The war is the great test: 'If this war provokes, as we firmly believe, a proletarian revolution, it must inevitably lead to the overthrow of the bureaucracy in the USSR and regeneration of Soviet democracy on a far higher economic and cultural basis than in 1918. In that case the question as to whether the Stalinist bureaucracy was a class' or a growth on the workers' state will be automatically solved. 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. If, however, it is conceded that the present war will provoke not, revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains another alternative: the further decay of monopoly capitalism, its further fusion with the state and the replacement of democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime This would be, according to all indications, a regime of decline, signalizing the eclipse of civilisation
E'Then it would be necessary in retrospect to establish that in its fundamental traits the present USSR was the precursor of a new exploiting regime on an international scale
E'The historic alternative, carried to the end, is as follows: either the Stalin regime is an abhorrent relapse in the process of transforming bourgeois society into a socialist society, or the Stalin regime is the first stage of a new exploiting society. If the second prognosis proves to be correct, then, of course, the bureaucracy will become a new exploiting class
E'Bruno has caught on to the fact that the tendencies of collectivization assume as a result of the political prostration of the working class the form of bureaucratic collectivism.' The phenomenon in itself is incontestable. But where are its limits and what is its historical weight?
For Trotsky, the Stalinist USSRis inconceivable apart from October 1917. 'The Kremlin oligarchy has the opportunity of directing economy as a body only owing to the fact that the working class of Russia accomplished the greatest overturn of property relations in history. This difference must not be lost sight of.
E'The October Revolution was not an accident. It was forecast long in advance. Events confirmed this forecast, because Marxists never believed that an isolated workers' state in Russia could maintain itself indefinitely Degeneration must inescapably end at a certain stage in downfall.
E'A totalitarian regime, whether of Stalinist or fascist type, by its very essence can only be a temporary transitional regime If contrary to all probabilities the October Revolution fails during the course of the present war, or immediately thereafter, to find its continuation in any of the advanced countries; and if, on the contrary, the proletariat is thrown back everywhere and on all fronts - then we should doubtlessly have to pose the question of revising our conception of the present epoch and its driving force. In that case it would be a question not of slapping a copybook label on the USSR or the Stalinist gang but of reevaluating the world historical perspective for the next decades if not centuries: Have we entered the epoch of social revolution and socialist society, or on the contrary the epoch of the declining society of totalitarian bureaucracy?
E'The twofold error of schematists like Hugo Urbahns and Bruno R. consists, first, in that they proclaim this latter regime as having been already finally installed; secondly, in that they declare it a prolonged transitional state of society between capitalism and socialism
Trotsky explains what he 'defended' and does not defend. 'We defend the USSR as we defend the colonies, as we solve all our problems, not by supporting some imperialist governments against others, but by the method of international class struggle in the colonies as well as in the metropolitan centers.
E'We are not a government party; we are the party of irreconcilable opposition, not only in capitalist countries but also in the USSR. Our tasks, among them the defence of the USSR,' we realize not through the medium of bourgeois governments and not even through the government of the USSR, but exclusively through the education of the masses through agitation, through explaining to the workers what they should defend and what they should overthrow. Such a defence' cannot give immediate miraculous results. But we do not even pretend to be miracle workers
E'The primary political criterion for us is not the transformation of property relations in this or another area, however important these may be in themselves, but rather the change in the consciousness and organization of the world proletariat, the raising of their capacity for defending conquests and accomplishing new ones
E'We must build our policy by taking as our starting point the real relations and contradictions Our defence of the USSR' will naturally differ, as heaven does from earth, from the official defense which is now being conducted under the slogan: For the fatherland! For Stalin!' Our defence of the USSR is carried on under the slogan: For socialism! For the World Revolution! Against Stalin!'.
Trotsky finds that he has to answer the charge that his provisional endorsement of the theory of bureaucratic collectivism has alarmed dogmatists on his own side of the escalating factional struggle in the SWP(USA).
E'Some comrades evidently were surprised that I spoke in my article (The USSR in War') of the system of bureaucratic collectivism' as a theoretical possibility. They discovered in this even a complete revision of Marxism. This is an apparent misunderstanding. The Marxist comprehension of historical necessity has nothing in common with fatalism. Socialism is not realizable by itself' but as a result of the struggle of living forces, classes and their parties. The proletariats decisive advantage in this struggle resides in the fact that it represents historical progress, while the bourgeoisie incarnates reaction and decline. Precisely in this is the source of our conviction in victory. But we have full right to ask ourselves: What character will society take if the forces of reaction conquer?
E'Marxists have formulated an incalculable number of times the alternative: either socialism or return to barbarism. After the Italian experience' we repeated thousands of times: either communism or fascism. The real passage to socialism cannot fail to appear incomparably more complicated, more heterogeneous, more contradictory than was foreseen in the general historical scheme. Marx spoke about the dictatorship of the proletariat and its future withering away but said nothing about bureaucratic degeneration of the dictatorship. We have observed and analyzed for the first time in experience such a degeneration. Is this revision of Marxism?
E'What social and political forms can the new barbarism' take, if we admit theoretically that mankind should not be able to elevate itself to socialism? We have the possibility of expressing ourselves on this subject more concretely than Marx. Fascism on one hand, degeneration of the Soviet state on the other, outline the social and political forms of a neo-barbarism
E'If we are to speak of a revision of Marx, it is in reality the revision of those comrades who project a new type of state, 'nonbourgeois' and 'nonworker'. Because the alternative developed by me leads them to draw their thoughts up to their logical conclusion, some of these critics, frightened by the conclusions of their own theory accuse me of revising Marxism.'
Nonetheless, the charge of 'revisionism', fuelled by ignorance, malice and theoretical poverty will reverberate down the decades!
VIII. The results of World War Two
After its survival and vast imperialist expansion following Trotsky's death, the USSR could no longer be described in the terms Trotsky had used and for the reasons he had given, as a degenerated workers' state, nor the Stalinist bureaucracy as a parasitic growth and not a social organ, as a caste and not a ruling class. When the Stalinist state proved capable of replicating itself in societies where there never was a proletarian revolution; where, as in China, the bureaucracy repressed the proletariat before and during the bureaucratic revolution, and not 10 years after a proletarian revolution, as in the USSR, Trotsky's workers' state theory died. Anybody who wanted to go on using Trotsky's name for the USSR, or its clones had to find another set of reasons. 'Workers' state' theory had either to disappear or to put a new and radically different analysis into Trotsky's verbiage: the 'Orthodox' could now maintain 'Trotsky's' position only by the most thoroughgoing 'revision' of the whole of revolutionary Marxist theory, elaborating a radically new set of theories within Trotsky's familiar old terms.
In the very long term - 50 years -Stalinism proved an unviable system and a historical blind alley, but far from collapsing 'in a few months or years' before capitalism or working class revolution, as Trotsky was sure it would, Stalinism survived and seemed as late as the early '80s, to friend and foe alike, to be a viable system: it seemed in some respects better equipped than capitalism to win the long Stalinist-capitalist competition. It was still expanding (into Afghanistan) at the beginning of the 1980s.
In 1940, in Stalin, Trotsky had defined the bureaucratic counter-revolution after 1928 as the bureaucracy making itself 'sole master of the social surplus product', what, in capitalism, Marxists name 'surplus value'. Trotsky thereby arrived at a clear description of the bureaucracy as exploiters of the working class. He still, before the USSRwas submitted to the test of the looming war, hesitated to name what he described with an appropriate name, though he rendered the old name, degenerated workers' state, nonsensical.
Once the survival and expansion of Stalinism in World War Two had destroyed, root and branch, Trotsky's theory that the USSRwas a deformed workers' state, what then, for Trotskyists? It was not possible rationally to go on arguing, as Trotsky had, in essence to postpone giving the indicated answer, that it was too soon to decide! He himself had set the temporal and empirical tests to reconceptualise the given USSR as a new form of class society. At the end his refusal to do so rested on the one central argument: it should be left to the test of war. By the time war had put the system to the test, Trotsky was dead. But his tentative reconceptualisation in September-October 1939 had cut through the cable binding Trotskyism to the Stalinist USSR and the idea that so long as nationalised property survived, the USSR was a degenerated workers' state rooted in October.
Instead of developing from Trotsky, the orthodox held on to the letter of Trotsky. They abandoned his methods of analysis. Post-Trotsky neo-Trotskyists froze Trotsky's interim and increasingly tentative degenerated workers' state theory. They substituted the name for Trotsky's method of analysing evolving USSR reality. They substituted analogy for class analysis.
From 1937, Trotsky had, for the sake of argument, separated the idea that the USSR was progressive - because it developed the means of production while world capitalism in the great slump and after was in marked decline - from the characterisation of Russia as a workers' state. He had asked more than once (in reply to Burnham, Carter and Yvan Craipeau, for example, in 1937): are we not, whatever its class character, compelled to see it as progressive? The post-Trotsky Trotskyists built new workers' state theories on this.
If, in terms of Trotsky's 1939-40 reasoning, no theory of the USSRas a workers' state was possible after World War Two, except a Stalinist one, this idea - the USSR is progressive no matter what - was transmuted by his followers into the idea that the survival of the USSRproved it was a workers' state, thus turning Trotsky inside out; and further, that the creation of Stalinist states elsewhere by the Russian Army or by autonomous Stalinist forces which created societies modelled on the USSR, such as Tito's and Mao's, meant that they too, by analogy, had to be classified as workers' states - 'deformed workers' states'. Thus did Trotsky's followers, committing political suicide, hold to the letter and form of his defunct old conclusions.
For Trotskyism, history was repeating itself. USSR Trotskyism in 1929 was faced with the fact that the expected bourgeois counter-revolution did not happen, but instead the bureaucracy uprooted the feeble shoots of bourgeois counter-revolution, destroyed the labour movement and emerged as 'master of the surplus product'. Now, with the emergence after World War Two of a new exeternal bureaucratic Russian Empire, something analogous happened on a vast international scale. The bureaucracy not only survived the war, but as, in the crisis of 1928 and after, it vastly expanded its spheres of operation; this time, way beyond the borders of the USSR. Stalinism was replicated in other countries by way of peasant movements that could by no twisting of language properly be construed as working class, as rooted in the working class or as making a workers' revolution.
The bureaucracy in the USSR and now elsewhere continued to develop the means of production in its own savage, murderous and immensely wasteful way. The new bureaucratic formations in China, Yugoslavia, etc., could not, as Trotsky had insisted was the case in the USSR - it was central to his analysis and to his theory of the degenerated workers' state - be said to be in conflict and contradiction with the collectivist property. They created it: collectivised property could not now be identified even obliquely with 1917, and even residually as a form of working class property. The old basic notion of socialism, that political power was decisive, which had been set aside, pro tem, as Trotsky grappled with the USSR's contadictariness, logically now should have come into its own. Trotsky in 1936 had posed the issue clearly. In fact 'totalitarian economism' swept all before it (see The Fate of the Russian Revolution).
Within the verbiage of Trotsky, which they turned into a sacerdotal language, as remote from life as any sacerdotal jargon frozen in time ever was, they radically altered Trotsky's ideas. Why did the post-Trotsky Trotskyists freeze ideas derived by Trotsky from continued analysis of the Russian reality? Because of the superficial and disorienting formal resemblance of Stalinist society to 'socialism' - nationalised economy and the elimination of both the capitalist mode of economic activity, and the bourgeoisie which personified it. Because attempts to analyse the world afresh threatened to collapse what they saw as the whole Marxist system. Though Trotsky, when he tentatively reconceptualised the USSR as it was in 1939, had shown them how to escape from this trap, they let themselves remain imprisoned by Trotsky's 'totalitarian economism' - 'full' nationalisation is a workers' state - and the idea he developed with increasing prominence after 1937 - as the idea of the USSR as any sort of workers' state became less and less tenable - that the property forms in the USSR were, in face of the semi-collapse of capitalism, progressive even if Russia was not a workers' state of any sort. They added a new adjective, 'deformed', for, e.g., China, to Trotsky's now utterly defunct workers' state designation.
Where Trotsky had argued convincingly that if the USSR could be defined as a stable social formation and not a freak short-term once-only formation created for a short time by the swirling cross-currents of history, then it would have to be seen as a new form of socio-economic formation, the post-Trotsky Trotskyists, faced with hard facts, chose to break with Trotsky's reasoning. The post-Trotsky Trotskyists insisted that states that arose by a conquering army subjugating the working class - in Yugoslavia and China for example - were working class dictatorships. Any state modelled on the USSR, in which the bourgeoisie was destroyed and replaced by a Stalinist bureaucracy, was a workers' state, irrespective of the workers.
The Stalinist USSR had, said Trotsky's self-designated 'best disciples', miraculously changed the direction of its social and class evolution, as Trotsky had seen them in the last years of his life. Stalinism in the USSR and in the USSR's clones across an additional sixth of the world, was now 'in transition to socialism'.
In this way, Trotsky's ideas, proclaimed as 'official' orthodox Trotskyism, were turned on their head, inside out and upside down. Socialism in one country - or 'socialism in a number of backward countries', was proclaimed to be the vindication of the 'permanent revolution' of Trotsky. The Stalinists had in spite of themselves been forced to carry out Trotsky's programme. Leaders of the neo-Trotskyist 'Fourth International', Pierre Frank, for example, proclaimed Mao and Ho Chi Minh and Tito, unconsciously to be Trotsky's political legatees, not Stalinists!
The evolution of the 'official', 'orthodox' Trotskyism shows that the complex of problems - the nature of statified economy, of the ruling elite, of this system's place in history and of its relationship to capitalism was capable of a very wide variety of answers and of many permutations and combinations of the elements that made up the answers. There was a great freedom and scope for whatever answer sympathy, mood, impression or revulsion indicated to you. The post-Trotsky Trotskyist workers' state label was only a way of calling these states post-capitalist and progressive.
Because of the importance of the foregoing, it is worthwhile to schematically nail down exactly what was changed in 'mainstream' 'offical Trotskyism'. It was, we will see, also incorporated in Cliff's state capitalism.
.
. The idea used by Trotsky from 1937, against demands to abandon the workers' state idea, that workers' state or not, the nationalised economy of the USSR was progressive, was now used to wipe out most of the pre-1940 Trotskyism. For eastern Europe in the 1940s, China or North Vietnam in the '50s or Cuba in the '60s, Stalinist statism was, it would be argued - by Ernest Mandel, for example - progressive because it shielded the economy from the world market and the dictates of the untrammelled law of value, which would have kept those states as mere suppliers of raw material to the advanced countries and hindered their economic development. Stalinist planning, which Trotsky had from the beginning called chaos and anarchy, multiplied by the subjectivism and ignorance of the totalitarian bureaucracy, was now allotted an enormously progressive historical role.
. More: for these ideas to make any sense at all capitalism had to be seen as Trotsky saw it in the '30s, as a system in historical reflux and terminal decline. Trotsky's picture of capitalism in the '30s was one-sided and exaggerated even then, but world capitalism was indeed in tremendous decline in the '30s. The idea that Stalinism was progressive in the USSR and was the only way to develop backward countries was propounded now in a world where capitalism was experiencing a long, long economic expansion, and in which whole new areas of the world were drawn into fully capitalist relations. The verdict of history does not support the idea that Stalinist state slave-driving was the most effective way of developing backward countries.
.
. The Stalinists' basic programmatic idea, 'socialism in one country', was in its fundamental assumptions incorporated into post-Trotsky Trotskyism. The USSR's claim to great economic progress was accepted. The new 'Trotskyism' - codified at the 3rd World Congress in 1951, which was in fact the first congress of a political current new in 'Trotskyism' - minimised such things as the contribution of slave labour and an atomised, driven working class to Stalinist progress. Trotsky's early political objection to 'socialism in one country', that it implied no revolution other than that of 1917 for the whole historical period that it would take the USSR to 'catch up' was deemed to be outmoded by the fact of new 'revolutions' (Yugoslavia, China, etc.), the expansion of the USSR post World War Two and the status of the USSR as one of the world's nuclear-armed great powers.
. Stalin had, they now decided, built a historically viable socio-economic formation that could compete with capitalism, and with increasing success, for as long as the workers' revolution was delayed in the advanced capitalist countries. And the old arguments against 'socialism in one country'? It was, they (Ernest Mandel, for example) said, no longer one country, but a cluster of countries! Most, though not all, of them - Czechoslovakia and East Germany - were backward: yet they were now seen as evolving toward socialism. Socialism was - 'for now' - evolving not out of advanced capitalism and as its spawn and replica, but as capitalism's competitor, moving 'from the periphery to the centre'.
. Conflicts with the capitalist states would force even the big Stalinist parties in Europe - France, Italy - to take power. Trotsky's fear of bureaucratic counter-revolution was also outmoded: the bureaucracy was committed to nationalised property. Russian and its allies were strong against international capitalism; so were the liberation movements in the colonies. Stalinism was stabilised, expanding and developing economically - 'in transition to socialism'.
. The 'actually existing revolution' was a matter of 'one, two, many socialisms in one country'. None of this - even if they were deformed and degenerated workers' states - made sense in terms of the Marxism of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. On an international scale, it bore more than a passing resemblance to the vision of Michael Bakunin in the First International and after about the effective movement for revolution coming from the social fringes and the social depths - not from the proletariat of advanced capitalism, on the basis of the best achievements of that capitalism, but now on an international scale from the 'wretched of the earth' on the edges of capitalism.
. A 'political' revolution - now usually defined as something far more shallow than Trotsky had defined it - was, of course still necessary in the USSR. But China? When it decided in 1955 that China was a workers' state, the SWP/USA said yes; the Mandel-Pablo group, no until 1969. Yugoslavia? No. Vietnam? No. Cuba? No. The result was chronic instability and a rabbit-like fecundity in generating competing groups.
.
. For all practical purposes Stalinism was, without acknowledgement, accepted as the next, or probably the next, progressive stage in backward countries, in the space pre-1917 socialists had given to the bourgeois revolution in backward countries. The inescapable tendency of support for Third World revolutionary Stalinists was to write Third World Stalinist revolutions into Trotskyism as a necessary, or anyway probably inescapable, first stage. The different tendencies varied in their crassness about this and in their proportion of delusion (Maoism, Castroism is not Stalinist) to crassness. The expansion of Stalinism in any new area was accepted as historically progressive as against any other possibility except working class power.
.
. The new post-Trotsky workers' state theory was in its essentials identical to the ideas of Trotsky's make-weight antagonist in 1939, Bruno Rizzi, who held that both Stalinism and fascism were all part of a great historically progressive - though unfortunately harsh and brutal - bureaucratic and collectivist world wide revolution. They had much in common with the perspectives of the Rizzi-ite James Burnham (who had in 1939 argued against Trotsky that capitalism had more or less been restored in the USSR: see The Fate of the Russian Revolution) in his very widely circulated 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution. The neo-Trotskyists pasted Trotsky's terminology, like a well-known label slapped on a bottle of bootleg whisky, over their version of Bruno Rizzi's and 1941-James Burnham's theory, and applied it to Stalinism. They themselves had defined the new Stalinist states of Eastern Europe as fascistic and reactionary, at their second World Congress (April and May 1948). They were under no illusions about what they were; in late 1948-9 they just reclassified them. 'Workers' state' came to indicate neither working class self-rule, nor, as in Trotsky's degenerated workers' state, some supposed remnant of a workers' revolution, but that Stalinism was progressive.
.
. Even in their own terms, Pablo-Mandel never produced a coherent theory to cover all the Stalinist states. They retained a variant of Trotsky's programme for the USSR and its direct clones; but it was diluted, qualified by all the changes above, and essentially an afterthought, something for the future: the USSR, etc were progressive and progressing; were stable and in a new bureaucratic equilibrium; the bureaucrats' USSR, as both model and source of material help, was not, or not consistently, hindering other Stalinist revolutions, but helping them, if only by acting as a counterweight to the USA.
In sum, the post-Trotsky Trotskyists answered the questions posed by the Stalinist conundrum in this way. Stalinism, though it could be better and needed stern remodelling by the working class, was progressive; it was post-capitalist, in transition to socialism; it was the 'wave of the future' at least in the backward countries (and for Michel Pablo in the early '50s everywhere, perhaps for 'centuries of degenerated workers' states', as he tentatively put it); it was to be supported against capitalism, even though its triumph would extirpate liberty and every vestige of a labour movement, lock the proletarians of capitalism in a totalitarian vice, and drive them like slaves.
The post-Trotsky 'orthodox' Trotskyists accommodated to the survival and expansion of Stalinism by turning all of Trotsky's ideas and perspectives into their opposite. Like a civilian population fooling an invader, they turned all the road signs in the wrong direction. Except the invader was already inside their heads in the form of false ideas about Russia. They turned the signs around to fool themselves! If Stalin had emptied the old forms and old words and terms of socialism of their old content, refilling the old socialist wine bottles with poison and corrosive acid, the post-Trotsky Trotskyists imported the basic Stalinist counterfeits of socialism into the camp of the rearguard of Bolshevism. It was the ultimate ideological triumph of Stalinism.
IX. The other Trotskyists: the Workers' Party
But there were other Trotskyists - those who had in '39-'40 opposed Trotsky. Before we discuss the theory of state capitalism Tony Cliff developed in 1948, we need to discuss the other Trotskyists (Max Shachtman, etc.) who in the last year of Trotsky's life and throughout the 1940s, logically and systematically developed in their analysis of world politics what was, on the evidence of Trotsky's last articles, and despite the fierce polemics he had hurled at their troublesome heads (collected in the one-sided and misrepresentational 1942 book, In Defence of Marxism) the real logic of Trotsky's position. Explicitly, they followed through on his political innovations of September-October 1939 and in the last six months of his life when he wrote 'The USSRin War' and 'Again and Once More' and the 'Communist International and the GPU', accepting for the first time the theoretical possibility that the USSR could be seen as it was and as it had been for a decade as a new form of class society, 'bureaucratic colletivism'.*
From the split in the SWP (April 1940), or a bit before it, Trotsky resumed the trajectory of the ideas he had been following in 'The USSR in War' and 'Again' The violent polemics against Shachtman and Burnham - which his 'disciples' will fraudulently turn into his legacy, by suppressing for 30 years much that he wrote at the same time and after - are, if his work from the Revolution Betrayed (1936) to his death is depicted as a straight line, only a short violent blip. At the end, in an article dated 17 August 1940, 3 days before he was struck down, Trotsky described the leaders of the Communist International parties as people aspiring to be in their countries what the Russian bureaucrats are in theirs. Even during the faction fight, Trotsky's more public writings on Poland and Finland are closer to what Shachtman was saying than to what Cannon and Goldman were saying.
Those who in 1939-early '40s fought Trotsky in the name of a democratic response to the USSRinvasion of Finland and what they saw as the better extrapolations from his own ideas (see Fate of the Russian Revolution) elaborated during the '40s a viewpoint radically different from that of the official Trotskyists, with whom they interacted continuously until the end of the decade, and later.
Yet the tendency that formed the Workers' Party in April 1940 was thrust before its time half-formed into independent existence. Some of its members - James Burnham (who ceased to be a member almost immediately), Joseph Carter, Hal Draper and others had long been at odds with Trotsky over the idea that Russia was any sort of workers' state. Before the dispute about how to respond to the Stalinist invasion of Poland and Finland, they had had no political differences with Trotsky. The USSR, whatever it was, was progressive vis vis capitalism, they said, and therefore it should be defended. Trotsky, while asserting that the USSR was a degenerated workers state, virtually conceded after 1937 that the precise class character could be left in abeyance provided there was agreement on such political questions.
The most important of the Workers' Party leaders, Shachtman, and Martin Abern, agreed with Trotsky's degenerated workers' state framework. The sharpest presentation of the anti-workers' state position in the 1939 dispute was made by Trotsky himself, using the unknown 'Bruno Rizzi' and his unknown work as a theatrical mask that allowed Trotsky himself to play more than one role. Rizzi's general ideas are not summarised or discussed by Trotsky at all, only his view that the USSR is a new form of class society. This, literally, was Trotsky debating with himself, and, against 'Bruno Rizzi', arguing with what he saw as the only viable alternative to the workers' state position.*
While his orthodox disciples counterposed Trotsky's concrete interim conclusions as dogma to Trotsky's method, which, in his hands, had led him by August 1940 quite a way beyond the 'Orthodox' positions of late 1939 and early 1940, the heretics adopted both Trotsky's spirit and his methods. What Trotsky wrote in 'The Communist International and the GPU' - that the CPs were incipient Stalinist state bureaucracies - would come to be seen by the 'disciples' as one of the greatest heresies of the Workers' Party/Independent Socialist League. Nothing but the reconceptualisation of the USSR as it was, which Trotsky had indicated, and roughed out, could save them from this fate. For the 'disciples', nothing did save them.
What the split bestowed on the Workers' Party was the freedom to follow the impulses that had led them to recoil from Trotsky's subordination of the right to live of the Finnish labour movement, to the USSR and its defence**, and thus the freedom to follow Trotsky's own trajectory unhindered by religiosity towards Trotsky's conclusions.
In 1941 they decided that the USSR was a new form of class society, bureaucratic collectivism. They did not mistake the literal transcription and litany-like repetition of Trotsky's words for their proper work of translating and adopting revolutionary socialist politics to reality.
The Workers' Party saved itself and rational revolutionary politics. They kept out of the hole Trotsky's too-faithful followers dug themselves into after Trotsky's death. The precondition for what they did was that they organised themselves as a democratic collective,*** with freedom to explore, discuss and argue politics and Marxist theory.
It fell to the Workers' Party to draw the conclusions about the USSR Trotsky had indicated. I am not arguing here that nobody but Trotsky ever had an idea on these questions - Carter, Draper and others preceded him. I do say that the record proves that the Workers' Party absorbed and developed the ideas and trajectory of Trotsky's last period - which the 'disciples' suppressed in themselves, just as for decades they buried the articles in which they were expressed. This entire dimension of Trotsky's thinking on the level of theory fell to the inheritance of the Workers' Party, which developed and augmented it.
Before the USSR was tested in war, the Workers' Party made the reconceptualisation Trotsky had refused to make - 'yet'. They made it on the only lines possible, and these had already been marked out by Trotsky (and by others from other tendencies before Trotsky) - bureaucratic collectivism. This meant that they made the changes as a development within the weighty Bolshevik tradition, and within Trotsky's defence and development of Bolshevism: in short, to repeat, they developed Trotsky in the direction Stalin's assassin had stopped him developing. To do so of course, they themselves had to analyse and think and synthesise, that is, act as living Marxists. Elements in the Workers' Party thought things through unevenly. Shachtman kept as close as he could to Trotsky for most of the '40s. For a while, he argued that the bureaucratic collectivist USSR remained progressive and should be defended. Others argued that it was reactionary and should not be defended.****
But these were free and open debates by people liberated from the compulsion to defend 'Trotsky's line'. The Workers' Party heretics analysed the world around them. The difference between them and the 'orthodox' as it is preserved in the files of their weekly papers (Militant and Labor Action) and monthly magazines (New International and Fourth International) of the '40s, is extraordinary. The intellectual and political decline that quickly set in amongst the 'orthodox', self-condemned to the role of rationalising scholastics about and, increasingly, apologists for, the USSR, (often by a shameful silence about many aspects of the USSR) is as startling as it is terrifying and tragic: - it is like watching a strong and vigorous person crouching and cringing before an alter, anxiously muttering and mumbling and fiddling with a string of rosary beads. These were serious revolutionaries, some of them amongst the very best of those in the USA who responded to the call of the Russian Revolution. Yet the logic of their position vis vis Stalinism compelled them to submit to the all-shaping totalitarian economism (nationalisation is a workers' state) for Russia, and then to extend it to other countries. It made them glory in the march of Stalin's army to the centre of Germany, raping, pillaging and enslaving all the peoples they imprisoned within the widening circle of military steel and concrete that marked the farthest extend of Stalin's Empire.
In contrast, the Workers' Party analysed and commented freely about the world as it was. Where nations were being overrun and enslaved, they could say so in plain English and respond with clear Communist politics. They could modify their ideas in response to unfolding evidence. The majority of them when they adopted bureaucratic collectivism as a definition had defined the USSR as Trotsky had, as a freak formation; Russia's survival, expansion and later Yugoslav, Chinese, etc., replications, forced them to modify that. Those who had at first seen bureaucratic collectivism as progressive were forced to abandon that: indeed, to face the fact that it was always nonsense. As eager as the disciples that World War Two should generate revolution, they nonetheless could look at the realities in a way that the orthodox could not.
The basic difference came to be that between two sharply distinct ways of approaching the world. One was a formation that was increasingly religious in its ways - reason in thrall to dogma: dogma outside reason, not subject to review by reason; theory and theorising that served preconceived and unimpeachable prior conclusions; real observation of the world as it was subverted by commitment to a preordained view of what was and was not, and what would be; a habit of relating to the here and now by way of reading back from an unrealised future, etc.
The other was a tendency that retained and used the capacity to reasons critically even about its own dearest hopes, wishes and preconceptions - and about itself. Politically, the Workers' Party remained a living tendency; the other slowly died, destroying many of the key ideas of the 1940 Trotskyism as it floundered about.
For example: the idea that for socialists the working class is the subject to history and, further, that working-class self-awareness and general understanding, and working class organisation in a revolutionary party are basic pillars of the outlook Trotsky represented. But if it is a dogma that revolution will certainly be the result of the Second World War, even though the working class movement, and the revolutionary movement, has been smashed and destroyed - what then? Either you face the fact that, in these conditions, working-class revolution cannot be, or is very unlikely to be, the first result of the war; or you climb up the ladders of mystification and teleology, and imagine a revolution that can somehow dispense with all the subjective prerequisites of working class revolution as understood by Marxists.
That is what the orthodox did in the war years and later in different ways by accepting other revolutions as working class and non-working class forces as surrogate for the working class for long after. In contrast, the Workers' Party could allow itself to think about the realities of the world - for the immediate prospects of socialism bleak realities.
The orthodox 'disciples' could wrap delusions around themselves for shelter. Seeing Stalinism as the first stage of victory for socialism left those Trotsky did not reduce to despair and desertion, with the ambivalently comforting idea that 'socialism', the 'world revolution' was, somehow, moving forward. The WP/ISL had no such encouragement. Just as their ties to Russia distinguished the Stalinists, however right-wing their policies of a given moment might be, from the social democrats, support by the orthodox for the Russian 'workers' state', etc., erected a powerful barrier against conciliation with their own ruling class. Seeing the realities as they were, the others had no such barrier, but relied on an equation of 'Washington' and 'Moscow' as imperialist equal evils; a view that, for many of them, it became increasingly difficult to sustain.* X. One, two, many state capitalisms
THE SWP myth is that in 1948 Cliff's theory of 'Bureaucratic State Capitalism' cut through the impasse of the Workers' State theory and the futility of Bureaucratic Collectivism. It is usually presented as the first or only state capitalist theory. In Tony Cliff's recent Trotskyism After Trotsky for example. In fact even within the Trotskyist current, state capitalism was anything but novel.
E State capitalism as an account of the USSR was as old as the USSR. The SPGB had called the USSR incipiently state capitalist from 1918 and 'state capitalist' from 1929-30. The social-democrat Karl Kautsky had sporadically talked of state capitalism - in Terrorism and Communism in 1920, for example: 'Today... both state and capitalist bureaucracy have merged into one system... industrial capitalism has now become state capitalism.' Later, in Social Democracy versus Communism, he wrote of Lenin, 'utilising his state power for the erection of his state capitalism.' Kautsky thought that without democratic control of the state, the workers find themselves with respect to the problem of control of the means of production in the same situation which confronts the workers in capitalist society. In the USSR too it would be necessary for the producers 'to expropriate the expropriators'.
The ultra-left Communist Anton Pannekoek thought that though the new ruling class in the USSR was not a bourgeoisie, because they only 'owned collectively', the ruling class was a bureaucracy and the system 'state instead of private capitalism'. Karl Korsh, the German Communist, who broke with the Communist International in the late mid-'20s, believed that there was a worldwide movement from capitalism to state capitalism.
The followers of the Italian communist Amadeo Bordiga developed a theory according to which the USSR was state capitalist because 'far from being planned the Russian economy flounders in the midst of the anarchy of the market... the Russian economy is planned' by nothing other than the world market!' The Bordigists were and are serious revolutionaries, but ultra-left sectarians.
The Paul Mattick school of ultra-left sectarianism also glossed over all detailed questions of historic perspective in sweeping generalisations, but from another angle. Bolshevism was 'one aspect of the world-wide trend towards a fascist' world economy' (Anti-Bolshevik Communism, p.71). In these theories, what made the USSR state-capitalist was not market forces but the authoritarian plan imposed on the workers; in its planning the USSR simply represented a more complete form of what was emerging in the West.
Of the many attempts to argue that the USSR was state capitalist before 1948, none of them solved the problem of how to locate the USSR in the historic perspective of capitalist development. They all ended up either postulating a state capitalism disconnected from any broad historic perspective of capitalist development, or they resorted to 'convergence' theories according to which the differences between the USSR and the West were secondary details, fast being obliterated by a converging historical evolution.
There were state capitalists in the Siberian Left Opposition, and this was known in the west from Anton Ciliga's account of life in the USSR's labour camps (published in an abbreviated version by the Labour Book Club in 1940). Discussion of state capitalism was a feature of the broader left. In 1938 the American magazine Modern Quarterly published a state capitalist study of the USSR by Dr Ryan Worrel, a British Trotskyist; the ILP published a shortened version of this article in 1939. Rudolf Hilferding replied to it. The majority leadership of the RCP, in the person of Jock Haston, played with the idea that Russia was state-capitalist in 1946-7, and Cliff, who started out after he arrived in Britain in September 1946 arguing against them, took over and developed their ideas. The mere state capitalist label conveyed very little.
Versions of this school of thought were advanced by groups within the Trotskyist movement in the 1940s, by Chaulieu [Castoriades] in France, by Munis in Mexico, and by C L R James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the US. All these currents became ultra-left and sectarian. The most talented of these writers were James and Dunayevskaya.
James and Dunayevskaya developed their ideas as members of the Worker's Party. (Much of their description of the USSR was similar to Shachtman's). Their chief difference with Shachtman was that Shachtman (until the mid-'40s) argued that the USSR was progressive compared to capitalism, and that Stalinism was radically different from and opposed to capitalism. Raya Dunayevskaya published two big articles on Russian state capitalism in the New International in 1942 and a third part in 1946.
The evolution of workers' state theory into mystification was paralleled by the evolution of state capitalist theories.
By the late 1940s all the currents - workers' state; bureaucratic collectivist; state capitalist - of Trotskisant thought had in one way or another to come to terms with the fact that Stalinism was a relatively stable, war-tempered expanding system. It could no longer be seen as a transitory, hybrid, short-term historical aberration. Its capitalist character was, to say the least, not as obvious as its all-dominating 'statism'. Was it state capitalism produced by the evolution of plain capitalism, according to the classic theoretical model of Frederick Engels and others, discussed by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed and dismissed by Trotsky as by other Marxist before him as in practice impossible because such a system would be so close to socialism that inevitably it would suggest and foster democratic movements for its own negation - as Trotsky put it, it would make the state 'too tempting an object for social revolution'?
Any argument that the USSR was state capitalist, in that sense faced, in the facts about the USSR, insurmountable difficulties. A strong feature of the USSR's 'socialism in one country' Stalinism was its systematic severance of links with the world market and its all-dominating drive for self-sufficiency. Trotsky considered that aspect of Stalin's USSR to be outright reactionary. Not all links with the world market were in fact cut, but there was a comprehensive drive to autarky. There was a rigid state monopoly of foreign trade. On the economic facts, the USSR could not be analysed as a giant 'firm' in the international capitalist market because on no level could the economic movements and deployment of resources inside the USSR reasonably be construed as being all of one mechanism with the movements of international capitalism.*
Whatever name the Stalinist states are given, this - or 'high Stalinism', anyway - is predominantly a system of overweening state power, a system based on the most self-contradictory and, in the longer scale of history, most untenable of all possible socio-economic systems: not a self-regulating, but a 'planned' economy under the absolute rule of an uncontrolled state, whose ruling class, its organisers and beneficiaries, cannot, for self-preservation, allow any of the prerequisites of planning - free exchange of information or opinions, honest reporting, or self-rule and self-administration either for society as a whole or for any part of it. Therefore it is in all its variants as Trotsky pointed out for the USSR in 1933 - a system of bureaucratic arbitrariness, accident, whim and subjectivism - a system without any accurate social and economic means of accounting.
Thrown back intellectually to a pre-Renaissance world of state and pidgin-Marxist state-church authority and scholasticism, it is economically a world before the invention of reliable and objective techniques of socio-economic accounting; it even lacks reliable arithmetic.
Take not the USSR, but Mao's China, for which a case in the older Marxist terms could be made for 'state capitalism': the pre-Stalinist (though in some respects Stalinist-aping and Stalinist trained) Chiang Kai-Shek regime had 'nationalised' much of industry. Mao led a so-called 'bloc of four classes', including sections of the 'national bourgeoisie', to power, and gave back industry to the 'national bourgeoisie'. Half a decade later, when the capitalists were pushed aside by the state, they were given 7% per year interest on their capital. They were drawing it, despite all the enormous convulsions of the years between, at the end of the 1960s; it was abolished then, but restored later. State capitalism? Yes, perhaps, in isolation. But it was only one part, and very much the subordinate part, of Mao's China.
In 1958 the Great Leap Forward a less immediately bloody variation on Stalin's forced collectivisation and industrialisation drive after 1929 was decreed. Enormous masses of people were mobilised by the state and sent to build dams and other public works. Agricultural collectivisation was carried through in conditions where the techniques and machinery that would have made it an instrument of greater agricultural productivity simply did not exist. The main 'economy of scale' consisted in the fall in the cost of peasant subsistence achieved by large-scale communal feeding. Vast numbers were directed by the state, in defiance of the most elementary rules of science, technology and economics, to build 'steel furnaces' in their backyards and start making industrial-quality steel. Immense, devastating social waste was the result of this arbitrariness and bureaucratic subjectivism by the all-powerful rulers of the totalitarian state.
Within three years, perhaps as many as 30 million people died as a result of this fomented chaos and waste, and then famine: the giant state overturned Chinese society as an overgrown man might kick over an ant-hill or a dolls' house.
One faction of the bureaucracy, led by Liu Shao-Chi and Deng Xiaoping, held the Maoists in check for four or five years after this fiasco, and then the 'Cultural Revolution' was launched. Rampaging 'revolutionary youth', ultimately controlled by Lin Piao's 'Red Army', wrecked cultural, social, economic and educational havoc. Higher education was abolished for over a decade!
The idea that this was an economically regulated system, and not one of overwhelming totalitarian state power crazily out of control, cannot be sustained on the facts; nor is this whole period wiped off the records by the present Chinese economy of totalitarian state-private capitalism, seemingly evolving towards the development of plain capitalism. The fact that neither 'workers' state' nor 'state capitalism' made sense of full-blown Stalinism points to the rational alternative - the development and correction of Trotsky's picture of Stalinist economics: the work the Workers' Party did after 1940.
Those who wanted to argue a state capitalist thesis after the Second World War had, given the wars' verdict on Stalinism, special problems. They had to respond to the other Trotskyism that had evolved after 1940 and had rectified Trotsky's errors on the USSR. Those who used state capitalism to hack a way out of the contradictions of workers' statism were as much under the pressure of Trotsky's dire warnings against Max Shachtman as the workers statists. They were naturally unwilling to face the idea that the USSR was something new. The workers' statists crammed it into one strange terminology; the state capitalists, including Tony Cliff into another.
The pressure of both Trotsky's formal workers' statist legacy and of the Workers Party's 'bureaucratic-collectivist' arguments account for the development in the 1940s of 'state-capitalist' theories of a special sort, based on analogies, special definitions and redefinitions of words and substantial meanings - what might be termed 'esoteric meaning' or 'prophetic insight' theories. In Cliff these were buttressed by a weighty academicism.**
XI. Tony Cliff's revolution in science