The AWL is Trotskyist: that is, we base ourselves on the ideas and struggles of the loyal Bolsheviks who, after leading the Russian Revolution in 1917, went on to resist the Stalinist counter-revolution.
Our touchstone is the political independence of the working class. In some situations this idea can be summarised by the phrase, "the Third Camp", meaning that the workers should pursue their own interests rather than choosing the lesser evil between two reactionary bourgeois or Stalinist camps whose competition dominates "official" politics.
Leon Trotsky coined the phrase Third Camp for China in the mid-1920s, to convey the idea that the Chinese workers should fight for their own interests and oppose the imperialist powers, warlords and nationalists. As he saw World War Two looming, in the 1930s, he argued for the working class to become a Third Camp in opposition to both Axis and Allied powers.
After 1945, the phrase Third Camp was mostly used to indicate a stance opposed to both capitalism and Stalinism, in contrast to the view argued by Stalin's deputy Andrei Zhdanov in 1947, that the world was divided into two (and only two) camps, the USA's and the USSR's.
But by then some Trotskyists denounced the Third Camp slogan as an evasion, and sided, critically but firmly, with the Stalinist camp. They said they were the "orthodox" Trotskyists. Right up to his death, they said, Trotsky had regarded the USSR as a "degenerated workers' state" and insisted on "defending the USSR against imperialism".
We believe those "orthodox" Trotskyists were wrong. The USSR after the Stalinist counter-revolution was not a workers' state of any sort. It was an exploitative class system in no way superior to capitalism.
From the early 1920s through to his death in 1940, Trotsky analysed Stalinism - a form of society never seen before in history - as it developed. His critique laid the foundation for all serious subsequent Marxist analysis of Stalinism; but, by the time of his death, it had errors which can only be resolved by a further development of some strands of Trotsky's thought, and a rejection of some of the formulations he used.
Trotsky called the USSR a "degenerated workers' state". The content he gave to that term changed as the Stalinist counter-revolution unfolded. The residual "workers" character was overshadowed by monstrous "degeneration". He insisted on a "political revolution" (in effect, a full-scale new workers' revolution) to overthrow it.
In the later 1930s Trotsky recognised that: "[T]he classic methods of exploitation... are applied in such naked and crude forms as would not be permitted even by reformist trade unions in bourgeois countries... [S]tate ownership of the means of production does not turn manure into gold, and does not surround with a halo of sanctity the sweatshop system."
"Of the revolution as it understands it, the bureaucracy has preserved only the cult of police violence... It fights for its existence with a conservative fury such as has not been displayed by any ruling class in history. Along this road, it has arrived in a short time at the commission of crimes such as not even fascism has yet perpetrated". "Historically, no class in society has ever concentrated in its hands in such a short period such wealth and power as the bureaucracy has concentrated during the two five year plans". "It contains within itself to a tenfold degree all the vices of a possessing class".
"Workers' state" - with "the sweatshop system", with a ruling group of such "wealth and power", such class vices, such "fury" against the workers? Trotsky thought the USSR was so much a combination of incompatibles, so terminally in crisis, so radically in flux, so unstable, that it could not be properly assessed in terms of its "being" but only in terms of what it had developed from and the variants it was developing towards.
He knew that fully-statised non-worker economies were entirely possible in the abstract. But he reckoned that:
• The full-scale nationalisation of property in the USSR had been made possible only by the workers' revolution of 1917;
• Such full-scale nationalisation was impossible anywhere else, in the world as it was, without workers' revolution;
• The full-scale nationalisation was a very progressive measure, as evidenced by the industrial growth of the USSR in the 1930s and its contrast with a slump-hit West;
• World capital was intent on overthrowing the nationalised economy.
All these reckonings were more or less reasonable at the time, but with hindsight were inadequate.
Writing a few weeks after the start of World War Two, in 1939, Trotsky acknowledged that if the system consolidated - if the USSR became a more-or-less stable, coherent entity which could be judged in its own right - then you would have to say that the USSR's nationalised property had become the basis of a new exploiting class. He still demurred. The USSR's ruling bureaucracy, convulsed by huge purges in the second half of the 1930s, was far too unstable to consolidate as a ruling class. "Might we not place ourselves in a ludicrous position if we affixed to the... oligarchy the nomenclature of a new ruling class just a few years or even a few months prior to its inglorious downfall?" But if Stalinism survived the world war, then, Trotsky said, we would have to reconsider.
The Stalinist assassin who killed Trotsky in August 1940 prevented him from reconsidering. After Trotsky's death, although the USSR stabilised and became a superpower, and although sweeping nationalisations become commonplace in the ex-colonial world under obviously non-worker regimes, his "orthodox" followers did not reconsider. They flattened his theory into the idea that fully-nationalised property - however created - was sufficient to define a workers' state. From the USSR they extrapolated into seeing "deformed workers' states" in Eastern Europe, Kim Il Sung's North Korea, Mao's China, Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam, etc. - all countries where the workers had played no part at all in the nationalisations of industry, but were rigidly repressed by the ruling bureaucracies.
This "orthodox Trotskyism" came in many versions. Some were very enthusiastic for the "workers' states" , or at least for some of them which they considered less Stalinist than the USSR (for some, at one time, China; for others, Cuba). Others reduced "workers' state" to a codeword indicating that these states were more progressive in economic structure, and put their emphasis on advocating a workers' "political revolution" to overthrow them.
The AWL tendency originated from the "orthodox Trotskyist" current, at the extreme anti-Stalinist end of the spectrum. We found ourselves at odds with the other "orthodox Trotskyists" on issues like Afghanistan (in 1979) and Poland (in 1981), and step-by-step were driven to reconsider. We now believe that more enlightenment can be found in the tradition of those Trotskyists of the 1940s, like the Workers' Party in the USA, who saw the Stalinist USSR as a new form of exploitative class society, not a workers' state.
