Workers' Liberty

For the whole article online, click here. For part 3 of it published in three parts, read on.

Tony Cliff's 'Russia: a Marxist Analysis' is impressively loaded with statistics and quotations from the Marxist classics, and with numerous citations of Russian language sources. It was published in June 1948 as an internal bulletin of the RCP (he said in an introduction that it had been completed some months earlier). One third of the book is given over to an examination of socio-economic relations in the USSR. This proves only that the USSR is not a socialist society. It could lead to degenerated workers' state, bureaucratic collectivist or state capitalist conclusions.

The theoretical part of the study is much less weighty. Cliff's theory of state capitalism was in fact rooted in the politics of the British RCPmajority - Haston, Grant - whose other main offshoot was the strange workers' state theories of the Militant/Socialist Party. Cliff shared the same basic ideas and translated them into a state capitalist 'dialect', building on earlier work by Jock Haston.

The essential points I will argue are these: a. The perspectives for the USSRwhich Cliff purveyed have been proved to be as wrong as those of the most muddled of workers' statists. b. Despite the fact that for Cliff the USSR was 'state capitalism' and not a degenerated workers' state, the logic of 'socialism in one country' was accepted by Cliff, as much as by the post-Trotsky Trotskyists. c. In Cliff's state capitalist theory of Russia, the blind alley character of the whole society which its collapse has demonstrated, is simply inexplicable. d. Cliff's argument that state capitalism was more effective as a social-economic formation and as a way to develop a backward society was as nonsensical as its workers' statist analogue. e. Cliff's theory was on the level of theory a pastiche of scholasticism and dogmatism: it was as bankrupt on the level of perspective as degenerated and deformed workers' statist theory. f. The arbitrariness and subjectivism of Cliff's political conclusions from his theorising can be seen as the paradigm of all the SWP's other politics and organisational practices. g. It was a procrustean cramming, cutting and stretching theory, inorganic and, as theory, sterile: an inert prop to be moved at will about the stage, its logical lines of development chopped off, and bits stuck on, to suit Cliff's convenience. h. The original theory has been chopped and changed so much that there is nothing but the name left; sects change their doctrines more easily, as someone said, than they change their names!

This article is centrally concerned with the place of Tony Cliff's theory of state capitalism in the evolution of post-Trotsky-Trotskyism. His place in this galaxy, on examination, will prove to be very surprising. For this purpose the best place to start is in the last section of chapter 1 of Russia: a Marxist analysis - 'Russia, an Industrial Giant' - where Cliff reveals that he harbours startling sentiments on the USSR.

Despite bureaucratic mismanagement the efforts of self-sacrifice of the people raised Russia to the position of a great industrial power from being, in terms of industrial output, first in Europe and second in the world' (Cliff doesn't notice that Europe is in ruins? He doesn't think it can be rebuilt? He thinks Russia can maintain this leading position and better it? Evidently yes!)

Russia 'has stepped out of her sleepy backwardness to become a modern, powerful, industrialised advanced country. The bureaucracy has thus earned as much tribute as Marx and Engels paid to the bourgeoisie. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals the bourgeoisie draws all nations into civilisation. It has created enormous cities and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colonial productive forces than have all preceding generations together.'

This is no isolated note. Elsewhere in the book Cliff will imagine Stalin speaking in the words of an ancient Mesopotamian king:

I have mastered the secrets of the rivers for the benefit of man... Ihave led the waters of the rivers into the wilderness; Ihave filled the parched ditches with them... I have watered the desert plains; I have brought them fertility and abundance, I have formed them into habitations of joy.'

Russian Stalinism is on the high road of social development. It is, Cliff argues, in transition towards socialism. The USSR, thought no workers state is not a freak (as in Trotsky or Max Shachtman for most of the 1940s); it is not barbarism, not social regression, not a historical cul de sac.

Not least surprising is the emotional tone of what he writes, which comes after a third of the book has described Stalinist horror after Stalinist horror. On one level Cliff seems to be as reconciled to contemporary Russian 'Bureaucratic State Capitalism' and its historic mission as we are to the industrial revolution of the 19th century.

This is an astonishing verdict on Russian Stalinism's place in history to find in work by one who comes from Trotsky's tradition and in this work calls himself Trotsky's disciple. Plainly there is in it an immense psychological shift from the horror Trotsky articulated and, his increasing tendency to question even the USSR's progressiveness towards the end of his life; it is a verdict in sharp contrast not only with that of the Workers' Party but - written in late '47 and early '48 - it is even at sharp odds with the mood of the Cannon-Pablo-Mandel degenerated workers' statists - the big majority of the Fourth Internationalists - at that time.

At the April-May '48 Second World Congress, of the reconstructed Fourth International, they passed a motion that the East European Stalinist states were 'state capitalist and reactionary' in the spirit of Trotsky against Urbahns, and adopted a strikingly less than enthusiastic stance towards the USSR; they would only defend 'what was left of the conquest of October' (implicitly, not much). They will come to terms with the survival and expansion of Stalinism, after June 1948, when Tito and Stalin fall out and within a year, will be reinterpreting Russia and Stalinism and the Eastern European states in a new light - without abandoning criticism etc - as 'this stage' of the workers' revolution, representing historical progress in the mid-twentieth century.

Though he does not reach any such political conclusions, Cliff's state-capitalist idea has allowed him to be a pioneer amongst Trotskyists in the great seismic shift of 1947-9/50 towards 'reconciliation' with Stalinism. How can this mix of stark class rejection and historical legitimisation be explained? By the fact that Cliff, the state capitalist, hatched out of the same political nest as those in the British Trotskyist organisation, the RCP, who would develop Militant's ideas on Stalinism.

To a considerable extent, the bold and positive exposition of the achievements of the Stalinist bureaucracy is a riposte to the havering and indecision on this question by Cannon-Pablo-Mandel and the majority of Trotskyists. These had been denounced by the RCP majority from the security of their own acceptance that Stalinism was stable and had made working class revolutions in all of Eastern Europe.

The Workers' Party and its co-thinkers had long ago rejected the whole workers' state notion (and the orthodox majority had seemed to be faltering and, when Cliff wrote, possibly on the road to the same conclusion).

Cliff was not alone here. Including the Workers' Party, the current stemming from the Russian Left Opposition of 1923 was by 1945-6 divided into three broad tendencies: those who rejected the idea that Stalinism had anything to do with the working class - these included both bureaucratic collectivists, and CLR James and Raya Dunayaveskaya state capitalists. At the opposite pole were those who had quickly came to terms with the idea that Stalinism was not a historical freak but a viable 'progressive' historical formation that had Stalinised half of Europe; and that in the face of these facts, not Stalinism had to be reconceptualised along the lines Trotsky had suggested, but Trotskyism: these were on the level of theory followers of Bruno Rizzi and the James Burnham of 1941. In between, there was the vacillating majority, letting themselves be torn apart by contradictory impulses and theories.

In this, the British RCP majority, ancestors of Socialist Appeal, the Socialist Party and the SWP, played a singular if not quite a consistent role. They were by the end of the war amongst the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for the Russian Army, the 'softest' on Stalinism. Then in 1946 the main leader of the organisation, Jock Haston, began to rethink the issues and the leading group decided that the USSR was state capitalist. That is how things stood when Cliff came to Britain in September 1946. He was a degenerated workers' statist and shared the views of the middle group that the Stalinist occupied states in Eastern Europe were state capitalist formations under the control of bourgeois states.

In the course of the discussion, the Haston-Grant-Lee grouping changed their minds yet again: Russia was a 'Bonapartist workers state' and so were all the Eastern European Stalinist-ruled states. This was self-emancipation from the doubts and conundrums that continued to bemuse the others by way of political suicide. If the USSR could 'revolutionise' half of Europe, creating as much as remained of the October revolution, what did that say about the USSR, about the character of 'the epoch' etc. By finally and unceremoniously junking Trotsky's workers' state theory, and adopting a mirror-image bureaucratic collectivism - the USSR Stalinist state was a stable progressive formation - they called it Proletarian Bonapartism. They reversed all the evaluations and negative political, social and historical judgements of the Workers' Party. They were not the first to say this sort of thing - David Rousset, a future Gaullist MP - had in 1946 said that the Eastern European states were workers' states; Isaac Deutscher in 1945 had projected a Bonapartist revolutionary role for Stalin's armies

E(in a series of articles in the left wing Labour weekly Tribune). But from 1947 the RCP majority became the champions within the Fourth International of this idea. It was their ideas - soon to become, in less crude, brutal and less truthful form, the dominant ideas of neo-Trotskyism - about Stalinism that Cliff 'translated' in his theorising into the state capitalist dialect. That is the explanation for the astonishingly positive account of Russian state capitalism in history. The rest of the Trotskyist movement would not catch up with them for a while yet.*

XII. Cliff and Haston-Grant

The most important point politically here is the remarkable extent to which Cliff's picture of the USSRis shaped by the Haston-Grant culture of the RCP so that he is more appreciative of the great industrialising work of the Stalinist bureaucracy, more 'optimistic' about the USSR's further development under the bureaucracy, more accepting towards the USSR's claims of 'development in one country', than the contemporary 'orthodox Trotskyists.'

Again: of agricultural collectivisation and 'primitive accumulation' Cliff says: 'Stalin accomplished in a few hundred days what Britain took a few hundred years to do. The scale on which he did it and the success with which he carried it out... bear stern witness to the superiority of a modern industrial economy concentrated in the hands of the state, under the direction of a ruthless bureaucracy.' (p 46)

Where Trotsky saw the bureaucracy as a gangrenous social scab, Cliff sees it as Grant and Haston have come to see it, though under another name. He rests much on analogy (the marsupial is the mammal!) 'The historical mission of the bureaucracy is summed up in Lenin's two postulates: increase in the productive forces of social labour and the socialisation of labour On a world scale these conditions had already been fulfiled. In Russia the revolution got rid of the impediments to the development of the productive forces, put an end to the remnants of feudalism, built up a monopoly of foreign trade which protects the development of the productive forces of the country from devastating pressure of world capitalism, and also gave a tremendous lever to the development of the productive forces in the form of state ownership of the means of production'. This could be any devotee of the 'progressive' USSR talking! 'Under such conditions all the impediments to the historical mission of capitalism - the socialisation of labour, and the concentration of the means of production which are necessary prerequisites for the establishment of socialism and which the bureaucracy was able to provide are abolished. Post-October Russia stood before the fulfilment of the historical mission of the bourgeoisie.' (p 105). This is no barbarism or historical blind alley! Trotsky's three options: world revolution or capitalist restoration and later, bureaucratic collectivism are all beside the point: restoration? It has been progressive capitalism all along.

Remember, Trotsky's depiction of the destructive tendencies of a hypothetical state capitalism? Here it is replaced by the state capitalist USSR's supposed economic progressiveness. Doesn't the subsequent history indicate that Trotsky's hypothetical state capitalist picture was close to reality? But Cliff, under state-capitalist labels, rejects that picture in favour of a flattened-out, almost caricatured version, of the 'progressive economy' picture which Trotsky adduced as evidence that the USSR was not state capitalist!

Presumably Cliff was simultaneously influenced by the Haston-Grant culture in the RCP (which became Militant/Socialist Party) and took refuge in his own peculiar version of state capitalist theory because it seemed to him a way of conceding the 'progressiveness' of Stalinism, yet retaining a guaranteed class hostility to it, and not having to agree with Haston-Grant that the Stalinists could create new workers' states.

For Cliff, Russian state capitalism comes out of the workers' revolution, and could not exist without it!

He puts a question with the answer more than implied. 'Can a workers revolution in a backward country isolated by triumphant international capitalism be anything but a point in the process of the development of capitalism, even if the capitalist class is abolished' (p106).**

He sums up. 'The first step the bureaucracy took with the subjective intentions of hastening the building of socialism in one country' became the foundation of the building of state capitalism.' And as we will see, according to Tony Cliff, they succeeded in outstripping monopoly capitalism on the road to the transition to socialism - in getting to the border, and in part beyond the borders of socialism.

He records that all the Marxist thinkers have regarded state capitalism as a theoretical possibility - capitalism develops so that the state organises for the capitalists, who continue to draw on bonds and debentures in proportion to their contribution to the common capitalist pool. The state would be a giant capitalist trust engaging in economic competition on a world scale. Equally, all Marxists believed that in practice capitalism could not actually evolve to that stage. Before the evolution from monopoly capitalism to full state capitalism, either the workers would have dispossessed the capitalists, or state capitalist competition would generate terrible imperialist wars and social decline.

Tony Cliff: 'It is indubitable that individual capitalists through evolutionary development will in practice never arrive at the concentration of the entire social capital in one hand.'

Here Cliff bases himself on Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed, from which he quotes a long passage. For two reasons Trotsky, who accepts the theoretical possibility of state capitalism, considers it impossible in practice: 'The contradictions among the proprietors themselves' (Trotsky); the fact that if the state were 'universal repository of capitalist property the state would be too tempting an object for socialist revolution'. Cliff does not dwell on why the Russian state for those living in it is not 'a tempting target', that the state is all-powerful. That points in a different direction. For Cliff, as for Trotsky, state capitalism of this evolutionary sort is a theoretical but not a real possibility. It is a theoretical toy. It is the workers' revolution which makes state capitalism possible!

While, Cliff says, in reality this evolutionary state capitalism is 'impossible', does that, he asks, 'exclude the possibility that after a ruling working class is overthrown, not traditional capitalism but state capitalism is restored (sic).' What Cliff refers to has not necessarily anything to do with capitalism. That would have to be proved by analysing the resulting economy and its place in the world capitalist economy. He uses the idea that state capitalism, impossible as an evolution of capitalism, is made possible by a workers' revolution that is then overthrown: 'the revolutionary proletariat has already concentrated the means of production in one body'.

The first Five Year Plan was 'the first time that the bureaucracy sought to realise the historical mission of the bourgeoisie as quickly as possible. A quick accumulation of capital (sic) must put a burdensome 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 fit all social political life into a total mould thus industrialisation and a technical revolution ('collectivisation') in a backward country under conditions of siege transformed the bureaucracy into a ruling class, into the manager of the general business of socialism.'

As a resume of history this is Stalinist apologetics rooted in fatalism. Some of the horrors, the mass murder of millions and the ruins of much of agriculture for a generation or more, were rooted in the fact that it was not a technological revolution in agriculture; the technology was not ready He dismisses the alternative working class course worked out and fought for by the Left Opposition.

Cliff argues that the bureaucracy is an exploitative ruling class, collectively owning the means of production. He concedes most of the arguments for rejecting the notion that the USSR is state capitalist; he then produces a series of arguments based on analogies, which he takes for identities, and on vulgar bourgeois economics. (He defines 'capital' as plant and machinery; he defines competition not as competition of exchange values, but of use values [arms] held in reserve). Is the working class in the USSR a proletariat, free to sell its labour power on the market? Implicitly, Cliff answers, No. Is the internal economy of the 'capitalist' USSR regulated by the law of value? He answers no here too. Is the USSR to be made (state) capitalist sense of, by being conceived of, as a giant firm with the same relationship to the world market as a big British firm might have to the British and other capitalist markets? He admits that here too, there is no basis for classifying the USSR as capitalist: its links with the world market are simply too weak to shape and dominate the USSR's economy. Is the ruling class a bourgeoisie? He is careful to explain that it is not. Is there, though, a bureaucracy which administers the economy, for a superannuated capitalist class drawing dividends? Nothing like that. In what he describes and concretely analyses Cliff is miles and miles away from anything previously conceived of as capitalism.

He could on the basis of his description go on (except for having defined the bureaucracy as a ruling class) like the RCP majority whose very positive account of the USSRhe shares, using his state capitalist dialect and not theirs, to describe the USSR as a degenerated workers' state. Cliff is in Trotsky's tradition in all this. Trotsky had left a pretty thorough concrete analysis of the USSR. The well-known facts all the Troskyists confronted could only with great violence now be construed as compatible with a workers' state theory - only if everything of '1940' Trotskyism but the idea that nationalised property was progressive, was abandoned, and acceptance that Stalin had been right about 'socialism in one country' added. It required scarcely less violence to the facts to construe them as proof that the USSR was state capitalist.

The key historical explanation and argument Cliff deploys to 'prove' Russia is state capitalist is that just as in theory capitalism could evolve organically to state capitalism and then be seized by the proletariat, so in reverse: a working class revolution does what capitalist evolution never can do, and creates a centralised economy - which is then seized. (He doesn't explain how it is seized by 'state capitalists' except by the argument that the role the bureaucrats play in history is analogous to that of capitalism - ergo: it is capitalism). Only by way of 'esoteric lore' theorising can the USSR be construed as state capitalist (or a workers' state). In fact it is plain, as we have seen that Cliff's theory is a dialect of the most extreme workers' statism circa 1947.

Let us look a little closer at what Cliff says. We will focus our investigation on Chapter 5 of Russia: a Marxist Analysis: 'The common and different features of a state capitalist and a workers' state'.*

In the theoretical model of evolutionary state capitalism which Cliff thinks 'most improbable' (p109, 1964 edition), the capitalists, having created a unified economy, can be expropriated by the working class; then the roles are reversed when, having created their own centralised economy, the workers are expropriated. This began as a modest question - 'is the possibility ruled out?' - it has now become 'proof'! He develops this to the stage where he says that the role of an isolated workers' state in a backward country is to prepare the way for state capitalism, which cannot grow organically out of even the most advanced, most monopolistic form of capitalism. If in basic Marxist theory - and in the Marxist theory of hypothetical state capitalism - capitalism prepares the way for working class power, in Cliff the workers' revolution, isolated and overthrown politically, while the economic centralisation it has created is preserved, prepares the way for what he will say is the most advanced of all possible advanced capitalism: state capitalism leap-frogs the working class revolution, only in turn to eventually be leap-frogged by the workers. Where Marx wrote (Capital) that ultimately the death knell sounds for capitalism and 'the expropriators are expropriated', Cliff would have to amend it: 'the leapfroggers are leapfrogged!'

Having assessed the possibility of evolutionary state capitalism as 'most improbable' (p 109) and having suggested that the old Marxist idea of the easier working-class expropriation of state capitalism into a workers' state, could work backwards, he now buttresses it. 'The only argument... against the possibility of the existence of state capitalism is that if the state becomes the repository of all capital (sic) the state ceases to be capitalist': state capitalism is theoretically impossible. (He has already sketched the classic Marxist condition for a single state 'capitalism' being capitalism: 'while competition on the world market continued'. And that condition is now, for now, ignored.)

This is close to the argument: because state capitalism is theoretically possible, therefore state capitalism, once the workers have cleared the way, is the only possible analogue for the USSR!

Cliff says, if state capitalism is oxymoronic 'the name of such a society in which the competition on the world market, commodity production, wage-labour, etc. prevails will be quite arbitrarily chosen.' He is here arguing for the dogmatists vain seeking for security in familiar names. This is slight of hand: he would not argue that these categories exist in the USSR. There is here too an arguing backwards. This undesirable conclusion will follow if you reject my solution. Why does the name you give it have fundamental importance? Do these categories apply to Russia? When he gets to it, he will in every case answer 'no', and find analogies instead!

XIII Being arbitrary

Cliff says: 'One may call it managerial society, arbitrarily determining its laws'. 'Arbitrarily determining'? The name can be arbitrarily chosen; the laws would have to be explored, extrapolated from evidence and experience. That sentence, smuggling in the question of the laws, is pure Cliff. There is here in Cliff's notion of identifying the work of establishing the laws of motion of Stalinism with 'arbitrariness', if you do not cram it into a familiar name, a superstitiousness identical to that of the orthodox Trotskyists, a seeking of safety in the familiar, a fear of sailing on uncharted seas, of terra incognita: if Cliff had been the first to find America, he would have insisted it was England! If he had without warning encountered a marsupial he would have insisted that it was a mammal. The spirit here is radically the opposite of Marxism, and a mere variation on the common superstitiousness that ruined post-Trotsky Trotskyism.

What does Cliff do, instead of 'arbitrarily determining' Stalinist societies' laws? He dispenses with exploring as a means of determining the unknown laws of this system and arbitrarily fixes the labels appropriate to capitalism, derived from exploring the history of capitalism and its modes of operation, to Stalinism. Thus he fools himself by making the 'arbitrary' exploration seem unnecessary. All one has to do is to cut and stretch reality and substitute analogies for concrete exploration of the reality! All Cliff's statistics are designed to illustrate the preconceived theory: his state capitalism does not come out of an analysis. The analysis is crammed into 'state capitalism'. This is every bit as scholastic as the approach of the orthodox Trotskyists - a variant/dialect of what they were doing with their stretching and cutting to fit a newly re-elaborated deformed and degenerated workers' state theory.

Having accepted the 'extreme improbability' of an evolutionary development from monopoly capitalism to state capitalism, Cliff then invokes the most concentrated capitalism known - that of Nazi Germany and contrasts it with Adam Smith's capitalism, stresses the differences and concludes:

'It is only the absence [sic] of the gradualism of development through the stage of monopoly capitalism, which makes it difficult to grasp the similarities and differences between the Russian economy and capitalism and traditional capitalism on one hand and a workers' state on the other'! What does the 'absence of gradualism' mean in evolution? Qualitative break without prior evolution? But revolution is the product of evolution - 20 years in a day. Without it, revolution is impossible. Where the Fabians decreed 'the inevitability of gradualness', Cliff decreed the dispensability of gradualness - of evolution - for revolution! It is an example of Cliff's reliance on analogues and parallels and cod dialectics. In Cliff's original 1948 version, the workers make the state capitalist revolution - needing only a 'supplementary' 'political' counter-revolution to realise its true nature. The common patterns with Trotsky and with orthodox Trotskyism are glaring here too. Cliff is saying the same things, in a different but no less arbitrary dialect. This 'state capitalism' juts into socialism.

Seeing that state capitalism is the extreme theoretical limit which capitalism can reach, it necessarily is the furthest away from traditional capitalism. It is the negation of capitalism on the basis of capitalism itself. Similarly, seeing that a workers' state is the lowest stage of the new socialist society, it must necessarily have many features in common with state capitalism. 'What distinguishes between them categorically is the fundamental, the essential difference between the capitalist and the socialist system.' If the decisive thing is who is in power, then, are the features in common structural? So, if workers take power what happens? This is Trotsky's political revolution: Trotsky's programme of specific changes covers everything. Trotsky's fault was theoretical mystification: so too is it Cliff's: and Cliff had none of Trotsky's excuse.

State capitalism' is a transitional stage to socialism, this side of the socialist revolution; while a workers' state is a transitional stage to socialism is the other side of the socialist revolution. So socialist revolution is a matter of the transfer of power? If a new Russian socialist revolution is primarily a transfer of power, it is Trotsky's 'political revolution'! At most it becomes a matter of arguing with Trotsky about labels.

This is 'variations on a theme' by Trotsky. It is also tautological and banal: the test will be in the details he now gives. Cliff headlines this section, 'State capitalism: a political negation of capitalism'.

Regulation of economic activity by the state is, in itself, a partial negation of the law of value, even if the state is, as yet, not the repository of the means of production: the law of value assumes the regulation of economic functions in an anarchical way.' (p110) Cliff deals at length with partial negations of the law of value.

State capitalism is 'a partial negation of labour power as a commodity': for labour power to be a commodity the worker must be free of the means of production; and free of legal impediment to selling his labour power.'

Cliff's headline is, 'State capitalism - a transition to socialism' Translated, this sub-head means: 'Stalinism, a transition to socialism'. He is now comparing socialism and state capitalism, having dealt with monopoly capitalist concentration of the working class.

The partial negation of capitalism on the basis of capitalist relations of production, means that the productive forces which develop in the bosom of the capitalist system so outgrow it, that the capitalist class is compelled to use 'socialist' measures and manipulate them in their own interests. This would be true of state capitalism that evolved out of monopoly capitalism, as it is to an extent true of monopoly capitalism. What has it got to do with the very backward USSR? All the 'old crap' - and 'state capitalism' - re-emerges there from backwardness, not overdevelopment.

Cliff quotes Lenin (Imperialism) that monopoly capital is a 'transitional form to socialism'. (But Lenin deals with advanced, developed capitalism, Tony Cliff with a movement from primitivism to 'state capitalism'!) Cliff in 1948 thinks Stalinism is so successful that it has gone as far and in some key respects further than the most advanced capitalism: state capitalism is highly developed capitalism in one country! All this is a parallelogram of the degenerated workers' statists for whom Russia is in transition to socialism and the Stalinists, for whom it is socialism realised. It is Cliff's version of the ideas of Grant and Haston but with a different label. He is psychologically so appreciative of Stalinism's wonders because he has cut himself off from the concerns of the still uncertain others - arbitrarily, subjectively.

On p113: 'State capitalism and a workers' state are two stages of the transition period from capitalism to socialism. State capitalism is the extreme opposite of socialism - they are symmetrically opposed and they are dialectically united with one another.' The difference is political power. Again this is political revolution a la Trotsky.

'Under state capitalism, workers' labour is partially negated in that the worker is not free to choose his employer'; and under workers' state where work is collective self employment.'

It is, for socialism, 'now or never'. Thus Cliff reflects the orthodoxy. He brings references to the H-bomb in as deus ex machina to back up this view. Marx said society would go towards socialism or barbarism. 'The threat of barbarism takes the form before our very eyes, of hitching the productive forces of humanity, of industry, and science to the chariot of war and destruction.'

Cliff and his supporters will put it like this: the development of the means of production in a backward country cannot be progressive when on a world scale humanity is ripe for socialism'. How do we know? Since 1948, when Cliff wrote vast areas of the world have experienced capitalist development, vast new armies of proletarians have appeared etc.

Cliff quotes Lenin/Bukharin/Engels about the collectivising and centralising tendencies of advanced capitalism. Where has this come from in the USSR? From the success of 'socialism in one country' in building 'monopoly state capitalism in one country'. It has come from backwardness, competing with the most advanced capitalism. Historically, it is the Stalinist bureaucracy that built up industry. Historically, what Cliff describes in the USSR after 1928 is a new class creating a country ripe for socialism at miracle speed. This is the picture of the workers' statists who have - the RCP - become convinced that the USSR is in irreversible transition to socialism. The point here is that Cliff, in his theorising about state capitalism, workers' statism, etc., as distinct from dealing with facts of history, falsely assumes a symmetry (workers' statism to state capitalism by political counter-revolution and vice versa). That possibility did not exist in 1928; if it exists now it is the product of Stalinism. Stalinism has indeed worked wonders.

One of the oddest things in Cliff's long chapter 1, examining the social and class realities of the USSR is that he does not seem to know who exactly he is arguing with; Stalinists who say the USSR is socialism, or Trotsky and the workers' statists. He argues with neither satisfactorily. His chapter on Trotsky is a shoddy travesty. This is at first sight puzzling. But the significance of Cliff not seem

Gly knowing whether he is arguing with the idea of a degenerated workers' state or with the Stalinist claim that the USSR is socialism is that he eliminates the notion of a degenerated workers' state to replace it with a dialect of itself, 'bureaucratic state capitalism' - a state capitalism that is not state capitalism and which incorporates most of the theoretical (as distinct from the political) implications of the degenerated workers' state position - that is being elaborated after Trotsky's theory has collapsed. All degenerated and deformed workers' state theories in reality describe the rule of a bureaucratic collectivist class: bestowing the honorary title workers' state is only a means of calling it progressive. Like the proponents of the notion that Russia is a degenerated workers' state, Cliff takes refuge in the redefinition of terms, in scholasticism and the over-pasting of inappropriate and in misleading labels.

In Cliff's state capitalist vision Stalin is building up our eventual legacy, and faster than capitalism could. It is in Cliff exactly as in the worst of the later deformed and degenerated workers' state theories. Like the degenerated workers' statists, he departs massively from the proper picture of Stalinism as bureaucratic arbitrariness and neo-medievalism. In the process of accepting USSR society as a thing in itself, not a la Trotsky, an ephemeral moment in history, transitional in one direction or another, Cliff too presents a glossed up picture of the bureaucracy's achievements. It is not for him a workers' state or lower socialism, but a viable monopoly state capitalism that has in key respects leapfrogged ahead of the most developed capitalism. Instead of seeing it as freakish, or barbaric, Cliff sees state capitalism in a 'progressive' light that gives it historical 'legitimacy'...

Side by side with reliance on bourgeois definitions of capital (as hardware) and the gross nonsense in terms of Marxist economics involved is the idea that the capitalist character of the USSR depends on competition of use values, there is the reliance on sometimes preposterous analogies. For example on page 32 he notes that the vastly extensive use of slave labour in the USSR arose because relatively Russia was so much poorer in capital than in man power. He then offers this mad analogical assimilation of the Stalinist Russian experience to capitalism: 'the slaves in Stalin's camps were a crude version of 'the army of the unemployed' of traditional capitalism, that is, they served to keep the rest of the workers in their places.'

Here encapsulated you have both what is wrong with his whole approach, and his spectacular capacity to convince himself of blatant nonsense. How does the 'reserve army' of unemployed labour power work in capitalism? It exercises pressure on wage rates by competition with workers who are free proletarians operating in a labour market. In Russia? police state terror, one employer, no trade unions, masses of workers more or less randomly enslaved. That terror, more or less arbitrary enslavement, etc, does make labour more controllable, is indisputable. That it is the equivalent of unemployment under 'free' capitalism loses all idea of quality and quantity. XIV. Conclusion

Cliff's theory of bureaucratic state capitalism was politically superior to any theory that polluted socialism with the notion that the Stalinist states were in any sense any sort of workers' state. That needs to be said and emphasised. As theory, that is as a conceptualisation of reality that grasped its essentials, that penetrated to an understanding of its inner workings, that allowed some degree of foresight about future developments - as theory - 'bureaucatic state capitalism' was utterly useless. More, it shared all the faults on the level of theory of those who thought the USSR was a degenerated workers' state 'in transition to socialism'. Cliff's theory too, which in origin and shaping influence was the twin of the workers' state theory of Militant/Socialist Party/Socialist Appeal, saw what it called 'bureaucratic state capitalism' as in transition to socialism. It did not even have the distinction of uniquely proposing the need for a new revolution - that it took over from Trotsky and, for the USSR, shared with workers' statists. For Cliff in 1948, bureaucratic state capitalism in the USSR was naturally not 'post-capitalist', as workers' statists would for decades see it. But it was at the furthest possible point of capitalist development short of socialism. It was so 'dialectically' advanced that in some respects it overlapped the margin between capitalism and socialism.

The difference in substance between this and what workers' statists said it was, on the level of theory, was scarcely discernable - at most it was a matter of semantics. In no sense was this a viable theory. It was an underdeveloped hybrid, a name as much as a theory. It has over the years been changed out of all recognition.

Michael Kidron, Chris Harman, and others developed Cliff's thesis further by eroding it and transforming it into a bland exercise in labelling. The thesis about military competition determining the economy evidently did not apply to most state-monopoly systems outside the USSR; it was faded out. Likewise the argument about Stalinist state capitalism representing a 'synthesis' between world capitalist pressures and property forms created by a workers' revolution. The notion that capitalist production in the West was being geared towards use-value rather than exchange-value was also quietly dropped.

What remained after all the fading-out was not much: the notion that the state-monopoly systems were state-capitalist because despotic bureaucracies controlled production and subordinated the workers' living standards to the accumulation of producer goods.

Instead of the theory being improved by successive approximations to reality, using evidence and debate as they developed to identify errors in Cliff's original exposition and to draw lessons from those errors, Cliff's followers practiced a sort of successive distancing from reality, making the theory more bland, vague, and tenuous.

It is now an SWP shibboleth not a theory. There is almost nothing of the '48 theory left. Tony Cliff claims he was right on everything. Symbolically, when last year he wrote an article in the magazine Socialist Review to mark the 50th anniversary of his great work, he devoted the article entirely to arguing why the USSR's bureaucracy was a ruling class. He had nothing whatsoever to say about whether or not it was a state capitalist ruling class!

To try to draw any direct line between this theory and the SWP's performance during the Serb-Kosovar-NATO war would be futile, indeed foolish. Yet there is a connection. The SWP has never treated theory - any theory - seriously. For Marxists, theory is a guide to what you do and do not do. You try to work out implications and ramifications. What was remarkable about the politics derived for the theory of bureaucratic state capitalism was how little of it there was. Except for 'defence of the workers' states' the SWP was, except for some years in the '60s, an orthodox Trotskyist organisation with doctrinal quirks.

Theory was always the property of a small mandrinate. And 'theory' could always be bent or put into a state of temporary suspension if some advantage might be got from doing that. Tony Cliff believed that 'tactics contradict principles'. That meant that what the group did was entirely separable from any principles it had. This was to some degree always true.

While its 'state capitalism' formally placed the organisation at the furthest pole from Stalinism, it could nevertheless even as far back as the '60s tolerate having Stalinist members (See 'A Funny Story Agreed Upon' WL41).

Today, the organisation is a rigidly run undemocratic kitsch-Trot sect, able at a word from the centre to undertake any zig zag or change of line in pursuit of organisational advantage. In political terms this is a 'bandit group'.

Beginning as proponents of the so-called 'Third Camp' (working-class independent politics) they have in the recent war behaved like half-demented Stalinists. Arbitrariness, subjectivism, banditism, calculation - these are what guides the organisation.

The impulses that led Cliff to oppose the workers' state degeneration of Trotskyism were good ones. The impulses that led him to take refuge in theorising that was as artificial and as superstitious as any of the workers' state theories, betrayed his better instincts.

Today, it is the young people who mistakenly go to the SWP looking for serious socialist politics who are betrayed.
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