Workers' Liberty

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.