicts this fundamentalMarxist assessment of this intermediate class.

Petit-bourgeois parties and their personnel canhowever be the instrument of the rule of other classes.By a process of internal di fferentiation, the groupingaround Castro evolved from peti t-bourgeois national-ism to petit -bourgeois Stalinism. The Fidelista cliqueassimilated themselves to the Stalinist party and pro-

gramme whilst ousting most of the latter’s former lead-ership and hybridising its programme with elements of peti t bourgeois nationalism (central role of the peas-antry, rural guerri lla warfare), as Mao had done before.

Castro, who in 1959 was a bonaparte for the enfee-bled Cuban bourgeoisie was, by 1962,a bonaparte“for”the po l i ti c a lly ex propri a ted Cuban working cl a s s .Trotsky considered in 1938 that “experience” (i .e. of Russia, Spain and France) confirmed the inabil ity of the part ies of petit-bourgeois democracy to create a“governm ent independent of the bo u rgeoi s i e”. Hethought that exceptional circumstances might force

them to go further than they wished, that the establish-ment of such a government was “highly improbable”and that even i f it occurred, it would be“merely a short

episode on the road to the actual dictatorship of theproletariat”.11

The realisation of this “highly improbable” alterna-tive in Trotsky’s prediction and then in a manner andwith a result not foreseen by him, does not undermineeither the Marxist method or the fundamentals of Trotskyism. It demands the application of that methodto understand these events, developing the programmeas a guide to action for the proletariat in situationsunavoidably only dimly foreseen by Trotsky himself.

The condition which opened the “Cuban road” tothe establishing of a degenerate workers’ state was thecontinued existence of the USSR and indeed, the pro-liferation of degenerate workers’ states. Without thepolitical, economic and mili tary aid from the USSR,theCastro government would eventually have gone downto defeat – either at the hands of Cuban-US counter-revolution, or at the hands of the Cuban proletariat ledby a Trotskyist vanguard party. The wil lingness of theSoviet bureaucracy to assist Castro in avoiding suchalternatives was due to the Kremlin’s tactical disagree-ments with imperialism and its strategic counter-revo-lut ionary hosti li ty to the seizure of power by the work-ing class.

The desirabili ty of Cuba as a missile base wasprompted by the severe disparity in military capabilitybetween the USSR and the USA at the end of the 1950s.The refusal of the US bourgeoisie to discuss arms limi-tation talks, despite Soviet concessions on the citing of offensive missiles in NATO countries in 1958,led to theUSSR seeking a counter-weight. Actions such as thewalk-out of the 1960 summit by Kruschev signalled notan abandonment of “peaceful coexistence”,but a searchfor a greater bargaining power. The Cuban revolut ion

was just such a political counter-weight. The arms pro-gramme of Kennedy on assuming office in 1960 madethis even more imperative. Hence, whilst the Kremlinoligarchy did not plan, or incite Castro to, the creationof a degenerate workers’ state in Cuba (any more thanthey did in Yugoslavia, China or Vietnam), they eco-nomically and mili tary acquiesced, for their own stateinterests.

In many instances it can be seen that it was theCastroites themselves who pushed ahead faster thaneither the USSR or their agents in Cuba liked. Thenationalisations of August 1960 were coolly received by

the PSP. Escalante declared at the 8th Congress of thePSP that the revolution should try to keep the nationalbourgeoisie “within the revolutionary camp”. Bias Rocagoes on record as saying “some nationalisations couldpossibly have Been avoided”, and that “private enter-prise which is not imperialistic is still necessary.” 12.While the PSP was trying to maintain its alliance with“peace-loving” sections of capital, Guevara was declar-ing at the first Congress of Latin American Youth:

“ If I were asked whether our revolution is commu-

nist, I would define it as Marxist. Our revolution has

discovered by its own methods the paths that Marx

pointed out”. 13

The considerable mass base of the Castro regime,the treachery of the Kremlin leaders over the Cuban

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missiles crisis in October 1962 (the decision to removethe missiles and the offer of United Nations observersin Cuba – both made without the consultation or par-ticipation of the Cubans), together with the limi tedeconomic aid, predisposed Castro, Guevara and co to arelatively independent foreign policy, especially in theyears 1966-68. In this period Castro advocated andGuevara practiced a guerrilla strategy aimed at produc-ing regimes similar to the one in Cuba.

The policy led to sharp clashes with the LatinAmerican Stalinists, and ended in complete fiasco. By19 71-72, this policy was comp letely abandoned infavour of support for an orthodox popular front inChile,and a statement of the unique “national roads” tobe followed in Latin America. From 1972, with Cuba’sentry into Comecon, Cuba came to provide in returnfor USSR economic aid, an interventionist strike forcein Africa. In Angola 1975-76, the Cubans aided theMPLA against South Africa, but also sti ffened theMPLA leaders’ crack-down on the left nationalists andon working class action. In Ethiopia in 1978, Cubantroops assisted the nationally oppressive Dergue to

impose its domination over Eri trea.In short, the Stalinism that Castro tr ied to disguise

with populism became more and more overt. Hisrecent support for the crackdown on Solidarnosc isenti rely consistent with his political trajectory since theearly 1960s.

Footnotes

1. Quoted in A.M. Ritter, Economic Development of Revolutionary Cuba, (New

York 1974) p.66

2. Quoted in H.Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom , (New York 1971) p.981

3. L. Huberman and P.M. Sweezy, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution, (New York

1960) p.78

4. T. Draper, Castroism : Theory an d Practice, (New York 1965) p.37 and H.

Thomas, op. cit. p.1219

5.H. Thomas, op. cit. p.1199

6.Op.cit. p.1220

7. L Trotsky, Transitional Program m e for Socialist Re volution, (New York 1973)

p.135

8. E.Gonzalez, Cuba Under Castro, (Boston 1974) p.102

9. H ispan ic Am erica n Rep orts, (June 1962) Vol. XV,No.9

10. Quoted in P. Binns and M.Gonzalez, “Cuba, Castro and Socialism” in

In tern ati ona l S ocialism (London,spring 1980) No. 8,p.18

11. L Trotsky,op.cit . p.135

12. H Thomas, op.cit. p.1212

13. Ibid, p.12

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Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Cuba have all beencited by the USFI as living examples of Trotsky’s

theory of permanent revolut ion. Here we have a seriesof revo lut i ons in back w a rd , overwh el m i n gly ru ra lcountries, all result ing in the establishment of workers’

states.For the USFI, at various times,Tito,Mao,Ho andCastro all became (and Castro sti ll is) agents of the per-manent revolut ion. To be sure they were all to a greateror lesser extent unconscious of this noble role, but thestrength of the objective process, of the unfoldingworld revolution, compensated for this subjective defi-ciency. Hansen gives one of the clearest expositions of this version of permanent revolution:

“The question of the absence of direct proletarian

leadership in the 1958-9 Cuba Revolution offers a

complication, it is true, but on the main question –

the tendency of a bourgeois democratic revolution in

a backward country to go beyond its bourgeois-democratic limits – Cuba offers once again the most

str iking confirmation of Trotsky’s famous theory.

That the Cuban revolutionaries were unaware they

were confirming something seemingly so abstract

and remote makes it all the more impressive.” 1

This interpretation is one-sided and therefore false.It is true that the objective factors of underdevelopedcountries in the imperialist epoch create the essentialobjective conditions for the permanence of a revolu-tion. It is not true that these objective factors, propelledin a revolutionary direction by their intrinsic features,

can ach i eve a revo luti on a ry com munist outcom e .Indeed one is forced to ask why the major ity of anti-imperialist revolutions have not led to the establish-ment of workers’ states if the objective process is so all -powerful. The truth is that in all imperialised countriesthat have become workers’ states, the subjective factor,i.e. the working class’ polit ical leadership, has beendec i s ive . In Yu go s l avi a , Ch i n a , Vi etnam andKampuchea Stalinism both in terms of the leadershipof these struggles and the intervention of the pre-exist-ing degenerate workers’ states,has played a decisive rolein establi shing the new workers’ s t a te s . Wi t h o utStalinism at the helm of government in such countries,the creation of a degenerate workers’ state would beimpossible. In Cuba the non-Stalinist origin of theCastroites was overcome in the course of 1961 by therallying to Stalinism of Castro and the assimilation andtransformation of his own peti t-bourgeois nationalistmovement into a Stalinist party. In all of those coun-tries where the Stalinists did not control the govern-ment – Algeria, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Iran etc., –far from growing over into socialism, objective factorshave pushed the rulers of such countries back into thearms of imperialism to one degree or another. Withoutthe conjuncture of world and local Stalinism the option

of the conscious creation of a degenerate workers’ statedoes not exist. This was the stubborn fact that pushed

Castro in a Stalinist direction.

However, while the creation of degenerate workers’states in imperialised countries confirms the tenets of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, it simultane-ously aborts the programmatic fulfi lment of this theo-

ry. The goal of permanent revolution is not the creationof degenerate workers’ states that block the road tosocialism, but the creation of healthy workers’ states aslinks in the chain of world revolution paving the way tointernational socialism. Thus Castro and Co. are notunconscious agents of permanent revolut ion – they areits conscious enemies. The strength of the objectiveprocess can do little to alter this because the fulfilmentof permanent revolution rests in the final analysis onthe subjective factor, on consciousness, on the revolu-tionary party and a self-organised, self conscious work-ing class. This much is clear from all of Trotsky’s key

writings on the permanent revolution.

Trot sky’s t heory

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is not anabstract histor ical schema, not an objective process of History, it is a coherent strategy for the seizure of powerby the proletariat based on a scienti fic appraisal of thelaws of motion and contradictions of capitalism.

It is rooted in the theory of uneven and combineddevelopment. Out of the unevenness of the growth of capitalism in the world and the consequent existence of advanced and backward countries arises the phenome-non of combined development. The backward countrydoes not simply fo ll ow the stages of development pio-neered by the advanced, but is compelled to “ leap over”stages of gradual evolutionary change. It does not there-by abolish its backwardness but combines it in a newformation. Tsarist Russia combined bureaucratic abso-lutism and semi-feudal agrarian relations with a smallbut modern proletariat. Concentrated in huge modernfactories in certain strictly delineated areas, the Russianworkers pioneered at the level of organisation and tac-tics all the key aspects of the modern class struggle.

They created the soviet; they developed the poli tical

mass stri ke. They gave their support to the mostadvanced Marxist part y of the Second International –the Bolsheviks.Bolshevism learned all the lessons of the“advanced” West, of German Marxism and applied itcritically and creatively to Russia – and hence devel-oped Marxism on the question of the relationshipbetween the bourgeois revolut ion and democratic tasksand the proletarian revolution and socialist measures.

Lenin disagreed with Trotsky’s theory before 1917,holding that the proletariat would have to share its dic-tatorship with the peasantry and consequently limit itsprogramme initially to the most far reaching revolu-

ti on a ry dem oc ra tic but not socialist measu re s .However life settled the dispute in Trotsky’s favour.

Permanent revolut ion aborted

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Lenin’sApr i l Thesesand indeed all his major program-m a tic and tactical wri ti n gs , (The Im pen d i n g

Catastrophe and How to Combat I t, Can the Bolsheviks

retain State Power , etc.) express the clear recognitionthat the task facing the proletariat and its party was toseize state power. Whilst it had to limi t itself in itsagrarian programme to the “capitalist” programme of division of the large estates to the peasants, it wasequally necessary to use the proletarian dictatorship totake measures transitional to socialism. Trotsky had

warned in 1907 that:

“While the anti -revolutionary aspects of Menshevism

h ave alre ady become ful ly app a ren t , those of

Bolshevism are likely to become a serious threat only

in the event of victory.” 2

Trotsky’s words proved prophetic – not with regardto Lenin but cert a i n ly with rega rd to his “Ol dBolshevik” disciples Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, atvarious points in 1917 and after 1923. Since Lenin fullyaccepted tactically the seizure of full power by the pro-letariat, an all iance with the peasantry socialist mea-sures and reliance on and support for the internationalspread of the revolution no further disputes existedbetween him and Trotsky on this question. Indeed itseemed entirely a question of party history until thetroika - Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev – started a cam-paign against “Trotskyism” based on unearthing all thedisagreements between Lenin and Trotsky between1903 and 1917.

This unprincipled factional onslaught, whose realsocial and pol itical purpose was the defence of bureau-cratism, of necessity focused on the theory which mostclearly expressed the socialist and international goals of the Russian Revolution. The most consistent expression

of this attack was Stalin and Bukharin’s theory of “socialism in one country.” No resurrection of Lenin’s“democratic dictatorship” slogan was possible – thoughZinoviev tried to do so first against Trotsky’s theorythen against Stalin’s. In fact, these two completelycounter posed theories had developed and transcendedLenin’s theory. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolu-tion expressed everything positive and revolutionary inLenin’s theory, Stalin’s everything potentially retro-grade. Indeed, it so developed the retrograde elementsthat it represented a complete Menshevik negation of Lenin’s theory.

The conflict within the International, the socialdynamics and goals of the Chinese Revolut ion, obligedTrotsky to reassess the importance of his own theory.Prior to this he had regarded it as a historical questionspecific to Russia. His bloc with Zinoviev in 1926-7both obliged and persuaded Trotsky to keep open oralgebraic the question of proletarian supremacy or of the duality of power between workers and peasants in arevolut ionary government in China. The Chinese revo-lut ion and counter-revolution convinced Trotsky of thegeneral validity of the theory of permanent revolutionin the imperialist epoch. Stalin and Bukharin’s stages

theory led to murderous defeat for the Chinese prole-tariat at the hands of Chiang Kai Shek. In his work

Perm anent Revolution (1928) he summed up his theorythus:

“It is a question of the character, the inner connec-

tions and methods of the international revolution in

general.” 3

With regard to colonial and semi-colonial coun-tr ies, backward in terms of capitalist development, itmeant that:

“the complete and genuine solut ion of their tasks of

achieving democracy and national emancipation isconceivable only through the dictatorship of the pro-

letariat as leader of the subjugated nation, above all of

its peasant masses:” 4

The vital importance of the peasantry arises notonly from the agrarian but also from the national ques-tions and necessitates an:

“ ir reconcilable struggle against the influence of the

national liberal bourgeoisie.” 5

The peasant-worker alliance can only be led by theproletariat organised in the communist party and onlythe dictatorship of the proletariat can solve all the tasksof the democratic revolution. The peasantry has a greatrevolutionary role to play but not an independent one– “the peasant follows either the worker or the bour-geois.” 6

There is no intermediate stage between bourgeoisregimes like those of Kerensky or the Kuomintang andthe proletarian dictatorship. The former are counter-revolutionary bourgeois regimes disguised in “democ-ratic” or anti- imperialist colours.

In a backward country the proletarian revolutionwil l triumph because of the need to resolve the nation-al-revolutionary and democratic tasks but their fulfil-ment will be accompanied by an assault on privateproperty:

“The democratic revolution grows over di rectly into

the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a per-

manent revolution.” 7

Conquest of power does not complete the revolu-tion but opens it – heralding a series of civil wars andrevolutionary wars. The socialist revolut ion cannot becompleted within national limits it :

“begins on the national arena,it unfolds on the inter-

national arena and is completed on the world arena.”8

This is what Trotsky calls the “newer and broader”meaning of permanent revolution – i.e. its character asa world revolution. Whilst backward countries mayarrive at the dictatorship of the proletariat sooner thanadvanced ones: “ they will come later than the latter tosocialism.”9

To say that this whole process is grounded in the lawof uneven and combined development is not to say thatthis law operates and wins through independently of the actions of the leaderships of the various classes. Aconscious revolutionary programme is needed to uti lisethe consequences and potential of the objective laws.

Against those, such as the USFI, who would disagreewith this and claim that the “ laws of history” can suc-


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cessful ly overcome subjective dif ficulties, we wouldrepeat Trotsky’s cri ticism of the Chinese CP in 1928who under the leadership of the Stalinist agen tLominadze, endeavoured to offload the responsibi li tyof leadership onto History:

“Now, Lominadze has made of the possibili ty of a

permanent revolution (on the condition that the

communist policy be correct) a scholastic formula

guaranteeing at one blow and for all time a revolu-

tionary situation ‘for many years’. The permanent

character of the revolution thus becomes a law plac-

ing itself above history, independent of the policy of

the leadership and of the material development of

revolutionary events.” 10

Hansen and the USFI seek to get round this prob-lem by suggesting that the most conscious act in histo-ry – the establishment of the dictatorship of the prole-tariat as a bridge to the construction of communism –can be carried out by unconscious revolutionary com-munists. In saying this they in fact grant to Stalinism –the force that these unconscious agents inva ria blybelong to or end up with – the capacity to carry out theprogramme of permanent revolution. This is a betrayalof revolutionary communism of the first magnitude.

As a po l i tical tendency Stalinism is absolutelyopposed to the programme of permanent revolution.Instead, it deliberately subordinates the working classas a political force to the parties of the bourgeoisie andpetit-bourgeoisie, and in so doing espouses the petit-bourgeois utopia of a national-democratic stage in theanti- imperialist struggle. Stalinism thus seeks to divertthe proletariat's objective propulsion towards the lead-ership of the revolution and does so either throughenforcing poli tical alliances with reactionary classes, or

physical liquidation of revolutionary leadership withinthe working class, or a combination of both.

This programme for the anti-imperialist struggle isbloodily self-defeating. The bitter frui t of the subordi-nation of the interests of the workers and peasants to“progressive” bourgeois politi ci ans , petty bo u r geoi snationalist dema gogues or mi li tary bonapartes hasbeen seen in China (1925-7), Spain (1936), in Egyptand Iraq (1950s and 1960s), in Indonesia (1965), in

Chile (1973) and in Iran in the 1980s.

But even should the Stalinists, exceptionally, outdis-tance their bourgeois “all ies” and seize political power,as they did in Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Cuba,then their polit ical expropriation of the working classcreates a counter-revolutionary obstacle blocking theroad of permanent revolution.

Both of these courses of action form part of the everpragmatic and eclectic programme of Stalinism, and

both of them are diametrically opposed to the pro-gramme of permanent revolution. They util ise andabuse the objective basis of permanent revolut ion toabort its fulfilment and defend their own bureaucraticinterests.

The revolutionary variant of the opportunities pre-sented by the law of uneven and combined develop-ment within imperialism retains all its validity andurgency. The experience of the creation and history of the degenerate workers’ states have proven that the costof aborted permanent revolution is not only a blockedpath to socialism, but a savage defeat for the democra-

tic tasks of the revolution.The vandalism inherent in the forced collectivisa-

tion of the peasantry, the abolit ion of all freedom forprogressive movements, the culti vation of national andethnic oppression and the strengthening of the reac-tionary elements in the old bourgeois culture (e.g. fam-ily life and religion) testify to this fact.

Foo tn o te s

1.J. Hansen, Dy na m ics of th e Cub an Rev olu tion , (NewYork 1978) p.291

2.L.Trotsky, 1905, (Harmondsworth 1973) p.332

3.L.Trotsky, Permanent Revolution , (NewYork 1965) p.152

4.I bid. p.152

5.i bid.p.153

6.ibid.p.153

7.i bid.p.154

8.i bid.p.155

9.ibid. p.155

10.L.Trotsky,On China, (New York 1976) p.349

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the slogan of “socialism in one country” against theInternational Left Opposition. Its fundamental politicalplatform (f rom which all other positions were derived)was that socialism could be constructed in the SovietUnion, without the victory of the proletariat in anadvanced capitalist country as long as the Soviet Unionwas protected against armed intervention.

Turning their back on the International programmeof the Comintern and the Leninist Bolshevik Party, theStalin faction amalgamated with the philistine conserv-ative Russian bureaucracy on the basis of a nationalistprogramme.

It follows inevitably that if socialism can be built “inone country”, then there must be a series of nationalprogrammes,of national roads to socialism. The theoryof “socialism in one country” propounded for Russia,leads inevitably to each Stalinist party adopting nation-al programmes for its particular socialism. Trotskypoi n ted this out as early as 1928 (in The T h i rd

International After Lenin ):

“ If socialism can be realised within the national

boundaries of backward Russia, then there is all themore reason to believe that it can be achieved in

advanced Germany. Tomorrow the leaders of the

Communist Party of Germany wil l undertake to pro-

pound this theory. The draft programme empowered

them to do so. The day after tomorrow the French

will have its turn. It will be the beginning of the dis-

integration of the Comintern along the lines of social

patriotism.”

The process of disintegration along the lines of social patriotism, of petty-bourgeois Stalinism, led it toaccommodate to, and seek to amalgamate with, thelabour bureaucracy in the metropolitan countries andboth the labour bureaucracy and layers of the petty-bourgeois in the imperialised and semi-colonial coun-tries. It means that the Stalinist part ies cannot simply beunderstood as agents of the Kremlin.

In the imperialised and semi-colonial countries theStalinists seek, via the labour bureaucracy, to bind theworking class to alliances with the “national” or “pro-gressive” bourgeoisie on a programme of realising the“s t a ge” of n ati onal indepen den ce and “bo u r geoi s”democracy. In practice such alliances can only mean thesubordination of working class interests to those of thebourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie. In every instance

where the working class has attempted to act in its owninterests the bourgeoisie have immediately broken thealliance and meted out violence and repression againstthe workers, and their parties, including the Stalinistparties. From 1927 in China to Chile in 1973, this strat-egy has proved a death trap for the proletariat and itsvanguard.

Stalinism has necessarily accommodated ideologi-cally and programmatically to the petty-bourgeois of the imperialised world. Its Menshevik programme for anational democratic revolution gives expression to theutopian horizons of petty bourgeois nationalism. In

concrete circumstances the model of the Soviet bureau-cratic plan and economic assistance from the USSR can

stand as a strategy for sections of the petty bourgeoisiein their struggle for freedom from imperialism’s yoke,and in order to overcome the massive unevenness andunderdevelopment of the productive forces that imperi-alism has maintained in these countries.

St alinism in t he w est

The communist parties of Western Europe are reformistin their domestic policies (i .e. bourgeois workers’ par-

ties). Their political programme is one of peacefultransformation of the capitalist state via a reactionaryutopian cross class alliance (“anti-monopoly alliance”,“historic compromise”,“new” or “advanced” democracy,etc.), a stage prior to “socialist” measures. A “peaceful”progressive anti-monopoly section of the Western bour-geoisie is appealed to for a common front to isolate thewar-mongers. The origins of this policy of Stalinism liein the Popular Front of 1935-39 and the war-timealliance of 1941-45.

The communist parties’ programmes are in essencesimilar to those of “ left” social democracy with the addi-

tion of the central role of the Soviet Union as a force forworld peace and socialism that must be defended.Powerful social democratic tendencies have developedwithin these parties (“ Eurocommunism”) which involvethe junking of the long-dead ideological baggage of Stalinism, such as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

The Eurocommunists reject the “Russian model”and express criticism of the USSR’s “human rights”record. Carillo of the Spanish CP has developed this tothe furthest point in an attempt to prove to the Spanishand the US bourgeoisie the governmental trustworthi-ness of his party. Both the Spanish and the Italian CP

accept NATO and the Western All iance. Yet the Westernbourgeoisie will not trust them with governmentaloffice except in an extreme revolutionary crisis and thenonly tempora ri ly, as in 1945-47.

The objective basis for this lies in the continuedStalinist nature of these parties. To the extent that theyrecognise the USSR as socialist, i.e. a higher historicalform of society than capitalism, to the extent that theyrecognise the USSR as the force for world peace, theirpatriotic fervour rings falsely in the bourgeoisie’s ears.They may peddle chauvinist poison to the working classin the place of communist internationalism but can they

be relied upon to be patriotic against the USSR?Despiteindividual leaders’ statements, none of these parties hasdefinitively and historically put itself at the service of imperialism against the Soviet bureaucracy.

In Spain, Italy and France, these parties have repeat-edly aborted revolutionary situations and mass move-ments of the working class. But unless - l ike the socialdemocracy - they effectively deny that the USSR and theother workers’ states are histor ic gains of the workingclass, i.e. deny their “socialist” or working class charac-ter, unless they espouse (bourgeois) democracy as ahigher good to be defended against totalitarianism they

remain Stalinist parties.Are these parties then “defenders of the USSR?” No,


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they are defenders of the Kremlin bureaucracy and itsinternational policy of class collaboration.They “defendthe USSR” via the popular front and petty bourgeoispacifism and through the subordination of the classstruggle in their own countries to these strategies. In sodoing they abort the only decisive act against imperial-ist war and capitalist restoration - the over throw of thebourgeoisie in the capitalist countries.

An important contradiction exists, however, withinthe make-up of these part ies. Added to the contradic-tion that exists within social democratic reformism (i.e.between its working class base and the bourgeois pro-gramme of the labour bureaucracy) these parties arehistorically committed to the defence of the bureaucra-cies of the workers’ states.They are counter-revolution-ary workers’ parties which serve the bourgeoisie to theextent that its interests are at one with the bureaucracyof the workers’ states.

The bureaucracies of the workers’ states strategicallypursue collaboration with imperialism whilst tacticallybeing forced to engage in actions which conflict withimperialism in order to buttress and extend its bargain-ing position. Imperialism, in its turn , has struck only atactical compromise with the workers’ states – crisis anddecay will force it to seize the opportunity to reverse theoverturns in these states.

War presents the Stalinist parties with the decisivech oice of loya lty to “ its own” bo u rgeoisie, or the

Kremlin. There can be little doubt that the largest sec-tion of the apparatus of these part ies and their tradeunion and municipal functionaries indistinguishable intheir social conditions and integration into bourgeoissociety from their social democratic peers within thelabour bureaucracy with which they have historicallyamalgamated – will serve the fatherland in war as inpeace.But large sections of the proletarian base of theseparties consist of the more mil itant spontaneously classconscious sections of the proletariat. They are isolated

from the bourgeois public opinion by the same bureau-c ratic appa ra tus that stif les workers’ democracy in theirranks.

They have not experienced the same degree of inte-gration into bourgeois society via the labour bureaucra-cy.It is this section of Stalinism’s base,hardened by iso-la tion in bourgeois society that will turn from the socialpatriotic apparatus with revulsion. The task of unfalsi-fied Trotskyism is to provide the programme, the rally-ing point for internationalist opposition to the war dri-ves of the bourgeoisie, for defence of the USSR and theother bureaucratically degenerate workers’ states, for

unremitting struggle for a political revolution againstthe Stalinist bureaucracies, for socialist revolution in thei m periali st heartlands based on pro l et a rian sovi etdemocracy, and led by a Leninist democratic centralistparty.

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The task of the political revolution is to take politicalpower directly into the hands of the working class.

This means destroying the political rule of the bureau-cracy and the apparatus of repression through which ithas been exercised. Only once the working class isorganised for, and capable of, exercising political powercan the international expansion of the revolution andthe transition to socialism be resumed.

The indispensable mass organs of the political revo-lution are the soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants’deputies.

Experience of Hungary in 1956 where workers’councils were formed and Poland in 1980 where theinter-factory strike committees of the summer consti-

tuted embryonic soviets, shows that these bodies comeinto being as organs of struggle against the bureaucracy.They are organs of economic and political struggle,organising centres for the general strike and the armedinsurrection. With Trotsky we raise the slogan of free-dom for all soviet parties, i.e. for representatives of allparties that accept and defend soviet legality.We opposeall attempts to ban political factions within the soviets –a position which can only be an attempt to have “Sovietswithout Bolsheviks”!

The experience of social and political revolutionsdemonstrates clearly that t he workers’ council, left to

“spontaneity” can be immobilised, de-valued and ren-dered impotent by false political leadership. The opencompetition of political tendencies allows for the work-ing class to learn the correct road in debate and actionand rally to the revolutionary communist programme.However, as organs of struggle the soviets should nottolerate saboteurs, agents of the class enemy or bureau-cratic oppressors in its midst.

As they are the organs of struggle against thebureaucracy we fight for the exclusion of the bureaucra-cy from the soviets. Self-evidently, workers’ soviets mustrefuse to recognise the “ leading role” of the bureaucra-

cy’s party if they are not to to declare their bankruptcyfrom the outset.

But the soviets can only become conscious instru-ments of political revolution under the leadership of anew revolutionary communist party committed to thefight for political revolution. We therefore oppose allattempts to limit or dissolve embryonic soviet-typebodies into organs for negotiation and collaborationwith the bureaucracy under the guise of establishing apermanent trade union for the working class in thebureaucratically degenerate workers’ state.

The limited programme of establishing a trade

union in a bureaucratically degenerate workers’ state isa utopian one. Under capitalism trade unions representworkers against individual capitalists in a market over

which neither employer nor worker has control. Thevery dynamics of the market economy keep alive trade

unionism as a form of representation of the workingclass within bourgeois society.Within a healthy workers’state trade unions would initially continue to representthe interests of sections of workers within a state thatwas under the direct control of the working class as awhole. They would be instruments for exposing andcombating bureaucratism, for resisting the crystallisa-tion of a bureaucracy. They would be essential traininggrounds for workers to learn control and manage theeconomy – “schools for socialism”,as Lenin liked to callthem.

But in a bureaucratically degenerate workers’ s tate ,

neither the market mechanisms through which workersbargain with individual employers, nor the above pre-requisites of the functions of trade unions in a healthyworkers’ state are in existence. Every major demand of the workers – on the length of the working week, thesacking of an individual manager, the allocation of goods or wages – inevitably pits the working classagainst the central bureaucracy which monopolises thecentral planning mechanism. No lasting success for theworkers can be secured by bargaining with the bureau-cracy. The nature of its power and privi leges is such thatit cannot for long coexist with any independent organi-sations of those that it oppresses.

Its brutal usurpation of the proletariat’s politicalpower, its scandalous privileges, its unnecessary rolewithin production, easily identify it as a parasite, giventhe most elementary self organisation of the workingclass. The bureaucracy must seek to atomise the work-ing class, to prevent the smallest forum of free discus-sion, of communication and of resistance coming intoexistence.

The bureaucracy maintains a massive standing armyand specialised armed squads to defend its privileges intimes of political revolutionary crisis. The working classwill need to build its own workers’ militia to defend itsorganisations against police and military attack. It willin the course of the political revolution have to createarmed forces capable of dissolving and defeating all thearmed forces loyal to the bureaucracy. It will seek itsweapons in the arsenals, and from the hands,of the con-script army. To win the troops to the side of politicalrevolution the proletariat must advance the slogans:

Full political r ights for soldiers, culminating in the callfor soldiers’ councils to send delegates to the workersand peasants’ Soviets.

Dissolution of the officer corps, abolition of the titles

and privileges of the generals and marshalls – comman-ders,officers and NCOs to be democratically elected orselected.

The programme of polit icalrevolution

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For the immediate dissolution of the paramilitaryrepression apparatus, the secret police and militia.

The victorious political revolution will arm andtrain all those workers capable of bearing arms. Theworkers’ state will rest upon the armed proletariat. Forthe military defence of the workers’ states against impe-rialism the maintenance of a standing army is necessary.The political revolution will however transform theexisting armies – instruments of bureaucratic tyranny aswell as defence – into Red Armies of the type foundedby Leon Trotsky. This will necessitate the conversion of a majority of these forces in time of peace into a territo-rial mili tia linked to that of the workers and poor peas-ants’ soviets – a minority of fully professional soldiers,sailors and airmen as “ frontier guards” wi ll , of course,benecessary as long as world imperialism remains capableof counterrevolutionary onslaught.

Internal counter-revolution may necessitate emer-gency or extraordinary bodies for detection and repres-sion, like the Cheka, but such bodies will require thestrictest inspection and control. Trotsky observed in T he

Revolu tion B etrayed that “The army is a copy of societyand suffers from all its diseases only at a higher temper-ature”.

The military caste will have to be destroyed as willthe state and party bureaucracy. Its destruction will l ike-wise be “at a higher temperature”, i.e. in armed conflict,as the experience of the Hungarian revolution hasdemonstrated.

As we have shown, the distortion of planning by thebureaucratic caste condemns the degenerate workers’states to stagnation and recurrent crises. Not only arelarge amounts of surplus syphoned off to maintain theluxurious privileges of the bureaucratic caste, and toprovide “incentives” for the labour aristocracy uponwhich they rest, but bureaucratic planning is incapableof developing production and technology beyond cer-tain limits. In c reasing econ omic depen den ce onimports reflects not the failure of “socialist planning”,but the inability of an alien bureaucracy to direct theconscious creativity and init iative of the workers.

As Trotsky pointed out in The Revolu tion B etrayed :

“Under a nationalised economy, quali ty demands a

democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of

criticism and init iative, conditions incompatible with

a totali tarian regime of fear, lies and flattery”.In the struggle against the bureaucracy and its vice-

like grip on state planning agencies, we call for theimmediate opening of the plan to the workers’ repre-sentatives, an end to bureaucratic secrecy to enable theworkers themselves to take control of the plan.

The experience of bureaucratic planning will haveled millions of workers to view with scepticism the veryprogramme of centralised planning. Against those whocounter “ market socialism”,“ the profit motive” and “freeprices”, to Stalini st bureaucratically centralised plan-ning, our slogan is for a democratically centralised plan

under the management of the toilers themselves.As a “school for workers’ management”, we support

partial and immediate struggles in the degenerate work-ers’ states to impose workers’ control over managementappointments and decisions, over work speed and toopen all books and proceedings to workers’ inspection.The struggle for workers’ management against bureau-cratic management is an indispensable component of the struggle against oppression and inequality.Howeverworkers’ management requires that the working class beorganised as a class to control its own state.

We oppose all tendencies that seek to develop work-ers’ control movements either into advisory or part ici-patory bodies with local management or as a meanstowards decentralisation and “market socialism” underthe slogan of “self-management”. The political revolu-tion will effect the revision of the plan from top to bot-tom in the interests of the producers and consumers.“Bourgeois norms of distribution” which are at presen treinforced and exaggerated by the bureaucracy will beconfined within the limits of strict necessity and,in stepwith the growth of social wealth,will give way to social-ist equality.

We stand for the democratisation of the plan, forworkers’ management in factories, for the democraticworkers’ organisations nationally to determine the pri-orities of the plan e.g. the proportions of resources to bedevoted to consumption, accumulation, the defence of the workers’ state and aid to the world revolution.

The democratic organisations of the working classcan take no responsibility for the debts to imperialismthat the bureaucracy has entered into in order to solvethe crisis of its planning system.All deals must be inves-tigated by the workers and their representatives andrepudiated where they do not serve the interests of socialist construction, subject to the tactical considera-

tions of the relationship of the workers’ state to worldcapitalism.

Nowhere is the bankruptcy of bureaucratic planningmore visible than in the dismal record of agriculturalproduction in the bureaucratically degenerate workers’s t a te s . Eith er bu rea ucra ti c a lly establ is h ed co ll ecti vefarms have stagnated and failed to guarantee the basicfood needs of the urban population, as in the USSR, or,as in Poland, the bureaucracy has encouraged the sur-vival of anachronistic small plot peasant farming in theinterests of its own political stability, thus retarding theforces of production in the countryside and allowing

the small peasant farmer – via the private market – todictate prices of elementary foodstuffs and withholdgoods from the state distribution network.

Rural society in the workers’ states is comprised of agricultural proletarians and semi-proletarians on thecollective and state farms, small peasant farmers, as wellas a layer of rich private farming peasants or collectivefarm aristocrats depending on the agricultural regime of the given workers’ state. The proletarian political revo-lution must win the poor peasants and agricultural pro-letarians as its allies. The programme of revolutionarycommunism is that these layers be won to the democra-

tic collectivisation of agricultural production on theroad to its complete socialisation.


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Stalinism by force and fraud has driven the peas-antry into collective farms or communes. The high pro-ductivity of private plots and the stagnation and decayof the collectivised lands has objective and subjectivereasons. Objectively bureaucratic planning with its con-centration of investment in heavy industry and itsneglect of the means to raise the physical and culturallevel of the masses has starved agriculture of invest-ment.Subjectively the forcible nature of collectivisationand the total absence of dem ocracy in the so-called

cooperatives demoralise the peasant.

Far from being a school for socialised production itappears as a continuation of feudal or tributary modesof exploitation and indeed increases their individualis-tic aspirations. The real incentive to collective farmingmust be resources provided by the workers’ state –machinery, fertiliser, building materials, agronomists,health and welfare provision, etc.

To create anew the alliance with the great mass of thepeasantry, the proletariat must advance demands andmeasures which raise it in active struggle against itsbu rea uc ra tic tormentors, whilst preventing it frombecoming a tool of reaction and restoration.

For the formation of councils of peasants and agricul-tural workers – organs of struggle against the bureau-cracy, the collective farm aristocracy and the rich peas-ants.

For the conversion of the “collective farms” or “com-munes” into democratic cooperatives with an electedmanagement. A mass return to individual ownershipwould be of course a serious retreat and should beopposed by the working class with all the means of per-suasion, education and rural class struggle at its dispos-al, the most effective of which will be the orientation of the planned economy to raise the level of collectivefarming above that of private husbandry.

Where a considerable number of private peasantsremain as in Poland - in order to overcome the anachro-nistic system of small peasant farming, a triumphantworkers’ political revolution would commit itself to aprogramme of i) taxation of the rich peasants; ii) invest-ment in and production of tractors, fertilisers and agri-cultural implements, iii) credits and education to pro-vide the material base for,and win the mass of the poor-er peasants to, co-operative farming as part of theplanned economy.

A workers’ state where the working class held politi-cal power could nevertheless continue to experiencebureaucratism since the services of adminis trators ,rooted in the separation of mental and manual labourwould not be able to be dispensed with in one blow.Trade unions are indispensable to the workers’ state as“schools for socialism”, i.e. as training grounds for themanagement of planned production, as an indispens-able channel of communication between the consciousvanguard, the party and the mass of workers.

They also have an indispensable function of defend-ing sections of workers, and even the wage earners as awhole, against managerial,bureaucratic and party arbi-

trariness. Therefore we support the slogan “For freetrade unions”.We fight to abolish the fake police-unionsthat exist in all the workers’ states and support the end-ing of the legal guarantee of the “ leading role of theparty” (i.e. of the party bureaucrats). With regard to itsinternal regime the programme for democratic tradeunions in the capitalist states applies in all its essen-tials.In the struggle to create such unions we struggle todefeat the social democratic reformists, Stalinists andclerical reactionaries who will fight to lead them.

But we do not make a condition of our support forfree trade unions against the Stalinists that they beunder revolutionary leadership. Stalinism cannot co-exist for long with trade unions that are genuine inde-pendent representatives of the working class whoserights will be consolidated through political revolution.For this reason we struggle to transform the organsdeveloped by the working class in struggle for tradeunions – strike committees, inter-factory committees,workers’ defence formations – into the nuclei of sovietsand a workers’ militia against programmes transform-ing them into negotiating bodies with the Stalinist

bureaucracy that recognise and co-exist with its usurpa-tion of political power.

The Stalinist bureaucracy has, again and again, sac-rificed the interests of the world revolution to its owninterests of maintaining itself in power. In this itmanoeuvres and colludes with imperialism against theinterests of the international proletariat. The revolu-tionary workers,once in power,will expose this hideouscollusion with imperialism by publicising the secretdeals made behind the backs of the workers and peas-ants, and adopt a policy of real proletarian internation-alism, consigning the reactionary theory of socialism in

one country to the dustbin of history and offering aidwithout strings to revolutionary and anti-imperialistmovements throughout the world.

Every political-revolutionary struggle of the work-ing class is confronted wh ether immediately as inHungary in 1956,or objectively as in Poland in 1980-81,with the threat of the armed insurrection on behalf of the Kremlin bureaucracy via the troops of the Warsawpact. Only the programme of proletarian international-ism – direct appeals to the invading troops and to theworkers of the other workers’ states to organise in soli-darity by overthrowing their particular bureaucratic

overlords – can guarantee a healthy workers’ state fromthis threat of extinction. The political revolution, likethe social revolution before it , can only survive anddevelop as part of the victorious international proletar-ian revolution.

The victorious political revolution will commit itself unconditionally to defending the historic gains of theworkers’ states from direct imperialist attack. I t willhowever withdraw its armed forces from the commandstructure of the Warsaw Pact which is the internationalarmed wing of the reactionary Kremlin-based bureau-cracy.

But while we raise the slogans Russian Troops Out,Leave the Warsaw Pact, we link these slogans indissol-


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ubly with the position of unconditional mil itary defenceof the USSR and other workers’ states against imperial-ism; with defence of the historic conquests of the work-ing class against counterrevolution; with support to theproletariat of the workers’ states against their bureau-cratic oppressors.

For this reason we oppose the slogan of “neutrality”between the USSR and imperialism. In the concrete cir-cumstances of the degenerate workers’ states this must,of necessity, strengthen the po s ition of imperialismagainst the USSR.

Because the bureaucratic political counter-revolu-tion in the USSR and the bureaucratised overturns of capitalism have not solved all the histor ic tasks of thebourgeois revolution the political revolution has to takeup the remaining progressive element of these tasks -ie.to provide the arena for the mobilisation of the prole-tariat itself and the means whereby it rallies all theoppressed strata around it.

This it must do despite, or rather because of, the factthat bourgeois social counter-revolution itself attempts

to use dem oc ra tic slogans as mobi li sing factors .Furt h ermore the Stalinists' crushing of prol etari andemocracy - the democracy of the soviets - itself fuelsand re-generates bourgeois democratic illusions, andillusions in the part ies of petty-bourgeois democracy(Social Democracy, peasant and nationalist parties). Indifferent countries different elements of the unfulfilledtasks of the revolution exist.

In the USSR national oppression exists in the nonRussian republics. Here to prevent these grievancesplaying into the hands of reaction we may raise the slo-gan of the independent workers’ council republic, freeto secede from the Soviet Union of the Kremlin oli-garchs. In Eastern Europe (and in the Baltic republics of the USSR) the tempo of the self emancipation of thetoilers was violated, the working class was bureaucrati-cally deprived of parties which represented the existingconsciousness of the workers and peasants.

The “social gains” were forced upon these nations asan accompaniment to their national oppression. InHungary and Poland the political revolutionary criseshad a powerful element of a national uprising againstRussian domination.The key question is how to preventthat national element from becoming i) a cover forcounter-revolution and ii) a self-isolation of the prole-

tariat from the workers of other oppressed nations andfrom the Russian proletariat itself. The Warsaw Pactwhich gives the Kremlin bureaucracy the legal pretext tointervene against political revolution is natura lly hatedby the proletariat itself. While we support the elemen-tary right and indeed the self-preservation involved inwithdrawal from the Warsaw Pact,we oppose the call for“neutrality” which must mean a lurch towards a blocwith imperialism and fight for unconditional defence of the USSR and all other workers’ states.

In other countries the bureaucratic overturns cameas the partial fulf ilment of the anti-imperialist “nation-

al” revolution.

In China, Korea and Vietnam uncompleted tasks of national re-unification existed for a whole period, orstill exist.

The policy of “socialism in one country” is a betray-al of these tasks and its completion becomes part of theprogramme of political revolution.

Because the Stalinist bureaucracy has crushed theorgans of proletarian power – the soviets – replacingthem with a lifeless imitation of bourgeois democratic

forms (parliament, elections by universal suffrage etc)the call for free elections, for multiplicity of parties, forthe secret ballot, all find a powerful resonance in themasses themselves. Our programme is for proletariansoviet democracy with freedom for soviet parties, for allpower to the soviets. The existence of a parl iament withbourgeois (counter-revolutionary) parties in it wouldbe a rallying point for counter-revolution.

Therefore this demand is not ours. The dem ocracyof the soviets, involving the workers, peasants, in execu-tive as well as legislative power is superior from the out-set to bourgeois democracy and is the only state form

which allows for the construction of socialism. Shouldnevertheless the masses take up this slogan, should theworkers’ councils, as in Hungary, espouse it we wouldfight for the following measures to guard the proletari-an dictatorship and expose in practice the reactionaryessence of parliamentarianism.

Fight to strengthen and centralise the soviets them-selves into a national congress of soviets

Ensure that any elections to a parliamentary bodywere conducted under soviet control debarring any can-didates actively seeking the overthrow of the workers’and peasants' power.

Place before a “constituent” parliament or assemblythe project of a purely soviet republic

Seek, on the authority of the soviets, the dissolution of the assembly either when it had ratif ied soviet power, orshould it fail to do so, to disperse it as a tool of counter-revolution.

We stand for the introduction of complete freedomof assembly and criti cism in the degenerated and degen-erate workers’ states subject to democratic workers’ con-trol of the media, press and printing industry. Whilerecognising that the bureaucracy reserves its most ter-roristi c measures for opponents who base themselves on

the working class and the traditions of October,we denythe right of the bureaucracy to repress “social democra-tic” or pro-capitalist dissidents in the name of the work-ing class. The working class must decide in workers’courts - who is counter-revolutionary and constitutes areal threat to the workers’ interests. For the release of allpolitical prisoners into the hands of the workers’ courts.

Down with the bureaucracy's closed and fraudulentlegal system! For open courts, public trials and worker

juries!

Just as the Thermidorian reaction destroyed thesociali st basis of dealing with the national question in

the USSR, so it destroyed many of the gains made byworking class women under the revolutionary govern-


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ment of the soviets. In the degenerate workers’ states of East Europe, the oppression of women is intensified bythe lack of socialised child-care and domestic facilities,accompanying a very high level of women's employ-ment in industry and agriculture. The lack of consumergoods to ease the burden of housework, and the queu-ing for basic necessities further worsens the doubleoppression of women in the degenerate workers’ states.

We support all struggles of women in the degenerat-ed and deformed workers’ states for adequate child-carefacilities, nursery provision, equal access to supervisoryand profe s s i onal occ u p a ti on s . Po l i t ical revo lut i onwould of necessity commit itself to a massive pro-gramme to provide expanded nurseries, cheap anddecent social canteens, socially controlled laundry facil-ities without which the enormous burden carried bywomen in the degenerate workers’ states – as workersand as domestic slaves – wi ll not be li fted.

The emancipation of women requires their activemobilisation and participation in political revolution.The political revolution will have in its programme thefull liberation and equality of women, their freedomfrom the ties of the family, through socialised domesticlabour and full economic and political independence.

Women must be given access to jobs and positions atpresent denied them: this will require propaganda, edu-cation and positive discrimination in favour of womenleaders in industry and political l ife. In workers’ councilsthis means special provision to ensum representation

and mobilisation of working class women and their rightto organise to voice and press for their own interests.

Free contraception and abortion on demand must beprovided, alongside decent maternity leave and healthprovision for all women. Family legislation should berevised to enable free and simple divorce, no alimony orother ties, and freedom to choose on life style, sexualityetc.without interference from the state.

For too long women in the USSR and East Europe

have been left to the ideological corruption of theChurch. Political revolution must break this if it is towin this major section of the working class behind itsbanner. Since the full libera ti on of women from all theeffects of their age-long slavery is attainable only alongthe road of the abolition of class society itself, women,once involved in struggle, will become the vanguardfighters for socialism and communism.

We demand an end to the social and legal discrimina-tion against gays in all the republics of the USSR and thedegenerate workers’ states. We condemn unreservedlythe blatant oppression and harassment of gay people in

Cuba.Only the full programme of political revolution can

open up the liberating road of socialist reconstruction –the road, necessarily international, to communism. Forthe proletarian political revolution, indispensable ally of the world revolution against capitalism!

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The Soviet Union and the other degenerate workers'states rest on property forms that are qualitatively

different from, historically superior to, and globallyirreconcilable with capitalism.

Capitalism’s own remorseless inner logic drives it toattempt to subordinate the whole world to its laws andneeds. Its survival ultimately depends on this. But thevery existence of the degenerate workers’ states meansthat huge markets and vast natural resources are closedto direct imperialist exploitation. Capitalism's crisesdrive it to attempt to reconquer these areas of the world

and subject them again to its exploitation.Only war and counter-revolution can return these

states to the imperialist orbit. In and of itself Imperialistwar in the last quarter of the twentieth century threat-ens the whole of humanity with unimaginable bar-barism, if not with complete annihilation. Even if thiswere not the case, the destruction of the degenerateworkers’ states by imperialism, the re-establishment of capitalist property relations,would represent an epochaldefeat for the working class and oppressed peoples of the world. It would immeasurably strengthen the classenemy on a world scale.For that reason the gains of the

proletariat of the whole world - the destruction of cap-italism in the Soviet Union and the degenerate workers’states must be defended. Capitali sm's drive to break upthe workers’ states must be resisted despite the politicaltyranny of the bureaucracy in those states, despite itsmonstrous privi leges, and despite its betrayal of the his-toric interests of the proletariat of the workers’ statesand of the capitalist world.

The political counter-revolution of the Stalinists hasstifled the voice, the initiative and enthusiasm of theworking class in the degenerate workers’ states. Thebureaucracies, motivated only by the defence of theirprivileges, represent a mortal threat to the preservationof post-capitalist property relations. These propertyrel a ti ons can on ly be pre s erved and qu a l i t a tivelyexpanded on the road to socialist construction by beingextended internationally.

But the bureaucracy’s historic abandonment of thegoal of communism was enshrined in the nationalistdoctr ine of “socialism in one country”.

The Stalinist bureaucracies attempt to strike strate-gic deals with imperialism.They sacrificed the German,Spanish and French workers to their alliances withGerman and Italian imperialists before the Second

World War.After that war they sacrificed the Europeanrevolution – in Greece,Italy and France – handing back

power to an enfeebled bourgeoisie and its transatlanticbackers.

In return, Stalin attempted to regulate a new divi-sion of the world between himself and Anglo-Americanimperialism. But for imperialism, the agreements andunderstandings reached at Yalta, Teheran and Potsdamwere to be kept only as long as the USSR and anti-impe-rialist, anti-capitalist forces, world-wide, obliged themto. For the imperiali sts these agreements are tactical andnot strategic. However the highest goal of the Stalinistbureaucracies is to render them permanent. This utopi-

an and reactionary programme has been variouslychristened “peaceful competition of social systems”,“peaceful co-existence”, and “detente” .

Imperialism itself has been forced by upheaval andcrisis in its own world system to restrict its direct mili-tary onslaughts on the degenerate workers’ states to thesmaller powers – Korea, Vietnam, Cuba – and to utilise“cold war” economic blockades and boycotts againstChina and the USSR. Its murderous wars in Korea andVietnam do indicate that as long as imperialism exists itwill never historically reconcile itself to the “loss” of these states.

The expropriation of the bourgeoisie, the concentra-tion of the means of production in the hands of thestate, the state monopoly of foreign trade and the mech-anisms of planification, represent historic conquests of the working class. They are the property forms objec-tively necessary for socialist construction. The absenceof workers’ democracy, the monstrous bureaucratictyranny does not alter this nor can it remove from com-munists the obligation to defend these gains and there-fore the state that defends those gains. In any war withimperial ism, we uncond i ti ona lly defend the SovietUnion and other degenerate workers’ states. In theimperialist states we are for the defeat of our “own”exploiters and for the victory of the workers’ states.Whilst we give no political support to the bureaucracy,our support for the workers’ states’ self-defence isunconditional.

This means that we do not impose pre-conditionsfor that support such as the overthrow of the Stalinistbureaucracies, the cessation of repression against revo-lutionary communists, or the pursuit of an intern ati on-alist policy.But our support for the workers’ states ruledby the Stalinist bureaucracy is not unconditional sup-port for that bureaucracy. Our support for the defenceof the workers’ state solely means that we subordinate

the overthrow of the bureaucracy to the defeat of impe-rialism and its agents.

The defence of t he USSR andof t he degenerate workers’states

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This does not mean that we shelve the task of over-throwing the bureaucracy or that we will sacrifice theinterests of the workers to the rapacious defence of thebureaucracy’s privileges.

We agitate for the defence of the workers’ condi-tions, for proletarian democracy in the conduct of thewar, and for soviets of workers and soldiers, as themeans of mobilising the enthusiasm of the masses anddefeating the imperialist enemy. Whenever the bureau-cracy’s defence of its privileges or its attempts to surren-der to imperialism threaten the workers state with col-lapse, then an armed insurrection is necessary and justi-fied.

In a degenerate workers’ state the decision to organ-ise for insurrection is conditional on the defence of theproletariat's gains against imperialist attack.

As supporters of the internationalist tradition andprogramme of Lenin and Trotsky we subordinate thedefence of the workers’ states themselves to the interestsof the world proletarian revolution just as a tactic is sub-ordinate to a strategy.For example, if successful political

or social revolution provoked a counterrevolutionaryintervention by a degenerate workers’ state and the suc-cessful defence of a workers’ political or social revolu-tion threatened a bureaucratically degenerate workers’state with destruction at the hands of imperialist pow-ers, then we would always say that a living revolutionmust not be subjected to the defence of post-capitalistproperty forms if that means subordinating it to thecounter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy.

Trotsky made this clear at the onset of the SecondWorld War:

“If the USSR is involved in the war on the side of

Germany, the German revo lution could certain lymenace the immediate interests of the defence of the

USSR. Would we advise the German workers not to

act? The Comintern would surely give them such

advice, but not we. We will say ‘we must subordinate

the interests of the defence of the Soviet Union to the

interests of the world revolution’.”1

In capitalist countries allied with the USSR or otherdegenerate workers’ states – Germany 1939-41, Bri tain1941-5 – we remain strictly defeatist with regard to thebourgeoisie.

The w ork ers’ st ates at w arHistorically five major types of invasion or interventionby the troops of degenerate workers’ states have beenseen. Different forms of defencism flow from each of these.

a) Interventions against imperialist powers. On theeve of the Second World War the USSR invaded Polandand Finland for mili tary strategic purposes. In those cir-cumstances Trotsky correctly condemned the criminalpolicies of the Stalinist bureaucracy which led to theseinvasions (for example the reactionary Nazi-Soviet pactwhich preceded the Soviet invasion of Poland), themanner in which they were carried out and the reac-tionary consequences that flowed from them. However

in the circumstances of war between the Finnish WhiteGuard regime and the USSR it was impossible for revo-luti on a ry com munists to be neutra l . The Fo u rt hInternational retained as the bedrock of its positiondefencism in the USSR and defeatism in Finland.

During the Red Army’s advance into Europe in 1944and 1945 it was the task of revolutionaries to supportthe entry of the Soviet forces and rouse the workers andpeasants to action against the Nazis and the bourgeoisieof central and eastern Europe. But a mili tary unitedfront with the Red Army could not have been allowed tocondition or truncate the struggle for the implementa-tion. of the full programme of proletarian revolution.Quite correctly the Fourth International called for thewithdrawal of Soviet as well as imperialist troops assoon as the Nazi bourgeois forces were defeated.

b) Intervention to protect a regime allied to theUSSR that is threatened with overthrow by imperialismor internal counter-revolution In the face of SouthAfrican and UNITA attempts to overthrow the AngolanMPLA regime – itself the product of an anti-imperialistrevolution – Cuban troops played a vital role in defend-ing the Angolan regime. For that reason it was justifiedto support the intervention of Cuban troops and theirvictory against the South African and UNITA forces.But in such circumstances the troops of a degenerateworkers’ state do not lose their strategically counter-rev-olutionary character. This was demonstrated in Angolaby the role of Cuban troops in helping to bolster thebonapartist MPLA’s repression of workers’ organisa-tions and its own left wing. Therefore, while supportingthem against the armies of imperialism, revolutionarieswould from the outset fight for the subordination of these forces to democratic organs of the Angolan work-

ers and peasants and for the creation of soldiers’ com-mittees in the Cuban forces.

In Afghanistan the Soviet Un ion intervened toinstall the minority Parchamite faction of the People’sDemocrati c Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in powerbecause, in its view, the Khalq faction was faced withdefeat at the hands of a reactionary mass movement (aVendée) and that defeat would have imperi ll ed the secu-ri ty interests of the Soviet bureaucracy through creatinga directly pro-imperialist regime on the USSR's south-ern border. Revo luti on a ries could not support theSoviet ousting of Amin, the installation of the Karmal

regime or the “assistance” of 85,000 Soviet troops. Thatthis intervention was not in the interests of revolution-a ry ch a n ge is shown by the Sovi et su ppor t forParchamite retreat from nearly all the progressive mea-sures of the 1979 revolution. It has served to isolate,andstigmatise as foreign agents, the principal anti-reac-tionary forces in Afghanistan.Parchamite-Soviet repres-sion in the major towns has served to further under-mine the cohesion and organisation of independentprogressive forces.

However the entry of the Soviet Armed forces doesnot alter the character of the war between the Soviet

backed Afghan government and PDPA forces on the oneside, and the reactionary muslim tribes on the other.


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The latter are systematically opposed to democratic landreform, to democratic rights for women and nationalminorities and are tied to aid from imperialism and itsagents in the Middle East and Central Asia. Thereforerevolutionaries would have to accept a military unitedfront with the Soviet Army. But only to the extent thatthe revolutionaries were incapable of inflicting lastingdefeat on reaction through their own efforts.

While opposing the intervention, revolutionarieswould therefore suspend the call for the immediatewithdrawal of Soviet troops and armed struggle againstthem, until either sufficient progressive forces em er ge todefend and extend the revolution or counter-revolutionis defeated in Afghanistan.

c) In terven tions to pro tect another degen erateworkers’ state against imperialist or counter-revolution-ary overthrow. In Korea for example, China, ruled by abureaucratic anti-capitalist workers’ government in theprocess of constructing a planned economy, interveneddirectly in support of the Korean Stalinists against theUS-Briti sh Empire forces that used the cover of theUnited Nations. Here revolutionaries should have givenunconditional support to the Chinese-Korean forcesagainst UN troops.

d) Interventions to smash a developing political rev-olution. In Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in1968 the Invasions by Soviet and Warsaw Pact troopswere reactionary in character.

They served to re-impose bureaucratic rule and sup-press the working class, the only force that could destroythe parasitic bureaucracy and open the road to socialistconstruction.

In the first instance revolutionaries would fight for

the withdrawal of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops bypropaganda and fraternisation in order to win them tothe side of the political revolution and in order to inter-na ti onalise the political revolution against the Stalinistbureaucracy,However in the face of counter-revolution-ary force from the Soviet Army and Warsaw Pact revo-lutionaries would support armed resistance to ensurethe expulsion of the invaders.

e) The invasion of one degenerate workers’ state byanother Despite the repugnant sight of workers’ statessending their armies to slaughter one another the exis-tence of such mil itary rivalry and competition between

Stalinist bu re a u c racies holds no su rpr ises forTrotskyists.

“Socialism in one country” poisons proletarianinternationali sm at root, replacing it with virulent socialpatriotism – a defence of the bureaucratic fatherland, inother words the national privileges of the rival bureau-c rac ies . Thus the Vi etnamese bure auc racy invadedKampuchea not to save millions from genocide but inorder to prop up Vietnamese hegemony in Indo-China.

In general terms we are opposed to these wars anddefeatist on both sides. The task of the workers is tooverthrow their bureaucracies, not to make war on one

another. However the poisonous rivalries between thebureaucracies of China and the USSR,between Vietnamand China, allow the imperialists the opportunity of

using one or another of these states as their agents.

China’s attack on Vietnam - though it had the pre-text of Vi etnam's inva s i on of Ka m p u chea – wasdesigned to co-ordinate with US imperialism's revan-chist project against Vietnam. In these circumstances wewould call for the defence of Vietnam against invasionby a degenerate workers’ state working in concert withimperialism.

The determination of the US and China to force

Vietnamese troops out of Kampuchea and re-install apro-Western capitalist regime, with or without the par-ticipation of the KPNA-LF means that (while we did notsuppor t the Vi etnamese bu re a u c rac y’s inva s i on of Kampuchea and were defeatist on the was between theKampuchean and the Vietnamese bureaucracies) it isnow necessary to suspend the call for Vietnamese troopsto leave Kampuchea, to subordinate that call to thedefence of the abolition of capitalism in Kampuchea.

In the context of accelerating rounds of nucleararmament by the imperialist powers since the secondworld war, we recognise that the workers’ states cannot

guarantee their own defence without the ability tomatch the imperialists weapon for weapon, technologyfor technology. For that reason we recognise that as longas imperialism has nuclear weapons the workers’ statescannot repudiate their manufacture or deploymentwithout seriously weakening the defence of post-capi-talist property.

While we oppose every measure that strengthens thearmed might of our class enemy - not a penny, not aman for this “s ystem” we defend the right of the work-ers’ states to maintain nuclear weapons in defenceagainst imperialism's drive to restore capitalism on aworld scale. We oppose all pacifist and neutralist cam-paigns against the self-defence of the workers’ states.

For Trotskyists the highest good is always the inde-pendent mobilisation of the working class for its his-toric revolutionary goals.Within this context we defendthe post-capitali st economies against attack by imperial-ism or its agents. Trotsky summed up the perspectiveclearly:

“We must formulate our slogans in such a way that the

workers see clearly just what we are defending in the

USSR (state property and planned economy) and

against whom we are conducting a ruthless struggle

(the parasitic bureaucracy and its Comintern). Wemust not lose sight for a single moment of the fact that

the question of overthrowing the Soviet uureaucracy

is for us subordinate to the question of preserving

state property in the means of production in the

USSR; that the question of preserving state property

in the means of production in the USSR is subordi-

nate for us to the question of the world proletarian

revolution.” 2

Footnotes

1. L Trotsky, In Def ence of Marxism , New York, 1973 p.40

2. ibid. p.21

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Between the European conference of 1944 and theThird World Congress of 1951, no section of the

Fourth International (FI), nor any tendencies withinthe sections, developed a correct appraisal of the role of world Stalinism in Eastern Europe.Up until the SecondWorld Congress of 1948 this did not preclude theFourth International from making a series of meaning-ful insights into the nature of and role of Stalinism.

Nor did it lead to the abandon m ent of t h eTrotskyist analysis of Stalinism as counterrevolution-ary. However the errors were to become amplified and

extended, under the impact of the Stalin-Tito break of 1948, into a quali tative revision of the Trotskyist under-standing of Stalinism.

The resolutions of the 1944 and 1946 gatherings of the FI made two interconnected errors on Stalinismand East Europe. On the one hand, they underestimat-ed the counter-revolutionary role of the Kremlin inEastern Europe; on the other, they overestimated theinstabili ty of Stalinism and the potential for its revolu-tionary defeat at the hands of the working class. Theperspective of the coming “death knell” of Stalinismwith which the Trotskyists entered the war continued to

operate, unmodified after the war. In the theses passedby the 1944 Con gre s s , the Fo u rt h In tern a ti on a ldeclared:

“The war, sharpening intolerably the contradictions

of the Russian economy, has sounded the knell of the

inevitable liquidation of the Bonapa rt ist Stalinist

bureaucracy. The latter is destined to perish without

fail, under the blows of world imperialism or under

those of the proletarian world revolution.” 1

This perspective was contradicted by events inRussia itself, in the buffer zone, in I taly, Greece andFrance. However the FI in its later theses, refused to

abandon or even partially correct its original perspec-tive. Consequently, although the FI recognised thecounter-revolutionary role played by the Red Army indemobilising the independent struggles of the masses,they suggested that these struggles would quickly throwaside Stalinism. Trotsky’s statement that the “ laws of history are stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus”(true at a general level) was used to justify a prognosisfor the immediate future. This prognosis left out of account both the subjective weaknesses of the masses(the absence of revolutionary part ies) and objective dif-ficulties (such as the armed might of the Soviet bureau-cracy, and i ts enhanced prestige after the defeat of

Nazism.) In short, it was a wrong prognosis.Refusal toacknowledge this led the F I to overestimate the “revo-

lut ionary” developments taking place in the bufferzone. In 1946 the FI argued:

“ The Soviet occupation and control have given an

impetus,although in varying degrees, to civi l war and

the development of a regime of dual power.” 2

This was untrue. The occup ation checked andarrested the development of civil war. Moreover, theregime of dual power consisted of the Stalinists and thebourgeoisie, not the Stalinists and independent work-ers’ organisations.

This error of prognosis did not have an immediate

programmatic consequence. The programmatic tenetsof Trotsky sti ll held good for the FI. The theses of 1944and 1946 do clearly and unequivocally call for the rev-olutionary overthrow of Stalinist rule and the expropri-ation of the capitalist economies in Eastern Europe,and for the building of independent sections of the FIto lead su ch overt h rows . In a re s o luti on of t h eInternational Executive Committee published in theJune 1946 issue of Fourth Internati onal , the FI madeclear their refusal to compromise with Stalinism:

“ The Fourth International demands the withdrawal

of all foreign armies, including the Red Army,from all

occupied terr itories.”3

Further, the FI raised a programme of transit ionaldemands for the East and the West which argued forpoli tical revolution, defence of the USSR and the over-throw of capitalism in the buffer zone and the west bythe independent organisations of the working classunder Trotskyist leadership.

The leadership of the FI, particularly the youngEuropean leader Germain, developed an analysis of thebuffer zone as capitalist states, but ones which couldpotentially become “structurally assimilated” into theSoviet Union. By this Germain meant that the states of

the buffer zone could, under certain conditions, be geo-graphically integrated into the USSR and at the sametime be economically transformed – from capitalistinto degenerated workers’ states like the USSR. ButGermain, dogmatically clinging to Trotsky's analysis of the pre-war bureaucratic social overturn in EasternPoland, insisted on maintaining that the condition for“structural assimilation” was the independent interven-tion of the masses.

“But in order to completely assimilate a given terr ito-

ry, that is to say, in order to expropriate and destroy as

a class the landed proprietors and capitalists, the

bureaucracy is compelled – even if in a limited wayand with the aim of always controlling it and crush-

Cent rism and Stalinism:

the falsif icat ion of Trot sky'sanalysis

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ing it when necessary – to call upon the autonomous

action of the masses. It is precisely for this reason,

among others,and precisely because the bureaucracy

fears the autonomous action of the masses like the

plague, that i t will be unable to accomplish assimila-

tion except on a relatively limited scale.” 4

While such an intervention of the masses (free of Stalinist control) is a condition for the creation of ahealthy workers' state, this is not as a general rule nec-essary for the creation of degenerate workers’ states.Germain, however, only approached the problem at ageneral level. He ignored the specific features of thebuffer zone – dislocation from the world market, deci-mation of the indigenous capitalists,monopoly of con-trol by the Stalinists over the repressive apparatus,demobilised working class – that were all crucial tofacil itating precisely an overturn of capitalism withoutthe intervention of the masses.

In circumstances where,as Germain rightly states inhis document, the principal foreign policy objectives of the Kremlin were the creation of a mil itary buffer torebuild Socialism in One Country, his theses appeared

p l a u s i bl e . However after 1947, wh en con d i ti on schanged dramatically and Moscow was forced to carrythrough overturns in the buffer zone to counter theplans of the imperialists,Germain’s maintenance of hispreconditions for an overturn of capitalism proved histheory to be a rigid and useless dogma. This becameapp arent by 1948 and, dis arming Germain in theYugoslav question, led him to suppor t Pablo’s revisionof the Trotskyist posit ion in 1951.

Germain’s insistence on the need for mass mobilisa-tions to accompany an overturn had a definite oppor-tunistic kernel. Tied to the prognosis of the imminent

collapse of Stalinism, this analysis caused the F I to con-stantly look for and anticipate the development of suchm obi l i s a ti on s . Fu rt h er it was con ceded that su chmobil isations could lead to a turn in the policies of thecommunist parties themselves:

“All of these countries, including Yugoslavia, will

however be exposed to an especially powerful pres-

sure from imperialism. It is not excluded that in this

case the Communist Parti es, basing themselves fi rm-

ly on the revolutionary aspirations of the masses, wil l

move forward and abolish the remnants of bourgeois

power and property.” 5

Such a development, it was thought, could only tes-ti fy to the crisis of Stalinism. However, when the FIapplied this prediction in practice to the Tito-Stalinsplit, they insisted that Ti to had split from Stalinism. Inso doing they believed that their prediction about rev-olutionary upheavals in the buffer zone had been ful-fi lled. This belief had serious consequences for the rev-olutionary integrity of the FI. The 1948 Congress andits resolution on “The USSR and Stalinism” did l it tle toguard the FI from these consequences. In fact it merelycodified all of the earl ier errors of perspective. The the-ses detailed the counter revolution ary role of the

Kremlin in the preceding years, yet sti ll insisted on thesame artificial pre-conditions for the carrying through

of bureaucratic social revolut ions as before (the needfor mass mobilisations and geographical assimilation).They maintained their fundamentally erroneous per-spective with regard to the crisis of Stalinism. At nopoint between 1944 and 1947 did the FI make an excep-tion of Yugoslavia in i ts analysis of Eastern, Europe.

Af ter 1948, the liqu i d a ti on of the capitalisteconomies in Eastern Europe and the Tito-Stalin splitpropelled the FI leadership into a further re-examina-tion of the nature of Stalinism.

Defining Stalinism narrowly as the subordinationof each CP to the interests of the Kremlin, the 1948Theses stated:

“under Stalinist leadership they have turned intoorganisations whose only function is to serve the diplo-matic manoeuvres of the Soviet bureaucracy.” (ouremphasis). The FI concluded that the Tito-Stalin spli tsignified that the YCP had ceased to be Stalinist.

Unable, or unwilling, to recognise that Stalinismremains true to i tself even while breaking up alongnationalist, social-patr iotic lines, the FI used the spli t to

re-read events in Yugoslavia from 1943 onwards.The FIsaw the spli t as a verif ication of their perspective withregard to the crisis of Stalinism. They saw it as the lat-est manifestation of a break with Stalinism that hadbeen effectively completed when the YCP in 1945 wassaid to have led the masses, under pressure, in a genuineproletarian revolution, which successfully overthrewcapitalism and created a “deformed workers’ state” notin need of political revolution.

Michel Pablo was the principal advocate of thisposit ion. In August 1948 Pablo hesitantly began to laythe foundations for his revisions of Trotskyism on the

Yugoslav question. In the articleT he Yugoslav Affair heclaimed:

“As against all the other Communist parties in the

‘buffer zone’ which won their power thanks to the

direct support of the Kremlin and the Red Army, the

Yugoslav Communist Party (YCP) during the war led

a real mass movement with distinct revolutionary

tendencies which brought it to power.” 6

The revolutionary tendencies of the masses hadimparted to the YCP a “special character”. At this stagePablo did not claim that the YCP was as yet centrist.

He did, however, suggest that independence from

Moscow gave the YCP, as a whole, the potential to breakfrom Stalinism thus rendering the need for a newTrotskyist party in Yugoslavia obsolete. His program-matic conclusion in this article was that the FourthInternational should seek to pressure the YCP onto theroad of self- reform.

By Septem ber 1949, building on his incorrectappraisal of the potential for self-reform of the YCP,Pablo correctly designated Yugoslavia as a workers’state. It was his definition of it as a deformed workers’state that was fundamentally wrong. In using this term,Pablo implied that the bureaucratic deformation of the

Yugoslav workers’ state was only qualitative. That is,poli tical power to some extent lay in the hands of the


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working class:

“Within this framework of a workers’ state, defined in

this sense, can be contained for a long time a part ial-

ly bourgeois content both in the sphere of distribu-

tion norms as well as in several aspects of political

power.” 7

Such a formulation is true for a healthy workers’state as well . It wil l contain bourgeois features in itseconomy and its political superstructures. But what

distinguishes a healthy workers’ state or even a workers’state with bureaucratic deformations, is that poli ticalpower still lies with the working class or in the hands of a revolutionary party, not in the hands of a consolidat-ed bureaucratic caste set against the working class andwith its own distinct interests.

The existence of such a caste, and one clearly exist-ed in Yugo sl avia , s i gn i f i ed a qu a li ta tive differen cebetween a healthy and a degenerate workers’ state andnecessitated in the latter case a political revolution totake political power back into the hands of the workingclass. Failure to make this distinction led Pablo at fi rst

to fudge the qu e s ti on of po l i tical revo luti on inYugoslavia and later to completely abandon the call forit.

Instead Pablo merely called for the extension of theworld revolut ion as a means of gradually underminingthe material base (back w a rdness) of bu re a u c ra ti cdeform a ti ons in co u n tries su ch as Yu go s l avi a . InFebruary 1950, therefore, he argued:

“between capitalism and socialism there wil l be an

enti re historic period and a whole gamut of transi-

tional regimes which, while ceasing to be capitalist,

will undergo various degrees of evolution with regard

to one another and in relation to socialism in whichthe state (state app a ra tus) wi ll be more or less

deform ed by the bu re a u c rac y; in wh i ch the

(deformed) laws of capitalism will continue to oper-

ate to some extent or another, and in which all these

difficulties and obstacles will be overcome only by the

extension of the revolut ion on the world arena.” 8

Not only was the programme of poli tical revolutionrendered ir relevant in this formula, so too was theMarxist programme for the struggle against bureaucra-cy in the transition period.

Pablo compounded these errors by claiming that,

given the experience of Yugoslavia and the YCP (aStalinist party transformed into a centrist party by thepressure of the masses). Stalinism generally could betransformed by such pressure. In his report to the 1951Congress of the Fourth International he argued:

“We have made clear that the CPs are not exactly

reformist parties and that under certain exceptional

conditions they possess the possibi li ty of projecting a

revolutionary orientation.” 9

Pablo’s positions on Yugoslavia were adopted by theFI at its 1951 Third World Congress. It was subscribedto by all the major sections and leading figures of the

FI. There was no revolutionary opposit ion to Pablo’scentrist position that:

“In Yugoslavia the first country where the proletariat

took power since the degeneration of the USSR,

Stalinism no longer exists today as an effective factor

in the workers’ movement, which, however, does not

exclude its possible re-emergence under certain con-

ditions.” 10

Germain’s objections to this position had becomeobsolete in the face of the reali ty of the Yugoslav work-ers’ s t a te , and useless in terms of explaining thecounter-revolutionary nature of the party that broughtthat state into being. At the same conference the FI didrecognise the rest of Eastern Europe as deformed work-ers’ states in need of political revolutions. But the reso-lutions of Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia were seen as acomplementary whole and this whole entailed a rightcentrist revision of the Trotskyist position on Stalinism.

This revision entailed redefining Stalinism as hav-ing a “dual nature”. The bureaucratic social revolutionsin the buffer zone were seen as examples of the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism. The progressive side of Stalinism is regarded as being the abil ity of some of theCPs, acting under the pressure of the masses, to break

with the Kremlin and project a “revolutionary orienta-tion.” This was what the FI claimed had happened inYugoslavia and later in China. It fell to Germain, nowobediently following Pablo’s line, to give this revisiontheoretical expression in his Ten Theses on Stalinism:

“ The contradictory nature of the Soviet bureaucracy

is only partially reflected in the Stalinist parties. The

dual nature of these parties is of a different social ori-

gin; it does not f low from the special role of a para-

sitic bureaucracy in a workers’ state but from the dual

function of these part ies, which are working class

because of their mass base in their own country as

well as intern a ti onal instru m ents of the Sovi etbureaucracy.” 11

It was only the latter characteristic that definedthem as Stalinist. The former characteristic could,under certain conditions,serve to negate this Stalinism.Thus:

“ The Yugoslav and Chinese examples have demon-

strated that, placed in certain exceptional conditions,

entire Communist parties can modify their political

line and lead the struggle of the masses up to the con-

quest of power, while passing beyond the objectives of

the Kremlin.

Un der su ch condi tions these parti es cease bein g

Stalinist parties in the classical sense of the world.” 12

That is, they became centrist part ies.

We reject the view that Stalinist parties are definedas such exclusively by virtue of their relationship to theKremlin. This forms only one important consti tuentpa rt of a Stalinist party’s programme and overa llnature.Further we reject the notion that Stalinism hasa dual nature and that it can be pushed in a revolution-ary direction without fi rst breaking up and bei ngreplaced by a revolutionary party.

Against this notion of Stalinism as possessing botha progre s sive and cou n terrevo luti ona ry side , e ach


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weighing equally in the scales and separated in timeand space, we re-assert the Trotskyist conception of Stalinism as predominantly counter-revolutionary butwith contradictory characteristics. We recognise thiscontradiction as an intensely dialectical one; that is,that Stalinism is capable of achieving (in exceptionalcircumstances) results which, taken in isolation areprogressive (the liquidation of capitalism).

But Stalinism achieves these results by counter-rev-olut ionary means. In recognising this we by no meansequate the progressive and reactionary elements. Werecognise that the progressive part is permeated anddominated by the counter-revolutionary whole.

By dissolving this dialectical understanding of Stalinism into a pair of formally opposed and separableelements – progressive and reactionary – the FI after1951 opened the way to a liquidation of the revolution-ary programme in favour of an orientation (deepentryism) which sought to pressure the national CPsinto taking the progressive path.

Finally, the FI’s revisionism on the question of

Stalinism cannot be fully understood without referenceto the positions taken on the FI’s other major concernof the period – the continuing instabili ty of imperial-ism. Up to 1948 this instabili ty was understood interms of chronic economic stagnation. After 1948 thisinstabili ty came to be expressed, according to the FI,more and more in terms of preparations for a thirdworld war against the USSR and Eastern Europe.

The errors on Stalinism and East Europe and on theprospects for imperialism came together in the 1951Congress resolutions on Orientation and Perspectives.These argued that a new world war was imminent, thatthe balance of forces was weighed against imperiali smin favour of the workers’ states, and that the newly dis-covered potentially progressive character of Stalinismwould mean that the new war would take the form of an int ernational civil war. The end result of this wouldbe a series of revolutions at least as healthy and pro-gressive as the Yugoslav one.

An opposit ion that purported to defend Trotskyismagainst Pablo’s revisionism on the question of Stalinismwas the Vern/Ryan tendency inside the SWP(US) dur-ing 1950-53.This tendency argued that the FI had beenwrong to delay for so long in characterising EasternEurope, Yugoslavia included, as workers’ states.

They argued that the only decisive criterion for thecharacterisation of the class nature of a state was whichclass’s representatives controlled the repressive appara-tus of the state machine. In Eastern Europe the entry of the Red Army (the repressive apparatus of a workers’state) marked the establishment of workers’ states – i.e.as early as 1944-5. They reasoned that it was “Here inthis superstructure of society, is where the revolution of our time takes place.”13 Stalinism is rooted in the work-ing class – therefore the Stalinists in power always equala distorted form of workers’ power. Stalinism could notpossibly rest on capitalist property relations, or prop up

a capitalist state, even for a limited period, because ititself rests on the post-capitalist property relations.

These undialectical positions of the Vern/Ryan ten-dency which failed to recognise the con tr ad ictorynature of Stalinism, foreshadowed many of the errorsof the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) on theRussian question. Their position can be defined asStalinophile.

It rests in the first place on an incorrect analogywith the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Because theBolsheviks in state power presided over private proper-ty in whole sections of the economy the Vern/Ryan ten-dency disregarded economic criteria altogether. Theyequated a healthy revolut ion, in which the capitaliststate was decisively smashed by the direct action of themasses led by a revolutionary party and a new type of state established, with the Stalinist bureaucratic over-turns of capitalism and the establishment of degenerateworkers’ states.

The same criterion was applied to two distinct his-tori cal ph en om en a . This was done because theVern/Ryan tendency regarded the counter-revolution-ary bureaucracy as only quali tatively different from theearly Bolshevik state functionaries. They define thebureaucracy solely as part of the working class, ignor-ing their nature as a caste within Soviet society – that isbased on the working class but with interests distinctfrom, and opposed to, the working class. They deny thepredom i na nt ly cou n terrevoluti on a ry natu re of th ebureaucracy. They deny the reality of Stalinism inEastern Europe after the war. They ignore the reali tythat Stalinism did defend capitalist property relationsfor a period and that it did hand back countries it con-trolled, like Finland and Austria to the imperialistsrather than abolish capitalism in them. This tendency’sone-sided analysis of Stalinism grants to the Soviet

bureaucracy a revolutionary dynamic it does not pos-sess. The criterion for establishing whether a degener-ate workers’ state exists is not, in the fi rst place depen-dent upon whether the Stalinists have secured politicalpower. As we have shown, this is a precondition for thecreation of a degenerate workers’ state. But it does notfollow that fulfilment of this condition will inevitablylead to the establishment of planned property relations.This fact was proved beyond doubt by Austr ia, Finlandand Vietnam (in 1945).

In the period 1948 to 1953 (in 1953 the FI spli t intothe In tern a ti onal Com m i t tee (IC) and the

International Secretariat (IS) there was no revolution-a ry oppo s i ti on to Pa bl o’s revi s i onist po s i ti ons onStalinism. The American SWP, the British Healy groupand the French PCI (all of which joined the IC) repeat-edly expressed their support for the FI’s positions, up toand including the 1951 Con gress doc u m ents onYugoslavia. ostensibly the IC’s split with Pablo involveda rejection of his tactical orientation towards Stalinistpart ies and his organisational methods,not his analysisand understanding of Stalinism.

The Germain opposition to Pablo on the Yugoslavquestion was not able to sustain an alternative position.

Their dogmatism proved to be increasingly at vari-ance with reali ty in Eastern Europe. Their conversion to


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Pablo’s viewpoint was made easy by the fact thatthroughout the debate they accepted all of the premis-es that Pablo drew his conclusions from – the excep-tional nature of the Yugoslav revolution, the centr istnature of the YCP and the conception of the Tito-Stalinspli t as a “proletarian revolt against the anti-proletari-a n , co u n terrevo lut i on a ry policy of the Krem l i n”(Germain).

At the 1951 Congress Pablo's centrist position onYugoslavia and on Stalinism was passed, unchallengedby any section of the FI or even any section of a section,on a revolutionary basis.

This was quickly to take programmatic effect in thetactics and slogans raised by the FI. For example. in1953 during the East German uprising, the FI (IS)refused to call for political revolution.

That is why we recognise the 1951 Congress as thepoint at which the FI – codifying its errors instead of rectifying them and abandoning the Trotskyist positionon Stalinism – completed its collapse into centrism.

Mandel’s ort hodox revisionsIn the dem on o l ogy of the “a n ti - Pa bl oi te”, Fo u rt hInternational International Committee (lC) tradition,the chief demon was,and remains, Michel Pablo. Whileit is certainly true that he ushered in the “ theoreticalrearmament” of the Fourth International (F I) that wasto rob it of every vestige of authentic Trotskyism, herapidly lost the role of principal theoretical revisionistof the FI after the 1953 spli t. The IC’s constant harpingon “Pabloite revisionism” was actually a testimony tot h eir own theoretical bankru ptc y. I t rep l aced anyattempt to theoretically refute the chief spokesman for

the FI’s International Secretariat (IS), Ernest Germain,later to become better known as Ernest Mandel.

He was the architect of the analysis of the crisiswithin Stalinism after Stalin’s death in 1953, and waschiefly responsible for formulating the IS programmat-ic response to the events surrounding the “crisis” of Stalinism at the 1954, 1957 and 1961 Congresses of theIS. He played a leading role in the re-unification dis-cussions with the main grouping in the IC, the SocialistWorkers Party (US), reaching agreement wi th its leader,Joseph Hansen over the analysis of the Cuban revolu-tion. From the reunification in 1963 – when the United

Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) wasestablished – to the present day, Mandel has retainedhis po s i ti on as the major USFI theoretician onStalinism, the USSR and the degenerate workers’ states.

After 1950, Germain (Mandel) was forced to con-cede his error on the Yugoslav revolution. Pablo hadbeen ri ght to ch a racterise Ti to’s Yu go s l avia as a“deformed workers’state”.His defeat – or rather his col-lapse – on this question prompted him to carry out atask that has since become the trade mark of his books,pamphlets and art icles. He set to work to disguise theFI’s revisions of Trotskyism with the gloss of Marxist

“orthodoxy”. In 1951,he reaffirmed the Trotskyist posi-tion on Stalinism in the USSR, but revised it with

regard to other Stalinist parties. In his Ten Theses, heargued:

“ The contradictory nature of the Soviet bureaucracy

is only part ially reflected in the Stalinist parties. The

dual nature of these part ies is of a different social ori-

gin; it does not flow from the special role of a para-

sit ic bureaucracy in a workers’ state,but from the dual

function of these parties, which are working class

because of their mass base in their own country as

well as intern a ti onal instru m ents of the Sovi et

bureaucracy...For the Kremlin, the usefulness of this

mass base consists exclusively in serving its diplomat-

ic designs. But these designs periodically involve a

political line diametrically opposed to the most ele-

mentary aspirations of the masses. From this flows

the possibili ty of the outstripping of the Communist

part ies by their own base, which, in action, can go

beyond the objectives set by the Kremlin and escape

from its control. This possibi li ty has always been one

of the fundamental perspectives of the Trotskyist

movement”.14

In the event of this happening, claims Germain,such parties cease to be Stalinist.

This analysis leads to a practical capitulation towhat remain, in essence, Stalinist part ies. Mandel usesthe apparently orthodox analysis of Stalinism as con-trad ictory to obsc ure the real natu re of Stal in ismbehind a spurious “dual nature”, a bad side underKremlin orders; a good side under mass pressure.Whenthe latter becomes predominant, Stalinism turns into“centrism” or an “empirically revolutionary tendency”.This fails completely to comprehend why Stalinism iscounter-revolutionary.

As we have shown, wherever a break with theKremlin takes place and the indigenous Stalinists carrythrough an overturn of capitalism, as in Yugoslavia andChina, this is prompted by the need for self-preserva-tion on the part of the already-established bureaucra-cies of these part ies, not as a result of pressure fromtheir mass base. Where such pressure is involved, itplays only a secondary,coincidental role, and is usuallyaccompanied by increased repression against the mass-es. While the possibili ty of such fractures within worldStalinism has indeed always been part of Trotskyism’spers pectives , the belief that part ies breaking fromKremlin control thereby cease to be Stalinist has never

been part of those perspectives.Germain applied this position to the Chinese revo-

lut ion. Mao became a second Tito.15 The position of theChinese Tro t s kyists on the1949 revo luti on wh i chattacked Mao’s Stalinist popular frontist project, wasreplaced by Germain’s analysis of the Chinese coalitiongovernment as a “workers’ and farmers’ government”,fol lowing the Yugoslav road:

“Many reasons permit us to hope for such a develop-

ment (a left turn – Eds). More than any other

Communist Party the Chinese CP has been obliged to

keep a less bureaucractic and centralised structure, to

maintain a constant metabolism between its ownaspirations and pre-occupations and those of the


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masses. The objective situation pushes it along this

road.” 6

In 1977, Mandel maintained that the Chinese CP,which had ceased to be Stalinist, did indeed take thesought-after left turn:

“The victory of the third Chinese revolution in 1949

was the most important gain for the world revolution

since the victory of the October sociali st revolution.” 17

This assessment, stemming from his false analysis of

Stalinism’s dual nature, ignores the massive counter-revolutionary setback for the Chinese working classthat this revolution involved. Since 1949 the ChineseStalinists have excluded the masses from any real polit-ical power, but have rather used them as cannon fodderfor their inter-bureaucratic faction fights.

The programmatic logic of this analysis of Stalinismin China (and Yugoslavia) was to return to Trotsky’spre-1934 position, namely a posit ion call ing for thepoli tical reform of these Stalinist regimes. The 1954Congress resolution, subscribed to (i f not indeed wri t-ten by) Germain, explicitly rejects political revolution

for China and Yugoslavia together with the perspectiveof a new party. It argues instead for the creation of sovi-ets, as forms of proletarian democracy, and factionsinside the Chinese and Yugoslav CPs, whose objectiveshould be to replace the “centrist” leaderships of thosepart ies through a democratic process of reform:

“Since both the Chinese and to a certain extent also

the Yugoslav CP are in reality bureaucratic centrist

part ies, which, however, sti ll find themselves under

the pressure of the revolution in their countries, we

do not call upon the proletariat of these countries to

constitute new revolutionary parties or to prepare a

political revolution in these countries.”18

This po s i ti on had the adva n t a ge of pre - 1 9 3 4Trotskyist “orthodoxy”. But whilst Germain borrowedthe term, his purpose was to wipe out the historicalgain of Trotsky’s analysis of the Stalinism after 1934.Moreover, Germain’s posit ion ignored the reali ty thatthe working class had been politically expropriated by abureaucratic caste. It ignored the fact that in all funda-mentals the ruling parties practiced the Stalinist pro-gramme of “socialism in one country”, the stifling of a ny indepen dent pol i tical li fe for the masses, thebureaucratic operation of the plan, and the subordina-tion of international revolution to the strategic deal of the bureaucracy with imperialism.

Since the 1950s, the brutal reali ty of Stalinism hasimpinged on Mandel’s consciousness, and has led himto change his stance on these countries. His method,though, remains exactly the same,and the USFI has onvarious occasions found replacements for China andYugoslavia as non-Stalinist workers’ states, in Vietnamand Cuba.

With regard to Eastern Europe, 1954 witnessed thebeginning of a new stage of the FI’s revision of the pro-gramme of polit ical revolution. The crisis of Stalinism

after Stalin’s death and the East German workers’ upris-ing, threw the bonapart ist clique in the Kremlin into a

turmoil, and led to a relative loosening of the bureau-cracy’s stranglehold on the political li fe of the masses of Eastern Europe. Mandel recognised that the measurespromulgated by Stalin's successors in the USSR andEastern Europe were, in fact, measures of self-preserva-tion , conce s sions de s i gn ed to buy, them time forretrenchment.

Nevertheless, he did argue that the rumblings inEastern Europe did open up a persepective of fragmen-tation in the national CPs, with a section (defined asbeing “closest to the masses”) placing themselves at thehead of the struggle for poli tical revolution. While thefragmentation has occurred, Mandel went further andargued that the IS programme should centre on devel-oping such a split as the best means of achieving thepolitical revolution. To this end, an entry tactic wasadvocated,and the “prioritised” programme of polit icalrevolution was reduced to the call for a series of reforms that would be palatable to a potentially revolu-tionary section of the bureaucracy:

“1. Freedom for working class prisoners.

2.Abolition of repressive anti-tabor legislation.3.Democratisation of the workers’ part ies and organ-

isations.

4. Legalisation of all workers’ parties and organisa-

tions.

5. Election and democratic functioning of mass com-

mittees.

6. Independence of the trade unions in relation to the

government.

7. Democratic elaboration of the economic plan by

the masses for the masses.

8 . E ffective r i ght of s el f-determin a tion for the peo-p les .”19

The programme fails to link these demands to thestruggle to overthrow the bureaucracy and establishgenuine workers’ power. Indeed, calls for this course of action are not raised precisely because of the IS’s newview of the bureaucracy as containing within it poten-tially centrist elements.

Between 1954 and the Fifth World Congress in1957, further enormous upheavals occurred in thedegenerate workers’ states and the USSR. The 20thCongress of the CPSU “secret speech” by Kruschev and

the ensuing concessions, the revolut ionary upr isingagainst the bureaucracy in Hungary and in Poland – allin 1956 – made a deep impression upon the IS’s per-spectives. Mandel gave the report to the Congress onthe crisis within Stalinism. The reactions of the YCPand the CCP leaderships to the Hungarian events,whilst uneven, were held to be progressive, confirmingthe perspective of reform.

Yet a major change in orientation to the buffer zoneand the USSR was outlined by Mandel. For him and theIS leadership, the Hungarian and Polish events hadproven that a wing of the bureaucracy would follow the

Tito-Mao road : in Hu nga ry – Na gy, in Poland –G omu l k a . In the USSR the “cen tr i s t” f acti on of


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Kruschev was crowded on its left by Malenkov andMikoyan, who whilst not of the Nagy-Gomulka mold,presaged the emergence of such a tendency.

In a bid to facil itate the development of such ten-dencies in the bureaucracy, the programme of politicalrevolution for Eastern Europe and the USSR was com-pletely revised. Since the prospect of political revolu-tion was seen to depend upon a section or wing of thebureaucracy, soviets could not be organs of struggleagainst the bureaucracy. Political revolut ion was con-sidered as (i.e. was replaced by) competi tion betweenan “FI faction” and the rest of the bureaucracy for theleadership of the working class.

From this point onwards, the notion of workers’councils or soviets as revolutionary organs of struggle islost, and replaced by the conception of soviets as organsof administration, for bringing the masses into democ-ratic life, to participate in the plan. The polit ical revo-lut ion is thus reduced to the peaceful withering away of the bureaucratic caste.

This programme of polit ical “revolution” emerges

from the Fifth Congress as a unified strategy for allworkers’ states. It was merely a question of the ease andrapidity with which the objective crisis in Stalinismwould produce the necessary tendencies and splitswithin the bureaucracies.

In 1961, the Sixth Congress, and again the 1963Reunification Congress, merely repeated these sameformulae, and added nothing new by way of pro-gramme.

During the last decade, Mandel has further revisedthe programme of polit ical revolution. As we haveshown, he fi rst revised it by degutting the soviets as

organs of struggle against the bureaucracy.At that time(1957), he was sti ll clear that soviets should at leastexercise the workers class’s dictatorship against restora-tionists. But in the 1970s, a social-democratic wingem er ged within the Stalinist parties –“Eurocommunism” which identified Bolshevism withStalinism, and advocated greater use of bourgeois par-liamentary insti tutions as a guarantee against the “nat-ural tendency” to dictatorial/bureaucratic abuse that issupposed to accompany rule by soviets.

Whilst Mandel has attacked such conceptions, hehas made unwarranted concessions to this wing of

Stalinism. He has done so by accepting that sovietpower must include representatives of the bourgeoisie,at least in the transit ion period, if not in the struggle forpolitical power. Mandel explicit ly rejects Lenin’s andTrotsky’s justif ications for such exclusion, a justi fica-tion which he himself accepted in earlier years.

In short, Mandel, most part icularly in hisTheses on

S o cialist Dem o cracy and the Di ct a to rship of t h e

Proletariat , passed at the USFI’s World Congress in1979, obli terates the repressive character of the work-ers’ dictatorship, in a way similar to Kautsky’s denial of the repressive character of all polit ical forms of thebourgeoisie’s dictatorship. Applied to the programmeof political revolution, this can only mean support for

open restorationists or counter-revolut ionary Stalinistbureaucrats – sworn enemies of the proletariat – in theworkers’ councils.

Mandel’s political perspective is intimately tied tohis economic understanding of the Soviet Union andthe degenerate workers’ states. Mandel laid down hisbasic position in M arxist Econ om ic T heory . While notuncritical, he presents a picture of the Soviet economyas an ever-expanding one:

“ This progress is not to be explained primari ly by theenormous backwardness it had to overcome, in com-

parison with the industry of the most advanced capi-

talist countries. It has continued after this backward-

ness has already been, by and large, overcome. This

progress is proceeding apace especially in the direc-

tions of increase and modernisation of the country’s

stock of machines and of str iving to automatise pro-

duction.” 20

This process is, for Mandel, proof of the superiorityof planning over capitalist anarchy. However, he doesrecognise that managerial self-interest and bureaucrat-

ic control of the state leading to hyper-centralisation –act as a fetter on the planned economy, particularly inthe sphere of the production of consumer goods. Butwhile Mandel accepts that the bureaucracy act as a fet-ter, he does not believe that they undermine the work-ing of the plan and threaten to plunge it into reverse,opening the way to capitalist restoration. How thisaccords with his analysis of Kampuchea, which was aplanned economy thrown into reverse, he has neverdeigned to explain.21

The planned economy of the USSR is not withoutits contradictions,and the chief contradiction is, for the“orthodox” Mandel, the one that Marx pointed outwould inevitably exist in the period of the transitionfrom capitalism to communism:

“In fact, Soviet economy is marked by the contradic-

tory combination of a non-capitalist mode of pro-

duction and a ti ll basically bourgeois mode of distri-

bution. Such a contradictory combination points to

an economic system which had a ready gone beyond

capitalism, but which has not yet reached socialism, a

system which is passing through a period of transi-

tion between capitalism and socialism, during which,

as Le nin already showed, the economy inevitably

combines features of the past with features of the

future.” 22

In a 1979 work, Mandel elaborated on this point:

“Just because a transition is more complex and – to

put it paradoxically less dynamic, since it transits less

rapidly than expected,is no reason to say that i t is not

transitional.” 23

As well as planning, the other key feature inMandel’s analysis of the USSR is that is is a transitionalsociety in the classical Marxist sense.

A further element of his analysis to be noted is hisposition on the Soviet bureaucracy. He regards it, as a

whole, as becoming objectively weaker, even redun-dant, as, the productive forces grow, since its social role


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as an arbiter in the distribution of scarce goods declinesas production increases. The growth of the workingclass concomitant with this is a further objective factoroperating against the bureaucracy. He developed thekernel of this posit ion in 1952:

“The level of development of the productive forces

has become incompatible with bureaucratic manage-

ment”.24

Once again this pos iti on has the advan tage of

ort h odox y. It starts with Tro t s ky ’s prognosis of Stalinism as a regime of crisis and objectively creatingits own grave digger.

However, through the 1950s and 1960s, Mandeladded his own prognoses to this orthodoxy, and bui lto ut of it constant pred i cti ons of devel op i n gcentrist/reform wings of the bureaucracy, in turn citingthis as evidence for his essentially “objectivist” view of the bureaucracy’s crisis.

Taken together,Mandel’s posit ions on planning, thetransition and the bureaucracy consti tute a thoroughlyfalse, non-revolutionary Marxist understanding of the

economic and polit ical nature of the USSR and thedegenerate workers’ states.

They lay the basis for his reduction of the pro-gramme of polit ical revolution to a series of structuralreforms wh i ch can, poten ti a lly, be carr ied out inall iance with a wing of the bureaucracy.

Mandel’s explanation of the progress of the Sovieteconomy is based on a one-sided assessment of theplanned economy which ignores the bureaucratic andblind nature of the plan itself. By attr ibuting thisbureaucratic plan with the power of unlimited eco-nomic growth (albeit at a slower rate than would be

possible with a democratic plan), Mandel overlooks theexistence of a series of intr insic contradictions that theplanned economies of the USSR and of the degenerateworkers’ states suffer from.

The bureaucracy, according to Mandel, underminesthe efficiency but not the existence of the plan. In hisview, the main threats to the plan are external to it –imperialism and the plan/ market contradiction insidethe workers’ states.

But these threats would inevitably exist with regardto a healthy workers’ state. The problems facing theplans of the USSR and the degenerate workers’ states

are of a different order. Poland, Yugoslavia, China, theUSSR itself and other workers’ states have all sufferedfrom serious economic crises that have included unem-ployment, wage cuts etc – features which Mandel sug-gests have been removed in these countries.

Of course the bureaucracy (and Mandel) disguisesuch crises with figures indicating overall economicgrowth. Nevertheless this growth is increasingly art if i-cal in that i t is not, and cannot be, short of politicalrevolut ion, quali tative economic growth. The bureau-cratic plan has proved i tself incapable of outstrippingthe highest economic and technical achievements of

capitalism. It lags behind the world’s largest imperialistpower, the USA. This is an inevitable product of the

plan’s internal contradictions its inability to mobilisethe creativity of the masses, its tendency to increase dis-pari ty between branches of economic life, its tendencyto increase inequality, and so on.

The dynamism of the plan that does exist (and hasbeen shown by the industrialisation of backward coun-tr ies) is strictly limited to the tasks of catching up withcapitalism. Periods of economic growth in the plannedeconomies, as Trotsky pointed out in The Revolution

Bet rayed , are those periods when the bureaucracybuilds up industry by copying the industrial, achieve-ments of the capitalist cou ntries . While this freesdegenerate workers’states from the yoke of imperialismand facilitates growth rates that are unthinkable ini m peri a l i s ed co u n tr i e s , it does not en a ble thoseeconomies to create the material base necessary forsocialism.

This is because the plan is not merely threatened byexternal factors. It is threatened by the caste that polit-ically controls it the bureaucracy. Trotsky was clear onthis in a period when the economic growth of the USSRwas dazzling fellow-travellers and enemies alike:

“While the growth of industry and the bringing of

agriculture into the sphere of state planning vastly

complicates the task of leadership, bringing to the

front the problem of quali ty, bureaucratism destroys

the creative init iative and the feeling of responsibil ity

without which there is not, and cannot be, qualitative

progress” 25

In other words, bureaucratism is not simply an inef-ficient fetter on the functioning of the planned econo-my. It actually blocks and threatens the existence of theplanned economy.

Mandel’s inabil ity to see this,his faithful retailing of official Soviet figures to prove his case, is tied to hisposit ion of the “transit ion” question. To accept that theSoviet Union is a transitional society is, necessarily toaccept that it is sti ll moving towards socialism. Mandelargues that this is so, but at a slower pace than expect-ed by earlier Marxists. Mindful of orthodoxy on thisquestion, Mandel justifies his posit ion by arguing:

“First of all there is no ‘Marxist tradition’ on thissubject in the real sense of the word” 26. On the contrary!Marx, Engels and the Bolsheviks were clear on the keyaspects of a transitional society,and on the programme

necessary to direct the transit ion to socialism. Apartfrom the economic expropriation of the bourgeoisie,these aspects do not exist in the USSR or any of thedegenerate workers’ states.

All the poli tical features of a society transit ional tosocialism have been crushed except those which areleft-overs of the old, corrupt, capitalist past. These fea-tures the bureaucracy have rapidly developed!

In other words, in these post-capitalist societies, thetransition in the Marxist sense (from capitalism tocom munism) has been bl ocked and thrown intoreverse by the bureaucracy. These states are degenerat-

ing back towards capitalism, a process that can, of course, only be completed by an actual social counter-


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revolution. For the transit ion to be restarted, a poli ticalrevolution is required.Contradictions will continue toexist after the victory of the revolution, but the polit icalrule of a bureaucracy fanning the flames of those con-trad icti ons and preventing their re so luti on by theworkers, will not.

The ever-upward motion of the planned economydetailed by Mandel in his writ ings as proof of the con-tinuing “ transitional” nature of the USSR, facilitate hisinterpretation of the bureaucracy’s impending fate. To justify his old position onYugoslavia, Pablo was forcedto offer a different explanation of the power of thebureaucracy than the one put forward by Trotsky.

Trotsky had been clear that the functional roots of the bureaucracy lay in the backwardness of SovietRussia and the scarcity of goods that such backward-ness impl ied. The bureaucracy arose as a gendarmeover the distr ibution of scarce goods. However, thenature of that bureaucracy was quali tatively trans-formed when, from being an agent of the workers’ sovi-ets, it usurped poli tical power and wielded it in its owninterests, smashing the vanguard of the working class,the Left Opposit ion of the party, in the process.

Pablo ignored the poli tical nature of the bureaucra-cy that this process resulted in ( i.e. its counter-revolu-tionary nature), and analysed Stalinist bureaucraciespurely from the standpoint of their functional roots.He was convinced by the colonial revolutions that theworld revolution would spread from the periphery(backward countries) to the centre (advanced coun-tr ies). Therefore, he concluded, bureaucratic deforma-tions would be an inevitable, indeed necessary, featureof tra n s i ti onal soc i et ies for some time to com e .However, as productive forces grew, and as the world

revolution spread, so the material base of these bureau-cracies would disappear as would the bureaucraciesthemselves. This conveniently left out the need forpolitical revolution against the counter-revolutionarybureaucracy that rules in every existing post-capitalistsociety on the planet.

Pa blo ex p l a i n ed this revi s i onist po s i ti on inpolemics with no less a person than Ernest Germain:

“Thus in the historic period of the transit ion from

capitalism to sociali sm we shall witness the rise not of

normal workers’ states,but of more or less degenerat-

ed workers’ states that is, states with strong bureau-

cratic deformations which can reach the point of

complete polit ical expropriation of the proletariat.” 27

But Pablo did not despair at this prospect since theforward march of deformed revolution is guaranteedby the objective situation and with it the witheringaway of the deformations.

Mandel’s position on the bureaucracy are takenstraight from his one-time adversary and long-timemaster, Pablo. The plan guarantees growth. Growthguarantees that the proletariat will increase in size andculture and that the bureaucracy will weaken. Whenfaced with this contradiction posed to it acutely, attimes of crisis, a section of the bureaucracy wil l move

closer to the masses and become a leading force in theprocess (Mandel's favouri te word) of political revolu-ti on . In deed , Ma n del som etimes implies that theprocess has already made qualitative leaps forward:

“Can it be said that the Soviet Union in which oppo-

sitionists were found only in Gulag camps and the

Soviet Union today with its ferment of polit ical cur-

rents, samizdat and discussions at all sorts of levels

(not only among intellectuals, but also in the unions)

are one and the same thing” 28

Trotskyists recognise that for a real change to takeplace in the USSR and the degenerate workers’ states,the power of the bureaucracy must be smashed deci-sively by the working class.

Therefore to Mandel’s question – flowing from hiscrass impressionism – the answer would be yes!; inessence the Soviet Union today is the same as the SovietUnion under Stalin. It remains the land of bureaucrat-ic tyranny over the workers.

In his long-forgotten polemics with Pablo in the1940s, the young and rash Germain argued vehemently:

“Any revision, either current or retrospective, of theresults of this analysis [of the buffer zone as capitalist

states – Eds] implying both a revision of the cri teria

employed and a revision of the Marxist theory of the

state,could only have disastrous consequences for the

Fourth International.” 29

At that time,Mandel was wrong in his characterisa-tion of Eastern Europe, but right in his estimation of the dangers of Pablo’s posit ion. However, having beendefeated by 1951, Mandel has spent over 30 years pro-viding a theoretical jus ti fica ti on for those “con se-quences” with a sophistry and alacrity of which Pablo

was incapable. His responsibi li ty for the destruction of the international Trotskyist movement as a revolution-ary force is far greater then Pablo’s. And it continues upto the present. Authentic Trotskyism has no place forMandel’s“orthodox” concoctions – they are a mockeryof the Marxism of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.

In the 1953 split within the FI the analysis of Stalinism developed by Pablo, and refined and modi-fied by Germain (Mandel) was not really in dispute.Therefore once the immediate tactical issue in the dis-pute – orientation to national Stalinist parties becameirrelevant, unification of the International Secretariat

and the International Committee again became a pos-sibility.

Hansen on Cuba

The Cuban Revolution showed that Mandel’s theorieshad an advocate within the Socialist Workers Party(USA). His name was Joseph Hansen.

In late 1949 Hansen emerged as a major protagonistin the debate on Eastern Europe arguing a line veryclose to that being defended by Pablo and against thosewho con ti nu ed to rega rd Yu go s l avia and EasternEurope as “capitalist states on the road to structuralassimilation”,principally Germain (Mandel):


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“This degenerated workers’ state [ the USSR – Eds]

spil ling over the frontiers fixed at the close of World

War 1, has upset capitalist property relations in

Eastern Europe and given rise to formations that are

pretty much replicas of the USSR.” 30

Hansen observed that the European and Americanoppon ents of Pa bl o’s cru de impre s s i onism werewrestling with the “norms” of Trotsky’s programme –civi l war, direct action of the masses, soviets, “ real”planning. They were seeking to defend this programmeagainst the revisions they instinctively felt would beushered in by accepting these misbegotten Stalinistmonsters as workers’ states.

Hansen, however, had no such misgivings and mer-cilessly mocked their “normative” method with quotesfrom Trotsky. He was easily able to trip them up in thecontradictions of their own confused dialectic.After all,by 1949 capitalism and the capitalists palpably did notexist in Eastern Europe. Here, a good American prag-matist, unhampered by “dialectical” baggage, could seeand say that “the Emperor had no clothes.”

In this assessment Hansen was not wrong. Heuti l i s ed the em p i rical shrewdness wh i ch he laterapplied to Cuba. Against those who were inventing allsorts of new criteria for the existence of workers’ states,Hansen insisted:

“ In my opinion, in a country where the rule of the

bourgeoisie has been broken AND the principal sec-

tors of the economy nationalised, we must place the

state in the general category of ‘workers’ state’ no

matter how widely or monstrously it departs from

our norms. This change cannot occur without a civi l

war although this civil war may also be a mutilation

of the type, differing in important respects from our

norms.” 31

This position contains two key errors that laid thebasis tor Hansen’s acceptance of Pablo’s revisionism onYugoslavia and for his own application of that revision-ism to the Cuban events.

Hansen is wrong to equate the political expropria-tion of the bourgeoisie and extensive nationalisationwith the establishment of post-capitalist property rela-tions. Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1948 showedinstances where the political power of the bourgeoisiewas broken (crucially their control of armed bodies of men defending their property, was gone), the economynationalised the Stalinists in power and yet these coun-tries (e.g.Poland and East Germany) remained capitalist.

For Hansen to be consistent he would have to datethe cre a ti on of workers’ s t a tes in these co u n tr i e sbetween 194 and 1946,a position he did not hold. Thushis empiricism in 1949 did not enable him to isolatewhat was the defining attributez of the workers states,nor the means by which they were created. As we haveshown, the political expropriation of bourgeoisie andnationalisation are pre-requisites for the establishmentof a degenerate workers’ state. But only when theeconomies are planned on the basis of suppressing theoperation of the law of value can we talk of degenerate

workers’ states having been established.

Hansen’s second error, and one that he shared withhis opponents in 1949, was his insistence on the needfor “civil war” for the creation of degenerate workers’states. Although he accepts that such civil wars can beof a “mutilated” type he does argue: “Overturns inproperty relations cannot occur without the revolu-tionary mobi lisations of the masses.” 32

But Ha n s en’s dating of su ch mobi l i s a ti ons in

Eastern Europe takes him back to the time of the entryof the Red Army not to the actual times of the over-turns.Precisely because the workers’ states are degener-ate from birth, their creation can be accomplished inthe special circumstances detailed elsewhere in thisbook, without the revolutionary mobilisation of themasses by a Stali nist bu re a u c rac y. Moreover, a sCzechoslovakia showed, even where mobilisations dotake place, they are completely bureaucratically con-trolled by the Stalinists. No organs of working classdemocratic power – soviets – are formed.

While Hansen in his 1949 document, The Problem

of Eastern Europe attacks those who have a “normative”notion of civil war, it must be said that his alternative isreally to operate with an idealist notion of civil war.That is, he is forced to invent civil wars where they didnot take place.

The real weakness of this method was exposedwhen it was applied to Yugoslavia.Here there was a fair-ly “normal” civil war, though under a leadership “withStalinist or igins”, as Pablo afterwards put it. Such a waris essential to the overturn of property relations. TheYugoslav civil war ushered in a workers’ state before thishad happened in the rest of Eastern Europe. Further,asthis civil war only deviated slightly from the norm, so,the Yugoslav workers’ state itself must only have deviat-ed slightly from the norm. That is,Hansen’s method ledhim, by 1951, to concede that the Yugoslav revolutionand the workers’ state it created only deviated from thenorm quantitatively not qualitatively.

Hansen rejected the normative method but notfrom the standpoint of the genuine materialist methodwhich can evaluate what the deviations from the normmean. Hansen effectively rejected the “norms” – soviets,pro l et a rian dem oc rac y, d i rect part i c i p a ti on of t h emasses in their own emancipation as “secondary”, “notessential” or merely“formal” questions.The full flower-

ing of Hansen’s pragmatism was to take place over hisanalysis of Cuba.

In 1960 Hansen stepped forward to re-apply themethod that had yielded these liquidationist conclu-sions with regard to Tito. The adaptation to Castroismcopied the capitulation to Titoism. This methodologywas unable to combat the peti t bourgeois “anti-imperi -alism” and Stalinism and 22 years later blinds its fol-lowers to the necessity for a political revolution.

Nevertheless Hansen did empirically register thedecisive political and “economic” events and even thestages of the Cuban revolut ion.

In this he retained the advantage over his “anti-


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Pabloite” critics. Mage, Wolforth, Healy all constructedlifeless abstract and idealist schemas – classless “transi-tional state”,“ structural assimilation”,“capitalist state” –wh i ch not on ly invo lved serious revi s i ons of t h eMarxist theory of the state but also blinded theirauthors to the major events and turning points of theCuban revolution.

However, Hansen’s evaluation of the significance of the Cuban revolut ion, whilst able to perceive the breakswith imperialism and the Cuban bourgeoisie, the deci-sive importance of the material links with the USSRand the expropriation of capitalist property, was never-theless hopelessly at sea when it came to the evaluationof political tendencies, governments and,consequently,strategy and tactics for the proletarian vanguard.

Whilst Hansen based his approach on the 1948-50Fourth International analysis of Titoism, a“ new” prob-lem posed was the non-Stalinist origins of the July 26thMovement (J26M), indeed its non-proletarian originsboth in social and political terms.

Hansen argued that the Castro movement was a

radical petit-bourgeois movement with a bourgeoisdem oc ra ti c progra m m e . Its programme prom i s edthoroughgoing agrarian reform and industrialisationto break Cuba’s dependent status vis-a-vis the USA.The Castroites however, were serious about their pro-gramme and as a matter of principle insisted on “revo-lutionary methods” to oust Batista.

During the civil war phase in the Sierra MaestraCastro mobilised the poor peasants and the agrarianproletariat, “the decisive sector of the Cuban workingclass”. By a reciprocal action the J26M leaders’“outlookbecame modified.” 33 The urban workers on the otherhand proved unable to bring their power to bear at thisstage, but later rall ied to Castro.

Castro destroyed Batista’s armed forces and tookpower in Ja nua ry 1959 inaugura ti ng a process of smashing the bourgeois state machine. It was a “popu-lar political revolution” but “appeared to be limited todemocratic aims.” 34 The government was a coalitionwith important bourgeois democratic elements. Theattempt to carry through the agrarian reform and othermeasures led to a clash with US imperialism and itsCuban agents.

Castro broke with the bourgeoisie, expelled their

representatives from the government and formed a“workers’ and farmers’ government” in autumn 1959.35

Cuba’s workers’ and farmers’ government could be sodesignated because of its firm resistance to imperialismand its Cuban agents; its resolute pursuit of the agrari-an reform; its disarming of reaction and its arming of the people; its carrying out of pro-working class mea-sures at the expense of the bourgeoisie; and its conflictwith imperialism forced it to take increasingly radicalmeasures.

The period of the workers’ and farmers’ govern-ment was completed by late 1960 with the establish-ment of a workers’ state. The decisive measures were:the establishment of a monopoly of foreign trade, the

nationalisation of the latifundia, the expropriation of the US and Cuban capitalist holdings in all the key sec-tors of the economy.This process was completed in theAugust 1960 period and Hansen could therefore pro-claim that “planning is now (December 1960) fi rmlyestablished.” 6 In his view planning developed “con-comitantly with the nationalisation of industry.” 37

The procedure for planning the economy was basedon a study of the USSR and Eastern Europe and “thusin the final analysis the overturn in property relations isan echo of the October revolut ion in Russia.” 38

The Castro movement and the state that it had cre-ated had however “unique” features. The Cuban work-ers’ state was neither degenerate nor deformed, indeed“it was a pretty good looking one.” 39 However, it was“lacking as yet in the forms of democratic proletarianrule”.40 Though if it were to develop freely, “ its democ-ratic tendency would undoubtedly lead to the early cre-ation of proletarian democratic forms.”41

There were no bureaucratic obstacles to the advanceto socialism in Cuba or to the international spread of

the revolution. The Castro leadership by their failure to“proclaim socialist aims” during the course of the revo-lution demonstrated that “the subjective factor in therevolution remained unclear.” 42Nevertheless, the Castrocurrent was empirically revolutionary and above all notStalinist, “a fact of world wide significance” 43

The non-Stalinist and indeed profoundly democra-tic essence of Castroism meant that the Cuban CPcould itself be purged of its legacy of Stalinism. Therewas no need to progra m m a ti c a lly co u n terpo s eTrotskyism to Castroism since there was no need tobuild a separate Trotskyist party.Hansen rejected polit-ical revolut ion and a Trotskyist party for Cuba.He givesexceptionalist reasons to explain why a Trotskyist lead-ership is not necessary – capitalism is weaker in impe-rialised countries and there, a “socialist minded” lead-ership wil l do because of the strength of the objectiveprocess of revolution. 44

Hansen’s analysis is thoroughly l iquidationist in itsprogrammatic conclusions. In the fi rst place by entrust-ing the tasks of a revolutionary communist party lead-ing a working class organised in armed, democraticorgans of direct power, to the Castroites his posit ionrepresents a capitulation to an agent of the petit-bour-geoisie. Castro’s programme in 1959 was absolutely

cl ear. He held back on devel oping insti tut i ons of democracy – bourgeois or proletarian – because hisrole was that of a bonaparte demagogically appeasingthe masses but acting in defence of capitalism.

The fact that Castro had employed revolutionarymethods – i.e. armed struggle – does not make him acom mu n i s t , conscious or uncon s c i o u s . Co u n t l e s snationalists in the imperialised world – Chiang KaiSh e k, for example – have used non - constitutionalmethods to achieve power. Hansen’s attempt to distin-guish Castro from other nationalist leaders by referringto his base amongst the rural proletariat is equally spu-

rious. The rural proletariat was never as well organisedas the urban workers and was never as class conscious


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as them.

For this very reason Castro was able to utilise themin this guerrilla war in exactly the same way as he wasable to use the poor peasants. That is, their form of struggle under Castro’s leadership was not a specificproletarian form of struggle. Indeed, against Hansen,we would argue that it was the very absence of the wellorganised urban working class led by a revolutionaryparty from the Cuban revolutionary struggle that madepossible the bureaucratisation of the movement andthe creation of a degenerate workers’ state.

His attempt to give the Castroites revolutionaryproletarian credentials leads Hansen to ignore the pop-ular frontist character of the J26M. In his Draft T heses

on the Cuban Revolution in 1960 Hansen concedes thatthe initial government was a “coali tion”, including in i t“bourgeois democratic elements”.45 However this fea-ture of the J26M, its limi tation to a bourgeois pro-gramme, and the class polarisation that resulted whenthis coalition was placed under the combined and con-fl icting pressures of the Cuban masses and US imperi-alism, is completely ignored.

Castro can be portrayed as a revolutionary drivenleft simply by US imperialism:

“The conflict between American imperialism and the

Castro forces precipitated a political crisis in Havana.

This was resolved by a decided turn to the left.” 46

The J26M becomes simply “ the Castro forces”, anundi fferentiated bloc.This is vital for Hansen’s analysis.This way he can paint Castro as a consistent revolu-tionary constantly evolving leftwards, albeit uncon-sciously.This obscures Castro’s real role as a bonapartefor capitalism in the first nine months of 1959. It also

provides Hansen with an explanation of why Castrowas eventually able to create a workers’ state. Castro’sliquidation of the J26M into Cuban Stalinism, whichwas possible because a pro-Stalinist wing existed in themovement, and the creation of a degenerate workers’state by this force, are ignored in the interests of Hansen’s capitulationist schema of Cuba as a healthyworkers’ state not in need of polit ical revolution.

Ha n s en ob s erves the anti -capitali st aspects of Castro’s“workers’ government” but assimilates it to thenorm of the Comintern’s revolutionary workers’ gov-ernment. He obscures the fact that the Cuban workers’

and farmers’ government was not under the control of or answerable to the proletariat and the poor peasantry.For it to have been so, democratic workers’ mili tia andworkers’and peasants’ councils would have had to havecome into being. Such bodies did not come into beingand in addit ion the existing workers’ organisations,especially the trade unions, were purged of their pro-capitalist bureaucracy.

This was immediately replaced with a Stalinist one.Whilst the anti-capitalist measures leading to the cre-ation of a workers’ state are observed even i f in a tele-scoped form by Hansen, the bureaucratic exclusionfrom poli tical power of the working class is completelyignored. In fact, if this latter process is taken into

account, one is forced to conclude that Castro’s govern-ment was not a revolutionary,but a bureaucratic work-ers’ and peasant’ government.

The reason Hansen feels able to dismiss the fact thatthe Cuban pro l et a riat had no real sel f - or ga n i s ed ,armed, democratic bodies, is because he reduces suchbodies to mere“forms of proletarian democracy”:

“If the Cuban revolution were permitted to develop

freely, its democratic tendency would undoubtedly

lead to the early creation of proletarian democraticforms adapted to Cuba's own needs.”47

Not only can a healthy workers’ state be createdwithout a revolutionary party, it can also be created onbehalf of the masses,rather than by them,without sovi-ets or a workers’ mil it ia. If this is the case, then the taskfor Trotskyists should simply be to encourage petit-bourgeois nationalists leftwards, to coax them to act onbehalf of the masses. There is no need for a party, norfor a programme based on the struggle for the seizureof power by the working class organised in soviets.These things, Hansen assures us, will some day eventu-

ally evolve naturally!Against this distortion of Marxism it needs to be re-

affirmed that soviets and a workers’ mili tia are notmere “forms of proletarian democracy”. They are theindispensable weapons that the working class has in therevolut ionary overthrow of capitalism and they are themeans by which the working class exercises its directpoli tical rule in a healthy workers’ state.

Their temporary atrophy can be offset by the exis-tence of a consciously revolut ionary party (e.g. Russia1920) but not by a petit-bourgeois nationalist move-ment that assimilated i tself to Stalinism. Besides if the

evolution of these democratic forms was really possiblein Cuba then the followers of Hansen would have toexplain why, twenty-two years later, such organs of power sti ll do not exist in Cuba.

Hansen was unable to raise an independent revolu-ti on a ry programme for Cu b a . As happen ed wi t hYu go s l avi a , the SWP (USA), foo l ed by one of Stalinism’s disguises, reduced its own role to that of being friendly advisor to Castro. If this applied to Cubathen it would equally apply to a host of other imperi-alised coun tries. Han s en’s theory, building on anddeveloping the Fourth International’s earlier errors,

cl ea red the way for reu n i f i ca tion with Pa blo andG ermain's In tern a ti onal Sec ret a ri a t . The Un i tedSecretariat of the Fourth International was founded ona programme that bore no resemblance to authenticTrotskyism’s characterisation of Stalinism.

The t heory of st ruct ural assimilat ion

The theory of structural assimilation holds that the cre-ation of workers’ states in Eastern Europe, Indochinaand Cuba was, in essence, the result of the assimilationof these societies into the USSR. For the theorists of structural assimilation – most notably in the recent

period, Tim Wohlforth – the process of the creation of new workers’ states has ultimately been the process of


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the extension of the property relations established bythe workers’ revolution in Russia:

“ Thus all post-war overturns were in essence exten-

sions of the new propert y forms thrown up by the

October Revolution and the bureaucratic caste which

usurped these property forms.” 48

The superficial attraction of this theory lies in the factthat,within its terms, neither Stalinist part ies nor petit-bourgeoisie nationalist forces are deemed capable of

creating workers’ states. even of a form degenerate frombirth. They can do so only as extensions of the degen-erate October Revolution.

“ The theory of structural assimi lation explained a

process of the creation of deformed workers’ states

through the extension of the degenerated workers’

state.That is it answered the question of origins with-

out in any sense undermining the revolutionary role

of the proletariat.” 49

By “proving” that the agency of social revolutionremains, albeit in a highly refracted and degenerateform, the October Revolution, Wohlforth thought he

had discovered a “theory” which would ward off theopportunist deviations of Pabloism.

Wohlforth’s position has changed significantly overthe years, particularly on the question of China andCuba. But a common thread of an erroneous and non-Marxist posit ion of the state links his positions from1961 to the present day.

Wohlforth is never absolutely clear as to what pre-cisely happened to the capitalist state in the countries of Eastern Europe following the victories of the Red Army.or in China in 1949 or in Cuba in 1959. One can inter-pret his posit ion in two ways: either the capitalist state

apparatus was never smashed;or it was, but was imme-diately reconstituted by the Stalinists or petit-bourgeoisnationalists, On Eastern Europe he argues:

“(structural assimilation) was not carried through by

the destruction of the old bourgeois state in its enti re-

ty and the erection of a new working class state appa-

ratus.Not only has much of the administrative struc-

ture been kept intact to this day, but a good section of

the personnel of the old state administration has been

maihtained.” 50

While on China he states the following:

“Rather it [ the CCP – eds] devoted its efforts to the

creation of a coali tion government with the remnants

of the nati onal bou r geoisie and petit bo u rgeoi s

forces, guaranteed the sanctity of private property in

the immediate period, and set to work to reconstruct

the bourgeois state apparatus.” 51

The confusion arises because Wohlforth defines theclass nature of the state, not on the basis of what modeof production it defends (i .e. its class content), but onthe basis of its form. What becomes important toWohlforth in determining the class nature of thesestates is the fact that a standing army was recreated, andthat the old personnel and administration were main-

tained.This also explains why he has no conception of the existence of dual power (except as “territorial” dual

power in China) in this period of overturn.

The class nature of the state apparatus becomessubsumed by its form. Having relegated the question of which property form the state presides over to the levelof a secondary question. the crucial events leading tothe characterisation of these states as deformed work-ers’ states therefore takes place at the level of the super-structure, within the state apparatus:

“The actual social tra n s form a ti on was carri ed

through in the state sector by a process of purging asection of the state bureaucracy, the inundation of the

state apparatus with supporters of the Stalinists, and

the fusion of the state and Communist Party bureau-

cracies.”52

This vir tual separation of base and superstructureleads Wohlforth into a serious error on the nature of the nati ona li sa ti ons du ring this peri od . Wohl forthargues:

“The direct economic power of the bourgeois class in

Eastern Europe had been basically eroded with the

nationalisations which followed the war. And when it

comes to social ownership therefore, the structuraltransformation process simply completed a process

basically finished.” 54

But these nationalisations – by capitalist states inEastern Europe in the period 1944-45 – did not deci-sively “erode” the economic power of the bourgeoisie,any more than they did for the Egyptian bourgeoisieunder Nasser. What really “eroded” the power of thebourgeoisie in this period was the smashing of its coer-cive apparatus. The crucial question for Wohlforth inthe creation of workers’ states therefore becomes, “ Inwhose hands is the state power?”:

“The completion of the destruction of the economicunderpinning of the bourgeois forces in these coun-

tries did not represent such a drastic change as the

destruction of their poli tical power. In most of these

co un trie s , by 1947, the commanding hei ghts of

industry were in the hands of the state, thus the crit i-

cal question was in whose hands the state was, rather

than the mopping up operation on the remnants of

private capitalist holdings.” 55

The int roduction of state planning, we should notein passing, must have been part of this “mopping upoperation”!

This gives rise to Wohlforth’s concentration on thefusion of the CPs and the Social Democrats and the“ interpenetration of the monolithic party with the stateapparatus” (tightening of the Stalinists’ grip on thestate, and that state’s grip on society) as the decisivepoints that mark the creation of a workers’ state albeitof a degenerate form. As Wohlforth himself describesthe process:

“Essentially structural assimilation is a combined

process of the destruction of the polit ical and social

power of the bourgeoisie through admi nistra tive

means, the consolidation of a monoli thic party which

is essentially an extension of the soviet bureaucracy,the purging of the state apparatus of bourgeois ele-


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ments and the fusion of the party and the state

bu re a u c racies into a single ruling bu re a u c ra ti c

caste.”56

Underlying Wohlforth’s theory of structural assimi-lation is a conception of the state, and therefore of thetransition from one type of state to another, whichowes more to Kautsky than to Marx.57

For Wohlforth it is possible for the proletariat, or acaste within it , to lay hold of the existing state machine

and use it as an instrument for the creation of a work-ers’ state,as a means of carrying through the social rev-olution. At no point in this process is the bourgeoisstate“smashed”; rather it is “purged”.

There is no quali tative break, rather the bourgeoisstate grows over through an evolut ionary process into adegenerate workers’ state:

“The problem of dating, like the problem of the

destruction of the bourgeois state through ‘fusion

and purging’, is a reflection of the very process of

structural assimilation.Wherever this problem occurs

– as long as it is crystal clear that a social overturn has

taken place – one knows one is dealing with thisprocess.” 58

This method stands in sharp contrast to our analy-sis of the formation of degenerate workers’ states whichanalyses at every point the class nature of the state andthe programmatic and tactical implications which flowfrom it. For Wohlforth, and presumably for any partywhich adhered to his theory, they could only know aworkers’ state had come into existence, or even that theprocess had started, after the event!

Wohlforth’s explanation of the creation of newworkers’ states is also based on an erroneous analysis of

the nature of Stalinism and the Stalinist part ies. In hisori ginal 1963 essay, the Com munist parties weredescribed as being in all essentials, extensions of theKremlin bureaucracy. Hence it is the Kremlin bureau-cracy, based upon the property relations established bya workers’ revolution, that is laying hold of these statemachines and using them as a means for the transfor-mation of bourgeois states into workers’ states througha process of “purgation”.

The degenerated workers’ state, which emanatedf rom the October Revo lut i on , has ex ten ded itsel f through its agents into large contiguous areas sur-

rounding the USSR – a process we call “defensiveexp an s ionism”.59 And agai n , in argument with thebureaucratic collectivists:

“But Stalinism did not expand in the post-war world

on this basis. It did not grow out of the managerial

strata of capitalist society at all. Rather it extended

itself from the USSR. Thus the identi ty of Stalinism

with the USSR its extension through its own agents

and in opposit ion to all strata of the countries in

wh i ch the tra n s form a ti on took place cannot be

explained through the theory of bureaucratic collec-

tivism.” 60

This analysis is extended,but only with difficulty, toYugoslavia and China. On the Yugoslav Communist

Part y he argues:

“Once the buffer in general is really understood there

a re no theoretical probl ems connected with the

Yugoslav developments in particular. The basic point

is to recognise the nature of the domestic CPs as essen-

tially an extension of the Soviet bureaucracy itself.

Once this is recognised then social tr ansformations of

a more ‘indigenous’ character like Yugoslavia can be

comprehended. Yugoslavia differed only in degree in

this respect – this was not a qualitative difference.” 61

While on the question of the Chinese CommunistParty the following analysis is put forward:

“To the extent that the CCP was and is independent of

domestic social classes, it is dependent upon – is essen-

tially an extension of – the bureaucratic caste of the

USSR, the distorted product of a workers’ revolution .”62

This is a fundamentally undialectical and thereforefalse characterisation of the national communist par-ties. Ever since the beginning of the bureaucratic ther-midor in the USSR which was carried through underthe nationalist slogan of “socialism in one country”, the

Comintern underwent a process of disintegration alongthe lines of national chauvinism. The national CPsaccommodated to specific strata of the petit-bour-geoisie in the imperialised countries and to the labourbureaucracy in the imperialist countries.

This process of accommodation took an acceleratedform in the civil wars in Yugoslavia and China. AsWohlforth himself in his second document points out,this process led to the crystallisation of a bureaucraticcaste in those societies, with i ts own distinct interests,separate from, and counter posed to,not only the mass-es of its part icular society, but also to the national inter-

ests of the Soviet bureaucracy.The timing and speed of the social overturn in

Yugoslavia, the very seizure of power in China, tookplace contrary to the immediate interests and desires of the Kremlin bureaucracy.

These Stalinist bureaucracies have been capable of making their own all iances with imperialism, againstthe Soviet bureaucracy, up to and including breakingfrom the Soviet bloc and entering into military allianceand coopera ti on with imperialism (for ex a m p l e ,Yugoslavia and the Korean war, China’s relations withthe USA in the late 1970s).

In a more recent document, Wohlforth appears torecognise the untenability of his previous analysis of Stalinism, as he attempts to grapple with the problemsof the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. He states:

“ I have proven that all the post-war social overturns

have been initiated from on top by military-bureau-

cratic means and have led to the establishment of

deformed workers’ states identical in all essentials

with the USSR. However the path which led to these

social transformations differed significantly in the

case of the Chinese Variant and the Cuban Variant.

Yet none of these processes were totally independent

of the Soviet Stalinist State.” 63

Historical reali ty has pushed Wohlforth from a


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position where these parties were seen as little morethan “extensions of the Kremlin bureaucracy” to onewhere they are seen as not “ totally independent” of theKremlin. The theory of structural assimilation, whichargued that Stalinist and petit-bourgeois nationalistmovements were incapable of creating deformed work-ers’ states except as extensions of the Kremlin bureau-cracy,has been stretched to breaking point!

It is false to see the Stalinist parties as simply exten-sions of the Soviet bureaucracy. The logic of this veryargument led Pablo to conclude that the YugoslavCommunist Party had ceased to be a Stalinist one onceit broke with the Kremlin! However, the abili ty of theforces of Stalinism to carry through bureaucratic socialrevolutions cannot be abstracted historically from theexistence of the USSR and i ts strength vis-a-vis imperi-alism. In the case of Yugoslavia, China and Cuba, thebureaucratic revolutions were carried through in a sit-uation where the world bourgeoisie was insufficientlystrong in relation to the USSR to directly and success-fully intervene to protect the native bourgeoisie and thecapitalist property r elations.

The very existence of the USSR can, of course, serveto materially aid the native Stalinist forces directly.Thatthis will not always be the case, should those forces notbe advancing the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy,is demonstrated by the Greek events of 1944-45.

The USSR can, by its very existence and armedmight, undermine the possibili ty of internationally-backed capitalist retaliation and counter-revolution. Itcan serve as an alternative source of economic aid andcooperation to forces struggling to break the strangle-hold of imperialism over their national economies, asin the case of Cuba. But such assistance wil l only ever

be forthcoming from the USSR should the overturnpotentially strengthen the bargaining posit ion of theKremlin bureaucracy without upsetting the Kremlin’sstrategy of peaceful co-existence with imperialism.

Within Wohlforth’s theory of the state is a reformistpolitical logic which stands outside the tradit ion of theThird and Fourth Internationals. This is most clearlyseen in Wohlforth’s most recent art icle, Transition to the

Transition in New Left Review.

Defining the class nature of the state according to itssuperstructural form rather than on the basis of whatproperty forms it defends, has led him to question, like

Kautsky before him, the soviet system itself. Hailinglooked more closely at the “Soviet type of the earlyperiod of the USSR”, Wohlforth is obviously no longersure as to whether it was “fundamentally different”from and superior to, the bureaucratic East Europeanor Mussolini state types, which were both, for him, cap-italist in form.

In this art icle, Wohlforth contents himself withattacking Soviet democracy as “undemocratic” andproposes instead a good dose of bourgeois democracyfor the early Soviet State. If the early Soviet Union alsohas a “capitalist state form”, then it is only logical to

argue for capitalist forms of democracy. Thus the “fail-ure” of the early Bolshevik government to transform

the Soviets into a “practical government structure”exposed the impossibili ty of directly combining thedecentralised Soviet system with the needs of a mod-ernised centralised state, as well as revealing the ambi-guit ies (sic) in the Leninist counter position of “prole-tarian” versus “bourgeois democracy.” 64

Wohlforth believes it is “utopian” to imagine theestablishment of direct democratic rule and is onlywill ing to defend “the vision and possibili ty” of such asystem.65 The Bolsheviks were forced to use “much of the old administrative personnel” and were forced towatch over “what was in many respects the reconsti tu-tion of the old state apparatus.” 66

Rather than the “expansion of democracy” (classch aracter not given) , dem oc racy was “res tr i cted .” 67

Once again Wohlforth is allowing his preoccupationwith the “ form” of the state to totally blind him to thecontent of Soviet democracy.The early Soviet state rep-resented the dictatorship of the proletariat; that waswhy the bourgeoisie were excluded from the suffrage,why the working class was given greater weight than thepeasants in the soviets. Wohlforth, like Kautsky beforehim, empties democracy of its class content, protestsagainst the violations of “democracy” in general.

Lenin had this to say when Kautsky complained of restri ctions in democracy in the young Soviet Republic:

“It is natural for a liberal to speak of ‘democracy’ in

general; but a Marxist will never forget to ask, for

what class?” 68

Undaunted, the liberal Wohlforth continues:

“It is hard to view the young Soviet state as structural-

ly superior to the systems of parliamentary bourgeois

democracy excoriated in Leninist doctr ine.’69

He then proceeds to recommend a constituentassembly as a stage on the road to soviets after theseizure of power by the proletariat:

“The specific function of representative democracy,

therefore is to ensure that the power that still rests at

the centralised summit of the state is elected directly

through pluralistic competi tion, universal suffrage

and the secret ballot. Representative Democracy is

n ece s s a ry to med i a te the con tr ad i cti on bet ween

Sovietism and centrali sm, and to guarantee the space

for, the gradual transfer of power from centralised,

representative institutions to decentralised, participa-

tory bodies of a Soviet or communal type.”70

All this is nothing new of course; these were exactlythe points on which Kautsky attacked the dictatorshipof the proletariat in the young Soviet Republic.

Wohlforth now has agreement with Kautsky notonly on the question of the state but also on rejectingthe dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1919 in Terrorism

and Co m m unism Ka ut s ky def i n ed the USSR as a“bureaucratic dictatorship” where the bureaucracy rep-resented a “new ruling class presiding over a ‘state cap-italist’ economy.” Having long had theoretical agree-ment on the state, it will undoubtedly not be long

before Wohlforth reaches agreement with Kautsky onthe class nature of the Soviet Union!


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The Spart acist school of St alinop hil ia

The Cuban Revolution created a new basis for agree-ment bet ween the two pr incipal camps of worl d“Trotskyism”. It enabled Joseph Hansen and the SWP(USA) and Ernest Ma n del and the In tern a ti on a lSec reta riat to reuni te around similar po s i ti ons onCub a , that stem med from their shared erroneo u sassessment of the Yugoslav revolut ion in the late 1940sand early 1950s. The SWP’s positions on Cuba did not,

however, go unchallenged within that organisation.During the latter half of 1960, a minor ity tendency

within the SWP (USA) led by Mage, Wohlforth andRobertson, developed an alternative posit ion to theSWP majority on the Cuban revolution. This led, in1961, to the formation of the Revolutionary Tendency(RT – later to become the international Spartacist ten-dency iSt ). Wohlforth was quickly to abandon the posi-tions he helped to develop within the opposition and,in alliance with Healy, was to side with the SWP major-ity in the bureaucratic expulsion of the RT.

The initial positions were further developed within

the iSt and have by implication rather than throughtheoretical elaboration, been extended to cover EasternEurope,Yugoslavia and China. (Indeed it is astonishingthat over twenty years later barely a few lines have beenwritten by the iSt on the Eastern European overturns).Motivated initially by a desire to avoid the chronicopportunism and liquidationism of the Hansen major-ity, the RT/iSt proceeded to make a series of major revi-sions of the Marxist theory of the state, which in theirimplications for the Marxist programme are no lesserroneous and dangerous than those made by eitherHansen or Wohlforth.

The core of the iSt’s error lies in the characterisationof the nature of the state that existed in Cuba betweenJanuary 1959 and late 1960. For them the governmentwhich controlled Cuba was,:

“an inherently transitory and fundamentally unstable

phenomenon – a petitbourgeois government which

was not committed to the defence of either bourgeois

private property or the collectivist property forms of

proletarian class rule.” 71

The government came to power in a situation where

“a capitalist state,namely armed bodies of men dedi-

cated to defending a particular property form, did not

exist in the Marxist sense.”72

The armed force on which this state rested was ledby commanders who had had their

“previous direct connections with oppositional liber-

al elements broken and had become episodically

a uton omous from their class...the Cuban bo u r-

geoisie” 73

Despite the attempts to distance themselves fromthe original Mage/Wohlforth position of a“transition-al state” with no defined class character – a positiondefined as “ indefensible” in Cuba and M arxist T heory –this is precisely the characterisation the iSt i tself used.Cuba and Marxist Theory declares: “at no point wasthere a classless ‘t ransitiona’' state in Cuba”, there was “a

petit-bourgeois government – not a class neutral one.”The use of the term “petit -bourgeois government” doesnot get round this problem. Does this mean we have apetit-bourgeois state, based on a petit-bourgeois modeof production?

The iSt recoils from thi s furt h er revi s i on of Marxism by remaining silent on this interesting newstate form. Instead it prefers to define this state nega-tively, as one which neither defends bourgeois privateproperty nor proletarian property forms.

Either this is a “class neutral” state, or the iSt is try-ing to breed a unicorn. Such a posit ion directly over-throws the Marxist analysis of the state as elaboratedfrom the Comm un ist M anifesto onwards, that the stateis a machine for maintaining the rule of one class overothers. It is an organ of class rule which defends, evenin its bonapartist form, one set of property forms.

A state which defends neither capitalist nor prole-tarian property forms is therefore a classless state, astate which is no longer an organ of class rule, and acontradiction of the Marxist theory of the state!

The iSt further argue that a state is defined as“armed bodies of men dedicated to defending a partic-ular property form” 74 [our emphasis]. This IS an ideal-ist notion of the relationship between property rela-tions and the state machine. We judge the class natureof a state by its actions, not by the “dedication” of theindividuals who make up its apparatus. This revision isessential for the iSt in giving a theoretical gloss to theirnotion of a“petit-bourgeois government”, in which theproperty relations the state chooses to defend at anygiven time, depends upon indecision in the minds of those in poli tical power.

This fundamentally false analysis has been extendedto Nicaragua, where we are expected to believe that (atthe time of wri ting) a government that has been in exis-tence since the summer of 1979, presiding over aneconomy overwhelmingly in the hands of private capi-tal, does not defend capitalism. It is,rather,not yet deci-sively “committed” to capitalism or to proletarian prop-erty forms!

Such an analysis of the Cuban events is unable toexplain the class character of the popular front whichcame to power in January 1959, which the iSt assureswas not capitalist. It ignores the pro-capitalist, bour-

geois aspect of the July 26th Movement. When thisaspect was dominant (i .e.during the popular front), theJ26M crushed all attempts by the workers and peasantsto go beyond the bourgeois limits set by the Castroleadership. Further, this analysis sows il lusions in thepetit-bourgeois leadership of the Rebel Army,declaringthem to be somehow committed to no class interests,i m p lying that the Army was som eh ow “n eutr a l ”between workers and peasants on the one hand and thecapitalists and landowners on the other.

It therefore cannot explain the struggle – in the formof dual power between the bourgeoisie and its support-ers in the army on the one side and the petit-bourgeoisleadership around Castro representing,in however a dis-


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torted form, the demands and pressure of the arousedworkers and peasant masses.The programmatic conclu-sions of such analysis are necessarily vague – because theSpartacists could not perceive the dual power situation,they had no programme for resolving it.

The basis on which Cuba is characterised as a“deformed workers’ state” by the iSt is also wrong:

“Cuba became a deformed workers’ state with the

pervasive nationalisations in the summer and fall of

1960.”75

The equation put forward here: “Nationalisations =deform ed workers’ s t a te” is com p l etely false. Th emonopoly of foreign trade, and most vitally the intro-duction of planning on the basis of the suppression of the law of value, as well as nationalisations, are the fea-tures which, taken together,define an economy as post-capitalist. Further, this position implies that a “peti t-bourgeois government” can overturn capitalism andconstruct a “deformed” workers’ state merely throughmassive nationalisations.

On this basis, no real distinction can be made

between Cuba and other “petit-bourgeois governments”which have fo llowed a similar course, such as Algeria,Egypt, Burma, etc – expect on the basis of the percent-age of the economy nationalised. Were all of these capi-talist states “deformed workers’ states in the process of formation?” By answering “No”, the Spartacists areforced to contradict their own methodology.

The Spartacists also do not recognise in any formthe essential role played by Stalinism in the CubanRevolution. They do not recognise the proto-Stalinistwing of the pre-1959 J26M.

They do not recognise the all iance of Castro with

the Cuban Stalinists from November 1959.They do notrecognise the essential assimilation of Castroism toStalinism, and the reliance on the PSP bureaucraticapparatus during the period of the bureaucratic work-ers’ government, complete by the onset of planning in1962. Nor do they recognise that such a process wouldhave been impossible without the economic and mili-tary support of the Kremlin. Consequently, they assignto the peti t - bo u r geoisie the abi l i ty. to form a“deformed” workers’ state – a revision of Marxism withregard to the fundamental characteristi cs of this class.

The fragmentary references of the iSt to the forma-

tion of “deformed” workers’ states in Eastern Europeimply the existence of simi lar periods of “classlessstates” or “workers’ states in the process of formation.”From the entry of the Red Army, the class nature of thestate is indeterminate.The only flaw which the iSt seesin the Vern-Ryan tendency’s equation of entry of RedArmy with formation of “deformed” workers’ state, isthat in some cases the soviet forces withdraw – e.g. inAustria, leaving behind a capitalist state.76 But the pre-ferred term “workers’ state in the process of formation”is a designation of no use. It can only be used after theevent, as a description.

This is a posit ion which, as in Cuba, wil l not definethe class character of the state, its government, or what

property forms its army defends at each stage, and thusfails to provide any coherent revolutionary programmeduring the period of dual power, or the period of ananti-capitalist bureaucratic workers’ government.

Not only a revisionist position on the state emergesfrom this analysis.In echoing the posit ions of the Vern-Ryan tendency, the iSt have made a fundamental revi-sion of the Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism. Forthe iSt, Stalinism has a “dual character” – it has a “bad”,counter-revolutionary side, and a “good”, progressiveone. Its bad side involves it in crushing workers’ democ-racy,expropriating the proletariat from poli tical power;its good side is that it can overturn capitalism, and thetwo weigh equally in the balance.

This po s i ti on is evi den ced in the incre a s i n glyStalinophile programme of the iSt, part icularly withregard to Afghanistan and Poland. In these countr ies,the “dual” character of Stalinism is reflected in the sup-posed abil ity of the Stalinists to act as “ liberators in asocial as well as national sense” in particular countries,and in its inability to carry through the proletarian rev-olution on a world scale.77 Both Mandel (in his "TenTheses" 1951) and the Vern - Ryan tendency (in theirdescription of Stalin ism as centrist) articulated a simi-lar posit ion. This position is absolutely false. It hasnothing in common with genuine Trotskyism.

Stalinism does not have two competing aspects, oneof which at anyone time predominates over another.Rather, it has a contradictory character because its priv-ileged caste existence in the USSR is based on the post-capitalist property forms established by the OctoberRevolution. To defend these property forms, the verybasis of this caste’s existence, the Stalinist bureaucracyis sometimes forced to carry through measures which,

if taken in isolation from the way they are carried outand the effects they have on the international classstruggle, would be considered progressive.

But these measures are never carried through in iso-lation, they are always carried through in a counterrev-olutionary manner, and always involve the politicalexpropriation of the working class in the country con-cerned.The Stalinist bureaucracies have a contradicto-ry character,but form a predominantly counter-revolu-tionary whole. This caste does not have the potentialfor fulfi lling the mission of the proletariat – genuineproletarian revolutions are the prerequisite for building

world socialism.The retreat from the revolut ionary programme that

the Spart acist po s i ti on invo lves can be acc u ra telygauged from the answers that they have offered to theAfghan and Polish masses.

In Afghanistan the iSt reject the perspective of per-manent revolution for that country,because of its back-wardness. They make a false analogy between thehealthy Soviet workers’ state of the early 1920s thatassimilated certain backward Asian countries, and theco u n terrevo lut i onary intern a ti onal de s i gns of t h ebon a p a rt ist cl i que in the Krem l i n . Events in

Afghanistan are viewed not from the standpoint of i nternational class stru ggle (wh ich would link the


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struggle of progressiveAfghans with that of their fellowAfghan workers resident in I ran, Pakistan etc as part of a struggle for a socialist federation of south west Asia),but from the abstract standpoint of “progress” “now ledby Russian tanks”, versus “backwardness.” 78

The Spartacists call on the bureaucracy to extendthe social gains of the October revolution. They “Hailthe Red (sic) Army” as the agent of this process. That is,behind the radical verbiage, they call for, as part of theirown programme for Afghanistan, the establishment of a degenerate workers' state.This is not a tactical uni tedfront, it is an abandonment of an independent pro-gramme. This reliance on the Soviet bureaucrats as sec-ond best given the weakness of the Afghan workingclass, leads inexorably to a strategic bloc with Stalinism.

On the events in Poland 1980-81, the iSt have gonefrom simple hosti li ty to the Polish workers’ movementright up to a bloc with the Stalinists to help crush thatmovement. They started their analysis of Poland notfrom the revolut ionary possibi li ties that existed, butfrom a supposed threat posed by the Polish workers’action to the property relations in Poland and theUSSR.Their excuse for this stance was their exaggerat-ed view of the immediacy of the Catholic church’srestorationist intentions.

After trying to square the circle – giving limitedsupport to the misled Polish workers, and opposing aRussian invasion (by “hissing at tanks” as Workers

Vanguard advised), by late 1981 the iSt gave up anddecided that Solidarnosc was counterrevolutionary tothe core, and should be crushed, by Kremlin tanks if necessary:

“Solidarity’s counter-revolutionary course must be

stopped! If the Kremlin Stalinists, in their necessari ly

brutal, stupid way, intervene mili tarily to stop it , we

will support this. And we take respon sibili ty in

advance for this; whatever the idiocies and atrocit ies

they will commit , we do not flinch from defending

the crushing of Solidari ty's counterrevolution.” 79

When the Jaruzelski coup was launched on 13December 1981, when Polish tanks moved to crush the10 mil lion strong movement of Polish workers, theSpartacists were quick to offer their support. Theywarned the Polish workers against any resistance, andcynically described the crackdown as a “cold shower”for the Polish proletariat. Upset by over a year of class

struggle, these miserable pedants, who can only imag-ine winning the working class to their cruel caricatureof Trotskyism in the sterile atmosphere of the propa-gandists’ school room (separate from the actual strug-gles of workers), called for a return to Gierek’s 1970s’style of government:

“If the present crackdown restores something like the

tenuous social equilibrium which existed in Poland

before the Gdansk str ikes last August, a tacit under-

standing that i f the people left the government alone,

the government would leave the people alone – con-

ditions will be opened again for the crystallisation of

a Leninist-Trotskyist party.” 80

The iSt have blood on their hands. The “good” sideof Stalinism’s“dual nature”, the side that the iSt call onrevolut ionaries to support, has become its will ingnessand ability to crush the independent activity of theworking class. Programmatic confusion on Cuba in1960 has become metamorphosed into Stalinophileclari ty in 1982. At no stage in this evolution did theSpartacists represent a revolutionary challenge to thebankrupt centr ism of the USFI.

Footnotes

1.Fourth International, (NewYork, May 1945) p.153

2.Fourth International, (NewYork, June 1946) p.172

3. ibid. p.255

4. In tern ati ona l In form ati on Bu llet in , (NewYork, March 1947) p.8

5. ibid. p.16

6.Fourth International, (NewYork,December 1948) p.241

7. In tern ati on al I nf orm ati on Bu llet in , (NewYork, December 1949) p.27

8. In tern ati on al In form ati on Bu llet in , (NewYork, May 1950) p.18

9. Fourth International, (NewYork November/December 1951)10. Class, Party and State in the Eastern European Revolution , (NewYork 1969)

p.57 11. Towards a History of the Fourth International, (NewYork 1974) Part 4,

Vol.l p.17 12. ibid. p'.1~

13.D.Vern,“ Method, Doctri ne and the Buffer States” 1951 ,i n Do cum ent s of th e

Vern -Ryan Tendency, (Communard Publishers n.d.) p.13

14. Towards a History of the Fourth International, (NewYork 1974) Part 4, Vol.

1 pp.17-18

15. cf C.L.Liu, “China: An Aborted Revolution” in, Fourth International, (New

York, January/February 1950)

16. Fourth International, (New York, January/February 1951) p.24

17.E.Mandel, From Class Society to Com m unism , (London 1977) p.

18. The Development an d D isintegration of W orld Stalinism , (NewYork 1970)

p.20 19. ibid. p.23

20. E.Mandel, M arx ist E cono m ic T heor y, (London 1968) p.558

21. cf In tercon tin ent al Press, (NewYork) Vol. 17, No.13

22.E.Mandel, M arx ist E conom ic T heor y, op.cit. p.565

23.E.Mandel, Rev olu tion ary M arx ism Tod ay , (London 1979) p.120

24. Fourth International, (New York,November/December 1952) p.192

25.L Trotsky,The Revolution Betrayed , (New York 1972) p.275

26. E.Mandel, Rev olu tion ary M arx ism Tod ay, OR. cit. p.116

27. In tern ati on al In form ati on Bu lletin (New York, December 1949) p.2

28. E.Mandel, Rev olu tion ary M arx ism Tod ay, OR. cit. p.136

29. In tern ati ona l I nf orm ati on Bu lletin , (New York January 1950) p.43

30. Class, Party and State and the Eastern European Revolution,op.cit.

p.24

31. ibid. p.35

32. ibid. p.31

33.J.Hansen, Dy na m ics of th e Cub an Rev olu tio n,(NewYork 1978) p.73

34. ibid.p.73

35. ibid. p.74

36. ibid. p.74

37. ibid. p.74


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38. ibid. p.74

39. ibid. p.85

40. ibid. p.75

41. ibid. p.75

42. ibid. p.75

43. ibid. p.76

44. ibid. p.202-3

45. ibid. p.73

46. ibid. p.74

47. ibid. p.75

48. T Wohlforth, The Post War Social Overturns and Marxist Theory, (SWP-US

internal discussion document, May 1979) p.72 (henceforth referred to as

Wohlforth, 1979)

49. Quoted in T Kerry,“The Wohlforth Way: A Methodological Mutation” in,

Class,Party and State and the Eastern European Revolution , OR. cit. p.6

50. T Wohlforth,“The Theory of Structural Assimi lation”.This 1963 essay was

reprinted in, Com m unists Against Revolution, (London 1978). All references are

from this book, henceforth referred to as Wohlforth-1978

51T Wohlforth 1963,p.28 51. ibid. p.71 (our emphasis)

52. ibid. p.47

53. ibid. p.23

54.ibid. p.31 (our emphasis)

55.ibid. p.24-5 (our emphasis;

56. ibid. p.35 (emphasis in original)

57. It is clear that Wohlforth’s posit ion on the state both predates and under-

pins the theory of structural assimi lation. Thus, he argues in 1961 in a docu-

ment that predates structural assimi lation: “ It ( the concept of the transit ional

state) is said to be in contradiction with the Marxist theory of the state as at all

times the instrument of the ruling class of a parti cular society... I will expand

on the challenge and state categorically all the emerging deformed workers’

states - Eastern Europe,Yugoslavia, China,North Korea, North Vietnam,Cuba

- went through transit ional periods of more or less extended periods of time

during which a bonapartist state apparatus administering a capitali st economy

was transformed into a state apparatus, sti ll bonapartist, administering a

nationalised economy. (T.Wohlforth,“Cuba and the DeformedWorkers’States”

1961,p.12 in, Cuba and M arxist T heory (Spartacist League Pamphlet). Again we

see a state which, because it is not defined in Marxist terms, i.e. in terms of

property relations that it defends,is able to “float free” from i ts economic base

and become, “t ransformed” from a bonapart ist (capitalist) state into a bona-

partist (degenerated workers’) state without that state ever being smashed.

(This is, of course, also the origin of the iSt’s “transiti onal state” which owes

more to the “KautskyiteWohlforth” than they care to admit.)

58. T Wohlforth 1963, p.87 (emphasis in ori ginal)

59. ibid. p.82

60. ibid. p.85 (emphasis in original)

61. ibid. p.62

62. ibid. p.75 (emphasis in original!

63. T Wohlforth 1979, p.79

64.T.Wohlforth,”The Transiti on to the Transiti on” in N ew L eft Rev iew N o. 130 ,

p.69

65. ibid. p.68

66. ibid. p.76

67. ibid. p.78

68. V I Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow 1965) Vol.28,p.235

69. T Wohlforth, Ne w Left Re vi ew op. cit. p.80

70. ibid. p.79

71. “Gueri llas in Power” in WorkersVanguard No. 102

72. ibid.

73. Cuba and M arxist Theory op. cit.

76. cf. secti on of this volume on the Fourth International after the Second

World War.

77. “Whose Poland” in Spartacist Britain N o. 32

78. Spartacist (Theoretical journal of the Spartacist League) Winter 1979/80

79. “Stop Solidarity’s Counter-Revolution” in Spartacist Britain No.36

80. “Power Bid Spiked” in WorkersVanguard No. 295

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racies. For Marxists the latter, however important theymay be,are not “ the essence” of the state.Thus even themost representative of these institutions, subject toperiodic elections under a system of universal suffrage,come and go, rise and fall, without anything funda-mental changing about the essence of the “state”.

Finally, when we want to focus the discussion evenmore narrowly we can isolate the core institutions of police, standing army and bureaucracy, and designatethese alone as the “state-machine”.

As early as the German Ideology (1845), but fullycodified in the 1870s (Origins of the Family, Private

Property and th e State), Marx and Engels give us a con-sistent class and materialist account of the nature andorigin of the state, in the second sense explained above,that is, a public force or poli tical superstructure risingout of and above civil society.

Quite simply, it arises on two conditions: first, thatthere should be a condit ion of generalised scarcity of goods; secondly, that classes have appeared and that thelevel of material wealth has developed sufficiently so as

to give rise to a large enough surplus for society to sus-tain an armed public force separate and distinct fromthe rest of the population.

Such a public force is necessary when society isdivided into antagonistic classes (i.e. exploiters andexploited) since otherwise the latter will use theirweapons to overturn their exploiters. This ostensiblypublic force is an instrument of the ruling economicclass and serves to perpetuate its domination.2 Througha historic process of revolutions and counter-revolu-tions in dif ferent class societies, the bureaucratic-mili -tary state machine core becomes more hypertrophiedand powerful vis-a-vis other components of the state.

The more generalised and sharp the class conflictgenerated by this exploitation and oppression all themore does the state machine isolate itself from anydemocratic and accountable pressure. 3

In his early writ ings Marx had no clear idea of whatthe tasks of the working class were in relation to thispublic force. Could it be seized as it was and used toemancipate the working class? By the time of theComm un ist M anifesto (1848) Marx had concluded thateconomic emancipation would not be possible for theworking class without winning “the batt le for democra-

cy”, i.e. to replace the state machine with the “proletari-at organised as the ruling class”. That is, it had to winpol itical power in order to liberate itself from itsexploitation. But, as Lenin remarked, in theCommunist

M an ifesto, “the state is sti ll treated in an extremelyabstract manner, in the most general terms and expres-sions.” 4

Having lived through the bourgeois revolutions andcounter-revolutions in Europe between 1848 and 1851Marx was able, in Lenin’s words, to “take a tremendousstep forward” in respect of his theory of the state. In1851, in The Eighteenth Brum aire of Louis Bona parte

Marx analysed what had occurred during the ebbs andflows of the French revolution of 1848-51. Behind the

frequently changing scenery of parliamentary and pres-idential republics, conventions and assemblies, and ulti-mately the restoration of a monarchy, Marx perceivedthe essence of the state, the “executive power with itsenormous bureaucratic and military organisation”.

This executive or state machine was the prize overwhich revolutions were fought, around which parl ia-mentary, bonapartist or monarchical insti tut ions wereassembled. Marx finally concluded what the proletari -at’s tasks were in relation to this machine:

“All revolutions perfected this machine instead of

smashing it. The part ies that contended in turn for

domination regarded the possession of this huge edi-

fice as the principal spoils of the victor”.5

By 1871—with France once more in revolution—Marx re-affirmed this conclusion and elaborated uponit . For the fi rst time the proletriat had seized power , ina great modern city. Marx believed that the actions of the Paris Commune had proved:

“ The proletariat cannot,as the ruling classes and their

various competing factions have done after their vic-

tory, simply take possession of the existing machineryof state and employ this ready-made machinery for

its own purposes. The prime condition for retaining

its political power is to reconstruct this inherited

political machine and to destroy it as an instrument

of class domination.”6

Lenin says of this: “This conclusion is the chief andfundamental point in the Marxist theory of the state”.

Marx was now, after the Paris Commune, able toflesh out exactly what “smashing” the state machine, asopposed to“taking it over”, means. For Marx the idea of smashing the state signified above all the replacement

of the bourgeois state insti tut ions—standing army,unaccountable executive, unrecallable legislature—byi n stituti ons of prol et arian dem ocracy: a terri tori alworkers’ mili tia, defending a body that fused a legisla-ture and executive and which was in turn fully andimmediately recallable by its electorate.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx explicitly drew afundamental dividing line between the classical bour-geois French Revolution and the nature of the impend-ing proletarian revolution.

He argued that whereas the former had ultimatelyonly taken over the old military bureaucratic apparatus

of feudal absolutism and developed it anew, the task of the proletarian revolution was to smash that very appa-ratus of social and polit ical oppression. Marx counter-posed the most thoroughgoing bourgeois revolutionfrom below to the programme of the proletarian revo-lution in that the latter wil l entail the “smashing” of theold state machine, whereas the former did not.

And yet the French Revolution involved the totaldestruction of the old absolutist army replacing it witha new revolutionary arming of the people. It involvedthe establ is h m ent of or gans of popular bo u rgeoisdemocratic dictatorship which routed the old aristo-

cratic rule. Marx knew all this but sti ll refused to grantthat the old absolutist state machine had been smashed


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in the sense of his new conception.

Merely violently destroying and then recomposingthe former insti tutions to serve a new master was, in hisview, not smashing but rather,“ taking hold of” the statemachine. In an all out war for example one statemachine can be totally destroyed by the actions of another state; one set of rulers thereby completelyobliterated by another, without this conforming to thesmashing of the state in the sense outlined by Marx.Human history is replete with such examples, involvingthe most diverse stages of development and the mostdiverse classes and nations in conflict.

Following the experience of the Paris CommuneMarx began to elaborate the tasks of the proletariat insmashing the state. He saw the Commune as a specificform of republic that could end class rule, throughimplementing its programme:

“The first decree of the Commune (...) was the sup-

pression of the standing army, and i ts replacement by

the armed people.”

All officials were to be elected and subject to recall

and to be paid the same wages as workers. Leninargues that these changes may appear to be merely

“f uller dem oc racy”, but in fact they represent a

replacement of state institutions by others of a “fun-

damentally di fferent type.”

“This is exactly a case of “quantity being transformed

into quality”: democracy, introduced as fully and

consistently as is at all conceivable, is transformed

from bourgeois into proletarian democracy; from the

state (= a special force for the suppression of a part ic-

ular class) into something which is no longer the state

proper.” 7

Through the experience of the Commune, and laterof the Russian Revolutions, Marx and then Lenin wereable to make concrete the difference between the tasksof the proletarian revolution and those of earlier revo-lut ions, that previously Marx had only been able topoint to in abstract. These concrete acts–the replace-ment of the standing army with the armed people, andthe subordination of all officials to the rule of the peo-ple–led to the qualitative transformation that is theessential difference between all previous revolutionsand the proletarian revolution.

The proletariat does not “abolish” the state. Indeed

it requires a force to suppress the inevitable resistanceof the bourgeoisie and i ts all ies. Why then does Leninsay that this is “no longer the state proper”?He arguesthat as the organ of suppression is the majority of thepopulation, there is no need for a special force, andtherefore the state, in its essence as a special force, nec-essarily begins to wither away. The proletarian stateretains key tasks, but it is transformed into somethingquali tatively different from all previous forms of thestate.

“ (Marx) stated that the “smash i ng” of the state

machine was required by the interests of both the

workers and the peasants, that it united them, that itplaced before them the common task of removing the

“parasite” and of replacing it by something new”.

Lenin argued that the creation of this somethingnew, the semi-state,must begin immediately upon theworkers seizing power. He saw it as inseparable fromthe general tasks of the proletarian revolut ion, with theworkers organising large-scale production based ontheir own experience and backed by the state power of the armed workers, alongside the reduction of the roleof s t a te offi cials to “m ode s t ly paid forem en andaccountants”. This wil l inevitably lead to the gradualwithering away of bureaucracy, and end a state with aseparate and special function.

The Russian Revolution and the bourgeois statemachine

In essence, Lenin adds nothing new to Marx’s theo-ry except to show how the Russian Soviets of 1917 cor-responded to the proletarian type of state that mustsmash the bourgeois state machine. As Lenin says:

“The Soviet power is a new type of state, without

bureaucracy, without a police force, without a stand-

ing army.” 8

Trotsky echoed Lenin in this regard:“Lenin, following Marx and Engels, saw the distin-

guishing feature of the proletarian revolution in the

fact that, having expropriated the exploiters,it would

abolish the necessity of a bureaucratic apparatus

raised above society—and above all, a police and

standing army.”9

In other words, the working class needs a state thatis constructed in such a way that it immediately beginsto die away—a semi-state.Moreover, this applied to allaspects of the state machine;

“This same bold view of the state in a proletarian dic-

tatorship found finished expression a year and a half

after the conquest of power in the programme of the

Bolshevik Party, including its section on the army. A

strong state, but without mandarins; armed power,

but without the Samurai! It is not the tasks of defence

which create a mili tary and state bureaucracy, but the

class structure of society carried over into the organ-

isation of defence. The army is only a copy of the

social relations. The struggle against foreign danger

necessitates, of course, in the workers’ state as in oth-

ers, a specialised mili tary-technical organisation, but

in no case a privileged officer caste. The party pro-

gramme demands a replacement of the standingarmy by an armed people.” 10

The army is the core of the state machine. In Engels’words “in the last analysis the state is reducible to bod-ies of armed men.” 11 Therefore, the smashing of thispart of the state machine goes to the heart of the pro-gramme of socialist transition in a workers’ state.Trotsky, as head of the Red Army, naturally recognisedthat a workers’ state needs a “specialised mili tary-tech-nical organisation” to defend itself from threats. YetTrotsky was in no doubt that the Red Army during1918-23 was qualitatively different from the bourgeois

standing army:“The great French Revolut ion created its army by


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amalgamating the new formations with the royal bat-talions of the line. The October Revolution dissolvedthe Tsar’s army wholly and without leaving a trace.TheRed Army was buil t anew from the fi rst brick.” 12

Trotsky located the special and unique character of a revolutionary army in a workers semi-state in theamalgamation of the regular forces with the milit ia sys-tem and the abolit ion of mil itary ranks.

In March 1919 the 8th CPSU Congress argued for

the creation of an army“as far as possible by extra-bar-rack room methods—that is, in a set-up close to thelabour conditions of the working class.” Divisions inthe army were to coincide territorially with the facto-ries, mines, villages etc and through the closest connec-ti on with the working class a “co - operative spir i tinstilled by the barracks, and inculcate conscious disci-pline without the elevation above the army of a profes-sional officer’s corps.” 13

But Tro t s ky was aw a re that the progra m m a ti cnorm—territorial militia—required for its fullest flow-ering a certain minimum material foundation in eco-

nomic li fe; that is, the relati ve homogeneity betweentown and country,a minimum level of infrastructure.Acons i dera ble depth of economic fo u n d ations wererequired for the introduction and universalisation of the cheaper and more efficient and effective territorialmili tia system. But they barely existed. So:

“the Red Army was created from the very beginning

as a necessary compromise between the two systems,

with the emphasis on regular troops.”

This can also be seen in the Red Army’s experiencewith the officer corps. The standing army of the bour-geoisie needs one. It sets the officers aloof from the

ranks and has a political and social function reflectingthe class society it is based upon. With rank comes priv-ilege and the chain of command that allows for thearmy to be set up against the people. Trotsky arguedthat in the Red Army, by contrast:

“The growth of internal solidarity of the detach-

ments, the development in the soldier of a critical

att itude to himself and his commanders wil l create

favourable conditions in which the principle of the

electivity of the commanding personnel can receive

wider and wider application.”14

The fact that a professional armed force needs to be

assembled and t rained to fight to secure the borders of the workers’ state does not in i tself make it a “standingarmy” in the Marxist sense of this term. A healthyworkers’ state needs an army and an intelligence serviceto protect i tself against imperialist aggression.

But such an army would be drawn from an armedpeople, would li ve for the most part among the peoplewhen not fighting, would not enjoy privileges over therest of the population and while observing military dis-cipline in the face of the enemy would not be hierar-chically stratified with the usual privileges that goeswith this in a standing army. A people armed always

undergoing military training at some level and capableof being sent to the front in turn is the anti thesis of the

bourgeois “standing army”.

There is no doubt that the programmatic norm of the Bolsheviks and Trotsky after October was for suchan army. But almost immediately they were throwninto a civil war and the norm was compromised withthe reali ty as they inherited it—the Tsar’s army, with itsranks and general staff. Trotsky had to make use of thisarmy. They did subject it to workers’ control – partycommissars supervising generals etc – as the next bestbet in the circumstances. But it was not what theyaspired to.

This can be seen in the fact that at the earliestopportunity – in 1920 – Trotsky proposed (and it wasadopted) at the Ninth Conference of the CPSU that theRed Army be turned into a Popular Mil it ia. Trotskywrote years later on this attempt:

“ In the Red Army the problem of shifting to a mili tia

system played an enormous role in our work as well

as in our mil itary conceptions. We considered the

question one of principle.

We believed that only a socialist state could allow

itself to shift over to a mil it ia system.‘I f we are carry-ing out this shift gradually,’ I wrote in May 1923,‘ it is

not out of poli tical apprehensions but for reasons of

an organisational and technical nature: it is a new

un dertaki ng—one of imme asurable importance—

and we do not want to advance to the second stage

without securing the first’.All this great work came to

nothing. The mili tia was abolished in favour of a

standing army.The reasoning was purely poli tical: the

bureaucracy ceased to have any confidence in an army

scattered among the people, merged with the people.

It needed a purely barracks army, isolated from the

people.” 15

The Degenerated Revolutio n revises t heMarxist t heory of t he stat e

The Degenerated Revolution analysed in detail theprocess of Stalinist expansion after World War Two.Faced with a revolutionary tide sweeping across centralEurope after 1944, Stalin’s Soviet Armed Forces andnational Communist Parties sought to contain its anti -capitalist thrust. The Stalinists came to the rescue of imperialism and constructed a series of class collabora-tionist governments across the region.

Wh ere it was unavoi d a ble these govern m en t snationalised industries to take them out of the hands of the workers. They disarmed the popular mili tias orguerrilla bands that had been forged to fight occupyingfascist or collaborationist armies. In short, they rebuiltthe shattered fo u n d a ti ons of the capitali st statemachine and underpinned the much weakened capital-ist economies.

Of course, this was no normal bourgeois statemachine; mil itary power was in the hands not of thena ti onal bo urgeoisie but of Stalinist bu re au c raciesunder the ultimate control of Moscow. The armed

power of the bourgeoisie had been broken in EastEurope as it was to be later in China, Cuba and


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Vietnam. The Degenerated Revolution is clear that thestate machine reconstructed in 1945-46 throughoutEastern and Central Europe was bourgeois in form, andas such that it was an obstacle to the transition tosocialism.

For a couple of years, unti l the polit ical offensivelaunched by US imperialism in 1947-48, the form of this state machine and the content of the economy itdefended – capitalism – were in an uneasy harmony.But under threat of being ousted by a resurgent nation-al bourgeoisie with stronger ties with imperialism,Stalin’s national agents moved to bureaucratically over-throw capitalist social relations, dump their polit icalrepresentatives from the Popular Front governmentsand through the medium of bureaucratic workers’ gov-ernments, create degenerate workers’ states.

The result of this process embodied an enormouscontradiction, between the bourgeois form of the statemachine and the proletarian content of the social rela-tions of production defended by this machine. Oneclear dynamic flowed from this contradiction, onealready evident in the USSR. There could be no possi-bil ity of a transit ion towards socialism so long as anu n acco u n t a ble and sava gely repre s s ive po l i ti c a lmachine towered over the working class. On the con-tra ry, this machine would serve to des t abilise thenationalised planned economic foundations of eachcountry and would claim more and more of the surplusproduct to satisfy the li fe styles of those who ran it.

As a description of the course of events and a classcharacterisation of the structures that emerged TheDegenerated Revolut ion is spot on. The problem layelsewhere – in i ts theorisation of this process. Speakingof these 1947 social overturns in East Europe the book

says:

“ . . . when the actual stages of these revolutions are

examined it becomes clear that the abolition of capi-

talism by Stalinist parties did not contradict the

Marxist theory of the state.

The capitalist state was smashed in each bureaucratic

revolution, but in a manner not envisaged by Marx,

Engels or Lenin, nor in a manner that is at all desir -

able from the standpoint of revolutionary commu-

nism.” 16

This point is emphasised later when it said that T he

Degen erat ed R evolu tion rejects the idea:“. . . that workers’ states can be created without the

smashing of the capitalist state. The bureaucratic rev-

olutions were only possible because in each case the

coerc ive app a ra tus of the bo u rgeoisie had been

smashed.”17

A further passage describes what this smashing con-sisted of:

“ If the essential characteristic of the state is the exis-

tence of bodies of armed men in defence of property,

then the essential element in the smashing of the state

is the destruction of the armed power of the bour-

geoisie. This is a fundamental law of proletarian rev-olution. By smashing the state we mean fi rst and fore-

most smashing its armed apparatus.”

But since the state is also “a huge and powerfulbureaucratic apparatus (civi l service, judges etc) . . .”,then, “ the smashing of the state must also involve thedestruction of this bureaucracy.” 18

Other parts of the bureaucracy (lower rank admin-istrators, for example) would not have to be smashedbut heavily purged and taken over and put to use underthe control of the workers.

Thus, while the smashing of the capitalist state is aprocess that begins with destructive tasks and ends withthe building of a state of an entirely new kind (sovietbased), the essential moment of this proces, is that “thea rm ed power of the bo u r geoisie was phys i c a ll ysmashed prior to each of the bureaucratic revolutionsthat marked the expansion of Stalinism in the post-warperiod” 19

Since the essential part of the smashing had beencompleted, the future creation of a healthy proletariansemi-state, while necessary, would not have to smashthe state.

Without being conscious of it , in these formulationsThe Degenerated Revolution revised the Marxist theoryof the state by reducing the process of the smashing of the capitalist state to what it has in common with earl i-er forms of political revolutions in class society ratherthan what is historically unique and specific about theprocess.

The position in The Degenerated Revolution laud-ably tr ied to avoid “formalism” with respect to theMarxist theory of the state by developing a moreabstract concept of “smashing” that could be appliedequally to the quite distinct historical experiences of

1917 and the period between 1945-49. We did notrealise that in the attempt to deepen the concept wemerely ended up regressing to a concept that had beenrejected by Marx and Lenin.

We decided that “smashing” the state was an elon-gated process with several “moments”. But the essenceof the smashing, the key moment as it were, was to befound in the violent destruction of the armed power,the destruction of the abil ity of the bourgeoisie to applycoercive power to defend its property relations.

But the book muddled the following distinguish-able “moments” in the unfolding of a revolution: first,

the defeat and disintegration of one standing army byanother; second, the emergence of a dual power situa-tion; third, the seizure of power by the proletariat bymethods of armed insurrection; fourth, the smashingby the victorious proletariat of the old bourgeois statemachine and its replacement by the armed people andpopular self-administration of the soviets.

This last task, no matter how much it dependsupon , or has been prepared for by the precedingmoments, is what Marx and Lenin insisted was thequalitative difference with previous transformations.This is therefore the specific meaning of the “smashing

of the state” required by the proletarian revolution incontrast to all previous revolut ions.


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The Degenerated Revolution confused the questionof violent revolution with the task of state smashing,and then to fi t i t in with the actual events of the bureau-cratic social overturns in 1947-48 (no soviets, mili tiaetc.) it reduced the essential tasks of smashing to theviolent seizure of power.

Obviously, for the proletariat to be able to set aboutthe task of smashing the state presupposes a “violentrevolution”, that is, forcibly depriving the bourgeoisieof its control over its “special bodies of armed men“.This can occur as a result of defeat in war, the mutinyand internal disintegration of the armed forces or by aninsurrectionary rising by the armed workers—or allthree in varying combinations.

Equally obviously, this can and usually does occur“in parts”,via a period of dual power. But none of theseare what Marx and Engels referred to as the “smashingof the bureaucratic-military machine”. They consti tutea violent revolution, no more and no less. All revolu-tions, bourgeois as well as proletarian, which are wor-thy of the name involve this forcible seizure of power.

But worse was to follow. In order to prop up thisfalse idea the book looked again at the process of theRussian Revolution in order to see if the same sequenceof events happened there too. And this is what wefound:

“. . . the coercive machinery of the Russian bour-

geoisie—its army and police—disintegrated prior to

the direct seizure of power by the proletariat and to

this ex tent was smashed before the October

Revolution”.20

To bolster one false idea Workers Power and theIWG were forced to revise an important part of the

established understanding of the course of the RussianRevolution during 1917.

It is true that the February Revolution instigated asituation of dual power, or rather a twin set of dualpower situations. First, between the Tsarist forces, thehigh command and much of the officer corps of thearmy on the one hand, and those opposed to Tsarismamong the Russian bourgeoisie, the peasants and theworkers on the other.More importantly, there was dualpower bet ween the sovi ets and the Provi s i on a lGovernment. Clearly the February Revolution took thearmy out of the undivided control of the high com-

mand and forced it to accept the abdication of the Tsar(and then the dynasty), putt ing the army at the serviceof the imperialist bourgeoisie.

This process obviously weakened the army, under-mined the authori ty of the officer caste and strength-ened the rank and file soldiers’ committees. Especiallyafter the July-August offensive widespread disintegra-tion of morale set in among the army. This made the job of the October Revolution easier, deepening andcompleting this disintegrative process. But Octoberproduced the qualitative watershed when the smashingof the state became the conscious act of a revolut ionaryparty at the head of the masses; it did not “ to thisextent” occur before October.

The whole thrust of Lenin and Trotsky’s wri tings onthis subject push in this direction. First Trotsky:

“. . . the destruction of the Tsarist bureaucratic and

m i l i t ary app a ra tu s , the int roducti on of n a ti on a l

equality and national sel f-determination—all this

was the el em en t a ry dem oc ra ti c work that the

February revolution barely even addressed itself to

before leaving it, almost untouched, for the October

Revolution to inherit.” 21

In this Trotsky was merely following Lenin whorecogn i s ed that far from smashing anything inFebruary the state machine was “taken over” by theRussian bourgeoisie and taken (half-heartedly) out of the hands of the Tsarist followers

Here is Lenin’s judgment on February:

“The development, perfection and strengthening of

the bureaucratic and military apparatus proceeded

during all the numerous bourgeois revolutions which

Europe has witnessed since the fall of feudalism . . .

Consider what happened in Russia during the six

months following February 27, 1917. The official

posts which formerly were given by preference to theBlack Hundreds have now become the spoils of the

Cadet s, Mensh eviks and Soc ialist- Revoluti ona rie s .

Nobody has seriously thought of introducing any

serious reforms.

Every effort has been made to put them off ‘until the

Consti tuent Assembly meets’, and to steadily put off

its convocation until after the war! But there has been

no delay, no wait ing for the Consti tuent Assembly, in

the matter of dividing the spoils, of getting the lucra-

tive jobs of ministers, deputy ministers, governor-

generals etc etc! (...) But the more the bureaucratic

apparatus is ‘redistributed’ among the various bour-geois and petty bourgeois parties . . . the more keenly

aware the oppressed classes, and the proletariat at

their head, become of their ir reconcilable hosti li ty to

the whole of bourgeois society.Hence the need for the

bourgeois parties . . . to intensify repressive measures

against the revolutionary proletariat, to strengthen

the apparatus of coercion, i.e. the state machine.

This course of events compels the revolution ‘to con-

centrate all its forces of destruction’ against the state

power, and to set itself the aim, not of improving the

state machine,but of smashing and destroying it.”22

The conclusion could not be clearer. The FebruaryRevolut ion did not smash the state; rather the Russianbourgeoisie got its hands on it and began to purge it of Tsarist placemen and start to perfect the executivepower which is nothing other than centralising therepressive apparatus against the popular classes evenmore. While they did not achieve much in terms of “perfecting” the state machine, this was the clear intentof the Provisional Government in its service of thebourgeoisie.

The Ma rxist progra m m a ti c con cepti on of t h esmashing of the old state is historically and class specif-

ic. It is impossible to abstract it from its working classnature, from the nature of the class force and class state


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which carries out the smashing and replaces the oldmachine, without thereby transforming it into a bareahistorical abstraction.

The Degenerated Revolution did this unconsciously,without even being aware of it and its implications. Its“ false abstraction” was to hit upon a description of what the 1917 process and 1947-51 process had in com-mon.Thus:

“These coercive bodies were smashed to the extent

that the bourgeoisies were no longer able to deployarmed force in defence of their remaining property

rights . . ” 23

And there we have it.

The process of smashing is redefined so that it canembrace quite different historical processes and out-com e s . Th eoreti cal con s i s tency was sac ri f i ced forsuperf icial historical description.

Against this we can now say that the capitalist statewas not “smashed” in February 1917 nor in the post-war period in Eastern Europe. Between February andOctober 1917 the Russian bourgeoisie did have an

armed force, albeit one that was in disarray due to theenormous pressure it was under from the contendingforces of dual power.

After the Second World War the Stalinist bureau-cracy, far from smashing the capitalist state, simplytook hold of the old apparatus of polit ical dominationand, util ising bureaucratic, mili tary, police measurestransformed/purged its structures and functions in itsown image and in its own interests. In the first periodthis state, controlled by the Stalinists, was used todefend and rebuild capitalism, and then later the samestate machine was used as a lever for the economic

expropriation of the bourgeoisie.In some parts of Eastern Europe, for example in

Austr ia, the Stalinists took hold of the state in the post-war period in exactly the same way as in Poland orEastern Germany. However, in Austr ia that state,havingbeen used to help rebuild capitalism, was never used toexpropriate the bourgeoisie but rather handed back tothe bourgeoisie. In this case the Austr ian bourgeoisiedid not have to carry out a revolution, or “re-smash”the state to make it work in their interests, as it hadremained, throughout, a bourgeois state.

In those Eastern European countires where capital-

ism was abolished, the working class was excluded,through counter-revolut ionary measures, from seizingstate power in its own right. As a result the Stalinistbureaucracy was able to construct an apparatus whichwas a bourgeois organ in a workers’ state. 24

It can be argued that in “ taking over” the apparatusof the bourgeois state machine the Stalinists continuedto “perfect” it, as for example, in respect to the standingarmy.

The Stalinists everywhere introduced modificationssuch as the existence of controlled “popular” mil it ias( e . g. Com m i t tees for the Defen ce of the Cu b a n

Revolution) or party militias attached to party cells infactories, as supplements to or extensions of the stand-

ing army.

These modifications can be seen as further perfect-ing the bourgeois state machine in the workers’ states in ce they represent nothing other than a furthermethod by which the state enforces repression, atomis-es and renders completely unaccountable the politicaladministration.

In the Soviet Union the smashing of the Staliniststate machine had been a programmatic necessity ever

since the counter-revolutionary political expropriationof the working class by the Stalinist caste. In EasternEurope such a task was necessary from the moment of their creation as workers’ states.

Trot sky on t he “ bourgeois - bureaucrat -ic” stat e m achine

That The Degenerated Revolution could fall intothese errors was in part conditioned by the fact that thelegacy of Trotsky on the issue of the class character of the state machine in the USSR is at best ambiguous.Nowhere did he clearly point to the fact that, conceivedin abstraction from the property relations defended by

the bureaucracy, this state machine was bourgeois. Tounderstand his thinking we have to establish the pro-gression of his thought on this question.

In the Cri tique of the Gotha Pro gra m m e Marxargued that in the lowest stage of communism “bour-geois right” (i .e.bourgeois law) would sti ll be in force inthe sphere of the distribution of that part of society’stotal product destined for individual consumption. Heargued that immediately after the socialist revolution,in the lowest stage of communism, the state can enforce“only” equal rights in the sphere of consumption (fromeach according to their abili ty to each according to their

work); that is to say, there is not as yet such materialabu n d a n ce that natu ra lly unequal indivi duals canreceive“according to their needs”.

In State and Revolution Lenin took Marx’s idea anddeveloped it into a clear theoretical conclusion. Heinsisted that not only bourgeois right survives “but alsoeven a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” even inthe healthiest, most prosperous case, even in America.In a backward count ry like Russia a workers’ state wil lnot for some time be able even to introduce full equal-it y. It wil l have to accord privi leges to some (skilledworkers, bureaucrats, army officers) in order to retain

services which are essential to the survival of the work-ers’ state.

Trotsky found in this conclusion the key to a scien-tific understanding of the nature and dynamics of therise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union:

“In so far as the State which assumes the task of

Socialist tra n s form a ti on is com pell ed to defen d

inequality—that is material pr ivileges of a minori-

ty—by methods of compulsion, in so far does it

remain a bourgeois state even though without a bour-

geoisie.”25

Both Marx and Lenin held that the state would

wither away under the highest stage of communismwhen the productive forces of social labour had reached


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the stage of development where the objects of socialand individual consumption could be distributed onthe basis of human need alone.Lenin grasped that whatthis meant was not the withering away of voting etc.butthe final withering away of this “bourgeois state with-out the bourgeoisie”, the final withering away of eventhe most democratic instrument of poli tical and socialrepression.

This withering away would be achieved through aprocess of conscious pol i ti c a l , c u l tu ral and soc i a lreform beginning in the transit ional period of the dic-tatorship of the proletariat and culminating in the low-est stage of communism or socialism. However, sovietreality in imperialist-encircled and backward revolu-tionary Russia immediately started to come into con-tradiction with this perspective and the associated pro-gramme.

The bureaucracy of the new workers’ state, the veryembodiment of the “bourgeois state without the bour-geoisie” did not begin to wither away at all; it began togrow apace, assert its power and appropriate a largeshare of the social product. Lenin himself becameincreasingly alarmed about this growth of “bureaucrat-ic deformations” within the workers’ state. His responsewas a programme of poli tical reform de s i gned toen a ble the pro l et a riat to con trol this bu r geon i n gbureaucracy through its soviets and its party.

Trotsky’s theory of the intensified degeneration of the Soviet Union was a further development of Lenin’sidea through to and beyond that point at which quan-ti ty passed into quali ty. The Stalinist apparatus of statepower—the ru ling bu re a u c racy wi thin a workers’state—strangled the soviets and the vanguard partywhich it once had to serve and with which it had shared

power. The co u n terrevo lut i on a ry Th erm i dor wascompleted in 1927 with the expulsion of Trotsky fromthe party and the outlawing of the Left Opposit ion.

Trotsky had to chart the consolidation in power of abonapartist bureaucracy which enjoyed more and moreprivileges whilst still defending the revolutionary socialfoundations established by the October Revolution.This led inexorably to a qualitative political degenera-tion of the Soviet state. These were no longer deforma-tions which could be reformed if the Stalinists were dis-placed from power.

In the Revolu tion Betrayed Trotsky refers to “ the

c rushing of Sovi et dem oc racy by an all - powerf u lbureaucracy”.26 But in his 1935 article, The Workers’

State, Th erm idor and Bonapartism , Trotsky developedthis brief formula in a way characteristic of his positionboth before and after 1936:

“ the present-day domination of Stalin in no wayresembles the Soviet rule during the ini tial years of therevolution.The substi tution of one regime for the otheroccurred not at a single stroke but through a series of measures, by means of a number of minor civil warswaged by the bureaucracy against the proletarian van-guard. In the last historical analysis, soviet democracy

was blown up by the pressure of social contradictions.

Exploiting the latter, the bureaucracy wrested thepower from the hands of mass organisations.”27

Or again:

“ The toil ing masses lived on hopes or fell into apathy

. . . Such power (of the Stalinist bureaucracy) could be

obtained only by strangling the part y,the soviets, the

working class as a whole.” 28

And:

“ The old cadres of Bolshevism have been smashed.

Revolutionists have been smashed.” 29

Organs of democratic workers’ power can also besaid to have been “smashed” by the Stalinist bureaucra-cy in the other degenerate workers’ states after the sec-ond world war. In these cases this occured before theStalinist bureaucracy could consolidate its own power,later used to expropriate the bourgeoisie. The Stalinistcaste fi rst crushed the workers, and then blocked theirpath to power.

The “smashing” of the political rule of the workingclass by the bureaucracy of the workers’ state cannot beseen as a simple mir ror image of the smashing of theold bourgeois state through workers’ revolution. Thesmashing of a bureaucratic-mi li tary state machine can-not but differ in its very essentials from the destructionof democratic soviet power by a bureaucratic-mili tarystate machine.

Trotsky clearly enumerates these concrete differ-ences in the course of his analysis of the evolution of the political expropriation of the working class in theSoviet Union. The basis of the whole process was thechronic backwardness of Russia exacerbated by thedestruction and depredations of the civil war, the lackof culture, part icularly political culture of the mass of

Soviet workers increasingly drawn directly from theranks of the peasantry. Capping this was a series of important defeats of the international revolution.

We should place the passages from Trotsky, writtenin 1935, against this background. These conditionsexplain the growing apathy and quiescence of broadlayers of the Soviet workers and the stul ti fication of thesoviets from the early 1920s onwards as well as thegrowing isolation of the revolutionary vanguard in theparty as represented by the Left Opposition. All this wasboth cause and, increasingly, effect of the continuouslygrowing power of the bureaucracy. In these circum-

stances the momentum, or mobile inert ia, of the cen-tralised bureaucratic juggernaut led to a process of grinding down of activity, organisation and initiativeon the part of the mass of the population.

The drawn out character of the process is one rea-son why it was so difficult for the Left Opposit ion, orindeed anyone, to determine the exact moment of tran-sit ion from counter-revolutionary polit ical quanti ty toquali ty in the life of the countr y. Nonetheless, the out-come of this process was clear enough to Trotsky longbefore 1935 – Soviet power had been comprehensivelysmashed or “blown up” and replaced by the absolut ist

rule of a totalitarian bourgeois bureaucratic-militarystate machine, but one which drew the source of its


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power and material privileges from nationalised prop-erty and planned economy.

The contradictions of the fi rst degenerate workers’state can be summed up thus: the dictatorship of theproletariat had taken the paradoxical form of a polit icaldictatorship of “a bourgeois state without the bour-geoisie” over the proletariat. It had taken the form of the rule of a polit ically counter-revolut ionary bona-partist state machine which still rested upon the post-capitalist social foundations established by the OctoberRevolution. That state machine was sti ll the organ of aworkers’ state because it defended those revolut ionaryproperty relations. But it defended them in its own wayand in its own material interests, in order to maintainits caste privileges against the working class.

It is clear that after 1935 Trotsky completely under-stood the character of the state machine that arose onthe debris of Soviet power—it was “bourgeois-bureau-cratic” (even fascistic).30 But here then arises a furtherproblem. Why then did Trotsky never argue that theStalinist state machine should be “smashed” in thecourse of the political revolution?

Tro ts ky was aw are that a bald counterpo s i ti onbetween the state superstructure and civil society in theUSSR was of limited value both theoretically and aninsufficient guide to practical action. Why?Quite sim-ply,because although there is a unity of form in regardto the state machine of a bourgeois state superstructureand a degenerated workers’ state there was no identity.It is clear if we ponder the significance of the followingpassages:

“ In a number of previous wri tings we established the

fact that despite its economic successes, which were

determined by the nationalisation of the means of

production, Soviet society completely preserves a

contradictory transitional character,and measured by

the inequali ty of living condit ions and the privileges

of the bureaucracy, it sti ll stands much closer to the

regime of capitalism than to future communism.

At the same time, we established the fact that despite

m on s trous bu rea uc ra tic degen era ti on , the Sovi et

state sti ll remains the historical instrument of the

working class insofar as it assures the development of

economy and culture on the basis of nationalised

means of production and, by virtue of this, prepares

the condit ions for a genuine emancipation of the toil -

ers through the liquidation of the bureaucracy and of

social inequality (...) Raising itself above the toi ling

masses, the bureaucracy regulates these contradic-

tions . . . By its uncontrolled and self-wil led rule, sub-

ject to no appeal, the bureaucracy accumulates new

contradictions. Exploit ing the latter, it creates the

regime of bureaucratic absolutism.” 31

Here Trotsky conceptually distinguishes between“state” and “society” in the USSR. The “state” includeswithin i t both the progressive aspects of nationalisedproperty relations and the wholly reactionary aspect of bureaucratic absolutism. In turn, this distinction flows

from some important differences of the USSR as com-pared to capitalism. This he defines in the following

way:

“Once liberated from the fetters of feudalism, bour-

geois relations develop automatically (...) It is alto-

gether otherwise with the development of social rela-

tions. The proletarian revolution not only frees the

productive forces from the fetters of private owner-

ship but also transfers them to the direct disposal of

the state that it itself creates. While the bourgeois

state, after the revolution, confines itself to a police

role, leaving the market to its own laws, the workers’

state assumes the direct role of economist and organ-

iser.” 32

So political revolution in the degenerate workers’state involves a dual task; on the one hand, the smash-ing of the “bourgeois- bureaucratic” state machine(police, standing army, bureaucracy). This Trotsky callss om etimes the “bon ap a rtist app a ra tu s”, s om eti m e s“bureaucratic absolutism”; on the other hand, havingsmashed this apparatus the victorious proletariat in itssoviets will rescue and take over the apparatuses associ-ated with the monopoly of foreign trade, the adminis-trative organs of planning, purge them,and wield themfor its own purpo s e s . Na tu ra lly, this cl e a ri ng outprocess will be very far reaching since the apparatus of economic administration has also been distor ted toreproduce bureaucratic privilege.

But did Trotsky still not at least formulate the taskof smashing the state machine more narrowly defined?Yes and no.It is a fact that Trotsky’s theoreti cal and pro-grammatic development lagged behind the evolution of the Soviet Union in some important respects, a fact heopenly recognised himself .

In the first place Trotsky had to openly correct hisinitial analogy with Thermidor in the French revolu-tion in an article wri tten in 1935. He argued thatThermidor in the Russian revolution should no longerbe regarded as the counter-revolutionary restoration of capitalism but as the politically counter-revolutionaryconsolidation of the bonapart ist power of the Stalinistbureaucracy still remaining on the foundations estab-lished by October.

In other words Trotsky openly admitted that theSoviet Thermidor stood not in the future as he had pre-viously thought but some eight years in the past.Without doubt this self-critical theoretical appraisalfol lowed from the fact that Trotsky had been compelled

to develop a dramatic new programmatic stance: theabandonment of a programme of polit ical reform andthe development of the programme of political revolu-tion. But Trotsky’s new theory of the Soviet Thermidorwhich placed its completion in 1927 raised an obviousproblem; namely, that the development of the pro-gramme of poli tical revolution had been delayed foreight years.

Trotsky’s belated development of this programmeretained a certain algebraic character up to his death.One reason for this was that nobody then had had thechance to go through the experience of an actual polit-

ical revolutionary rising of the working class in adegenerate workers’ state. Trotsky knew that nobody


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could be exactly sure of the dynamics and overall char-acter of the political revolution without the benefit of the experience of the class struggle itself. Hence, it isnot surprising that he did not leap into print with theidea that the bona partist state machine would besmashed in the classical Marxist sense in the politicalrevolution.

Indeed, in the Transitional Program m e of 1938Trotsky sti ll poses the tasks of the political revolution ina form that lies somewhere between the old reform per-spective and the new revolut ionary one. On the onehand,Trotsky recognises that the political “apparatus of the workers’ state . . . was transformed from a weaponof the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic vio-lence against the working class”.

On the other hand, he calls for the “regeneration of Soviet democracy” and “democratisation of the soviets”as though the soviets existed but only needed to bepurged:

“It is necessary to return to the soviets not only their

free democratic form but also their class content. As

once the bourgeoisie and kulaks were not permittedto enter the soviets, so now it is necessary to dr ive the

bureaucracy and new aristocracy out of the soviets.” 33

Yet it was clear that although they may have beencalled soviets they had nothing in common with theorgans set up in 1905 and 1917. They were powerless“parl iamentary” bodies made up of pre-selected mem-bers of the bureaucracy and labour aristocracy, subor-dinated enti rely to the bonapartist clique around Stalin.As structures they needed to be smashed.

Indeed, later in May 1939 Trotsky drew the neces-sary inference in a passage for the first and only time:

“To believe that this [Stalinist] state is capable of peacefully “withering away” is to live in a world of

theoretical deli rium. The bonapartist caste must be

smashed, the soviet state must be regenerated. Only

then wil l the prospects of the withering away of the

state open up.” 34

This plays the same role in Trotsky’s theoreticaldevelopment as did Marx’s observations in EighteenthBrumaireBut Trotsky did not live to see the politicalrevolution’s equivalent of 1871. If he had seen theHungarian revolut ion of 1956, which generated Sovietsoutside of and counterposed to the existing state appa-

ratus of Hungarian and Russian Stalinism, Trotskywould undoubtedly have recognised that the lack of sharpness in the Transitional Program m e would havehad to have been changed.

The Degenerat ed Revolut ion and theprogramme of pol i t ical revolut ion

Faced with the challenge posed by Trotsky’s ambi-guities The Degenerated Revolution opted for theoreti-cal conservatism. Basing itself on the revision regardingthe “sma sh ing” of the state , it chose to interpretTro tsky ’s 1939 formulation—“the bonap artist castemust be smashed, the soviet state must be regenerat-

ed”—in a very specific way when it came to its implica-tions for the programme of the polit ical revolution.

Since Trotsky did not say that the “state” must besmashed in the political revolution and given that T he

Degen era ted Revol u ti o n h ad insisted that this hadalready been done in the process of overthrowing capi-talism then, with Trotsky,we restricted ourselves to say-ing that while the castehad to be smashed the statecould be“regenerated” (i .e. “ taken over” and purged).

The counterposition of the “caste” to the “state” canas we have shown be given a meaning that does notimpair the tasks of the polit ical revolution; that is, pro-viding we understand Trotsky to be arguing for thesmashing of the military-bureaucratic core of the statemachine and “regenerating” or purging the organs of economic administration.

But The Degenerated Revolution took us in an alto-gether different direction. Since the section on thenature of the state had argued that the state was essen-tially “bodies of armed men” then it must mean thatTrotsky’s words could be interpreted to mean that the

state as bodies of armed men must not be smashed inthe poli tical revolution but “regenerated”.

Even at first glance this idea was incoherent since itsuggested that the bureaucratic caste could be smashedwi t h o ut smashing its arm ed power. But T h e

Degenerat ed Rev olu tion consciously rejected the simpleidea that the whole standing army of the Stalinistbureaucracy must be abolished and replaced by a work-ers’ mil it ia. Instead it argued:

“The bureaucracy maintains a massive standing army

and specialised armed squads to defend its privileges

in t imes of political revolutionary crisis.The working

class will need to build i ts own workers’ mil it ia todefend its organisations against police and military

attack. It will in the course of the polit ical revolution

have to create armed forces capable of dissolving and

defeating all armed forces loyal to the bureaucracy. It

will seek its weapons in the arsenals, and from the

hands of, the conscript army.To win the troops to the

side of the political revolution the proletariat must

advance the slogans:

• Full polit ical rights for soldiers, culminating in the

calls for soldiers’ councils to send delegates to the

workers and peasants’ soviets.

• Dissolution of the officer corps, abolit ion of thetitles and privileges of the generals and marshals –

commanders, officers and NCOs to be democratical-

ly elected or selected.

• For the immediate dissolution of the paramili tary

repression apparatus, the secret police and mil itia.

The victorious polit ical revolution will arm and train

all those workers capable of bearing arms.The work-

ers’ state will rest upon the armed proletariat. For the

mili tary defence of the workers’ states against imperi -

alism the maintenance of a standing army is neces-

sary.The polit ical revolution will , however, transform

the existing armies – instruments of bureaucratictyranny as well as defence – into Red Armies of the


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type founded by L D Trotsky.” 35

This is quite clear and in line with the false view of the “necessary” character of a standing army in anyworkers’ state already outl ined. The programme adds af u rt h er twi st however, s aying that it is nece s s a rybecause one is needed to defend a workers’ state fromattack.36 It is a conception that potentially bolsters illu-sions in the standing army of a Stalinist caste by sug-gesting that it is necessary to defend the workers’ statefrom restorationist attack,when in truth it is an agencyperfectly suited to overseeing the capitalist restorationprocess – as we have seen since 1989.

The Degenerated Revolution subordinated a crystalclear formulation of the strategy of polit ical revolutionto formulations on the possible need for united frontswith the Stalinist standing army against imperialistattack. But the formulation that the standing armies of the Stalinist caste have a dual character – “ instrumentsof bureaucratic tyranny as well as defence” surrenderstoo much to the Stalinists, above all in the light of events since 1989.37

The mistake was to believe that Lenin’s position, asexpressed in Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?concerning taking over parts of the lower bureaucraticadministration of the Tsarist regime and using them inthe transit ion to socialism, could be applied to thestanding army in a Stalinist state once those “ loyal tothe bureaucracy” had been defeated.

In truth what was needed was a clear statement thatthe armed struggle of the workers’ councils and mili tiaagainst the bonapartist standing army is the process of smashing the state machine in the political revolution,essentially identical to the arming of the whole popula-tion in contradistinction to the maintenance of a stand-ing army above the masses.

Trot sky on t he st ate machine and capit alistrestorat ion.

The Degenerated Revolution could not find any-where in Trotsky’s analysis the idea that the bourgeoisstate machine would not and could not be smashed ina bureaucratic social overturn. It did not draw a theo-retical inference which flowed directly from the wholeof the rest of his conception and which should have fol-lowed from an analysis of the actual events of the

bureaucratic social overturns after Trotsky’s death.Simi larly, the book stuck rigidly to the letter of

Trotsky’s programme on political revolution when acertain re-elaboration was needed. What then of aninterconnected question; namely, what would happento the Stalinist “ bourgeois-bureaucratic” state machinein the context of capitalist restoration?

A moment’s reflection reveals that if it is legitimateto apply the Marxist category of the smashing of thestate to the counter-revolutionary overthrow of Sovietpower then the same line of thought surely indicatesthat in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China and

Cuba, the “smashing of the state” on the road to capi-talist restoration stands not in front of us but far

behind, in the counter-revolutionary consolidation of the bonapart ist state power of the Stalini st bureaucracy.

In T he Revolution Betrayed , written in 1936,we findthree hypotheses concerning the possible future courseof development of the Soviet Union:

“Let us assume first that the Soviet bureaucracy is

overthrown by a revolutionary party having all the

attributes of the old Bolshevism, enriched moreover

by the world experience of the recent period. Such a

party would begin with the restoration of democracyin the trade unions and the Soviets. It would be able

to, and would have to, restore freedom of Soviet par-

ties. Together with the masses, and at their head, it

would carry out a ruthless purgation of the state

apparatus .. .But so far as concerns property relations

the new power would not have to resort to revolu-

tionary measures. It would retain and further develop

the experiment of planned economy. After the politi -

cal revolution—that is the deposing of the bureaucra-

cy—the proletariat would have to introduce in the

economy a series of very important reforms, but not

another social revolution.

If—to adopt another hypothesis—a bourgeois party

were to overthrow the ruling Soviet caste, it would

find no small number of ready servants among the

pre s ent bu re a u c ra t s , ad m i n i s tra tors , tech n i c i a n s ,

directors, party secretaries and pr ivi leged upper cir-

cles in general. A purgation of the state would of

course, be necessary in this case too. But a bourgeois

restoration . . .would probably have to clean out fewer

people than a revolutionary party. The chief task of

the new power would be to restore private property in

the means of production. . . Notwithstanding that the

Soviet bureaucracy has gone far toward preparing a

bourgeois restoration, the new regime would have tointroduce in the matter of forms of property and

methods of industry not a reform, but a social revo-

lution.

Let us assume—to take a third variant—that neither

a revolutionary nor a counter-revolutionary party

seizes power. The bureaucracy continues at the head

of the state. Even under these condit ions social rela-

tions will not gel . . . it (the bureaucracy) must

inevitably in future stages seek support for . . . itself in

property relations . . . It is not enough to be the direc-

tor of a trust; it is necessary to be a stockholder. The

victory of the bureaucracy in this decisive spherewould mean its conversion into a new possessing class

. . . The third variant consequently brings us back to

the two first.” 38

Trotsky asserts that both a political revolution and asocial counter-revolution would involve a “purgation”of one and the same Soviet state apparatus. This is acurious argument because it strongly implies that thesame state — while tra n s form ed in oppo s i te direc-tions—could preside over either a restored capitalisteconomy or—in the democratised form of a revivedworkers’ power—over the transit ion to socialism.

It was necessary to break with this suggestion andconsciously revise the idea that the political revolution


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will involve the purgation of the Stalinist bureaucratic-m i l i t a ry state mach i n e . Ra t h er, Th e Degen era ted

Revolu tion should have asserted that that the bona-partist state apparatus must be smashed by the armedworking, class organised in i ts own democratic work-ers’ councils.

Only after the smashing of all the armed executivein the polit ical revolution would the question of the“purgation” of its bureaucracy arise, i.e. the util isation,where necessary, of some of the old officials in theapparatus of the new power.

On closer inspection Trotsky introduced a deliber-ate asymmetry into his hypothetical cases involving the“purgation of the state apparatus”.The poli tical revolu-tion, he asserts, will involve a “ruthless purgation” whilecapitalist restoration “would probably have to clean outfewer people”.

What is more, in his third hypothesis he goes muchfurther. He assumes the possibi li ty that the Stalinistbureaucracy “continues at the head of the state” and,through the destruction of nationalised property, con-

verts itself into a “new possessing class”, that is, a bour-geoisie.

In the light of the experience since 1989 we can nowassert that even in this, Trotsky’s third, case the Stalinistbureaucracy would undergo an internal purgation dueto the inevitable splits and conflicts within its ownranks.

In any case, Trotsky argued that the overthrow of the degenerated workers’ state along the line of therestoration of capitalism would, in all events, involve alesser transformation of the state superstructure thanwould a political revolution.

Since 1989 it is Trotsky’s third variant that has pre-dominated, or at least a combination of the first andthird.39 The successful counter-revolutionary bureau-cracy/bourgeoisie coalition in Eastern Europe has takenhold of the bureaucratic state machine, purged i t, andthen used this to smash those elements of the state

which were responsible for the system of economicadministration.

The parliamentary forums that may or may notexist, may or may not have been the means by whichthe restorationists managed to take hold of the statemachine is irrelevant in the last analysis. Also, that the“smashing” of the system of economic administra-tion—planning organs,economic Ministries—is takingplace with little violence has nothing to do with theessence of the matter. What is interesting is that thisprocess involves a dialectical inversion of the processthat would be necessary in the proletarian political rev-olution. In the latter case the soviets would have tosmash the executive power and purge the organs of eco-nomic administration.

A healthy debat e

It is a mark of the health of a revolutionary tenden-cy that it can study its own past cri tically. If doctr ine isnot to be turned into dogma then revolutionaries areobliged to subject all theory to scrutiny in the light of

major new events.Serious debate with in the ranks of the LRCI over an

extended period has allowed i t to correct a mistake andthereby rearm itself politically. In the process all sides inthe debate realised that despite their differences theywere bound together in complete agreement on theprogrammatic tasks facing the working class after 1989.

We did not have any differences over the pro-gramme of political revolution from 1989 onwardswhich was based solidly on continued defence of thesestates against imperialism, the absolute necessity of soviets as instruments of the revolution, the smashing

of the Stalinist states’ apparatus of repression and theerection of a Paris Commune or Russia 1917-style semistate.

The Degenerated Revolu tion proved a strong enoughpillar of the LRCI to bear the weight of an importantbut narrowly circumscribed theoretical dif ference.

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