14.09.2023
Once more unto the breach
Workers did not rule and suffered terrible oppression, but, sticking to the provisional assessment made by Trotsky in the 1930s, the Soviet Union was still a workers’ state, insists Daniel Lazare
Apparently in response to a letter I wrote defending Trotsky’s theory of a degenerated workers’ state,1 comrade Jack Conrad has fired off a three-part series totalling an astonishing 13,000 words on the class nature of the Soviet Union.2
The series is nothing if not far-ranging, with everything from the Visigoths, the Big Bang and the history of western property relations coming under the Conradian gaze. He rounds up the usual suspects with regard to the question of class: Tony Cliff of ‘state-capitalist’ fame; Bruno Rizzi, Max Shachtman, James Burnham and other advocates of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’; Karl Wittfogel, who preferred the label, ‘Oriental despotism’, and Moshé Machover and John Fantham, who argued that Stalinism represented a not-unsuccessful road to economic development that third-world nationalists might well emulate.
Conrad disposes of them with ease - except for Trotsky, that is. Yet, when it comes to advancing his own viewpoint, the results are oddly anti-climactic. He concludes part 1 by criticising Ernest Mandel for his view of Mikhail Gorbachev as a potential Soviet saviour - a view that could not have been more inaccurate. He winds up part 2 by describing the USSR as an “ectopic social formation ... a freak society which had a past, but no future”. He ends part 3 with a view of Soviet Russia as “something new, something entirely unexpected, something that has to be studied in its own right”. If 90-plus years of analysis and debate have not resolved the issue to Conrad’s satisfaction, perhaps another 90 will.
Ectopic
The term ‘ectopic’ is particularly unfortunate. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it means “in an abnormal place or position” (an ectopic pregnancy is thus one that takes place outside the uterus, most often in the fallopian tubes, while an ectopic thymus is one that is also outside its normal location in the middle of the chest cavity). The implication in terms of Russia is that the Bolshevik revolution was also outside the normal flow of history - an event that was distorted from the start due to its location on the semi-industrial periphery rather than, as Marx and Engels expected, in the capitalist core. Studying the Soviet experiment “in its own right” thus suggests that it should be seen not as the culmination of historical processes to date, but as a stand-alone event.
Needless to say, this is a head-scratcher for those who have long viewed the Russian Revolution as “Ten days that shook the world” - an epic explosion that transformed global politics, elevated the international class struggle to a new pitch of intensity, and eventually brought 30% of the world population under its sway. The Soviet experiment can be called many things, according to this perspective, but ‘ectopic’ is not one of them.
Conrad’s treatment of Trotsky is also unproductive. For all his immense verbiage, his treatment of Trotsky’s theory of a degenerated workers’ state seems cursory and incomplete. He gets key elements wrong and fails to appreciate its significance for socialism in general.
Take the concept of a workers’ state itself. For Conrad, the meaning is straightforward: a state in which workers are the “dominating class” - an assertion that he regards as “a complete and utter absurdity”, since Soviet workers “faced coercion in every sphere of life” following the implementation of the first five-year plan in 1929. Strikes were crushed, strike leaders arrested, and speed-ups instituted - anti-working-class measures that were even more extreme than those seen in advanced capitalist countries like Britain or the US. How can Trotsky describe the Soviet Union as a workers’ state when workers were at the receiving end of so many kicks and blows?
The answer is that Trotsky was incapable of anything so crude or simplistic. To the degree the Soviet Union remained a workers’ state, he argued, it did so only at the core: “The proletariat is the spine of the Soviet state,” he wrote in October 1933, yet it was part of a larger organism that was “sick” due to the ravages of “an irresponsible bureaucracy” that had taken over the state power.3 Where Conrad assumes that this proletarian core should have mitigated Stalinism’s worst effects, the result were the opposite: the contradiction drove repression to new heights. Rather than condemning the Soviet Union in simple-minded moralistic terms, Trotsky was a scientific diagnostician trying to work out how a bureaucratic caste had managed to take a workers’ revolution and turn it inside-out.
His prescription was the opposite to that of the Cliffites. Instead of declaring socialism defunct and calling for the overthrow of the Soviet Union in toto, his goal was to rescue the proletarian dictatorship by cleansing the state from within: “Merciless criticism of the Stalinist bureaucracy, training the cadres of the new International, resurrecting the fighting capacity of the world proletarian vanguard - this is the essence of the ‘cure’,” Trotsky wrote. It is noteworthy that, while bourgeois commentators like “George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Cole and the Webbs enthused over the Union of Socialist Fabian Republics”, as Conrad puts it, Trotsky’s approach could not have been more unsparing. He condemned Stalin for the disaster of collectivisation - this when The New York Times was excusing it as historically justified - for the growth of economic privilege, for economic mismanagement in general and for the absolute destruction of any semblance of freedom and democracy.
It is interesting that, when Trotsky accused the regime of anti-Semitism during the Moscow show trials, he met with widespread scepticism.4 Stalin was guilty of many things, but surely anti-Semitism was too much. Even Orwell, writing a decade later in his 1984, described his mock-Stalinist Oceania as incapable of racism. (“Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the party ....”) Yet with Stalinism plunging into deepest anti-Semitism by the late 1940s, it was Trotsky who wound up vindicated, and bien-pensant progressives who were proven wrong.
The analogy that Trotsky favoured was that of a corrupt labour union. With thugs eliminating any and all dissent, such organisations can be as repressive as any non-union shop, if not more. If so, how should workers proceed - by overthrowing the union and admitting that the bosses were right all along? Or by recognising that it is still a union and proceeding collectively to purge it of its rightwing mafia leadership?
The answer is clearly the latter. The key to the Stalinist bureaucracy, Trotsky wrote, was its dual nature: “... today, when there is no longer a Marxist leadership and none forthcoming as yet, it defends the proletarian dictatorship with its own methods; but these methods are such as [to] facilitate the victory of the enemy tomorrow.” He went on:
… the bureaucracy in all its manifestations is pulling apart the moral tie rods of Soviet society, engendering an acute and a lawful dissatisfaction among the masses, and preparing the ground for great dangers. Nevertheless, the privileges of the bureaucracy by themselves do not change the bases of the Soviet society, because the bureaucracy derives its privileges not from any special property relations peculiar to it as a ‘class’, but from those property relations that have been created by the October Revolution and that are fundamentally adequate for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The bureaucracy is parasitic on the workers’ dictatorship. But, while a “tumour can grow to tremendous size and even strangle the living organism”, Trotsky wrote, it “can never become an independent organism”. Fifty-plus years later, this is what it ended up doing - weakening, demoralising and atomising Soviet society to the point where it finally disintegrated in 1989-91. But, when the Soviet Union finally did collapse, the bureaucracy collapsed with it - its place taken by a very different robber-baron class emerging from the rubble.
Trotsky’s theory makes sense because it is more supple and dialectical than the simplistic moralism that holds that, if Stalin is bad, he must be a capitalist. But, despite the Stalinist dictatorship, the Soviet political structure remained fundamentally unchanged, at least in its outward aspects. It was still the same state, the same flag and the same federal system, even though repression was spiralling out of control. Counterrevolution in any meaningful sense was nowhere to be found; indeed, Stalinism cooked up the myth of a Nazi-Trotskyist conspiracy solely to justify ever-increasing repression. “Squandering unproductively a tremendous portion of the national income,” Trotsky added in 1933, “the Soviet bureaucracy is interested at the same time, by its very function, in the economic and cultural growth of the country, [since] the higher the national income, the more copious its funds of privileges.” This is why industrialisation continued leaping ahead, even as Stalinist terror grew ever more nightmarish.
Breaking point
The dual nature of the Soviet bureaucracy explains much else: the ferocious resistance of Soviet workers and peasants during World War II; stepped-up, but increasingly imbalanced, industrial growth after 1945; the growing antagonism between a crude and benighted leadership and a population that was increasingly educated, cultured and urbanised; and so on.
“The fundamental condition for the only rock-bottom reform of the Soviet state,” Trotsky wrote, “is the victorious spread of the world revolution.” This viewpoint was confirmed both positively and negatively with the emergence of deformed Stalinist states in eastern Europe and the far east. Quasi-revolutionary expansionism gave the Soviet system a new lease on life, while simultaneously pushing the contradictions to breaking point. Economic advancement was such that Nikita Khrushchev’s 1961 prediction that industrial production would quintuple over the next 20 years, while agriculture output and per-capita income would both rise 250%, did not seem implausible. Yet, with the collapse of the Virgin Lands programme just two years later, the Soviet Union entered into an irreversible economic decline. Although the process took far longer than Trotsky expected, the parasite wound up destroying the host, just as he had predicted.
Civil war
Conrad argues that the Soviet Union’s relatively pacific transition to capitalism proves that Trotsky was wrong, because he had argued that the proletarian dictatorship could not be toppled other than by civil war. As Conrad notes,
The supposed lack of violent counterrevolution [between 1929 and 1940] served, for Trotsky, as proof that the Soviet Union remained a workers’ state, albeit a degenerate one. Given the largely peaceful events of 1989-91, [this is] a proposition that has demonstrably been disproven.
Score one for Conrad? Not quite. Obviously, Trotsky could not foresee the depths of depoliticisation, decay and failure that would lead to ignominious collapse. Neither could he have predicted the concomitant growth of a liberal intelligentsia with an increasingly starry-eyed view of western capitalism. But the transition to capitalism has hardly been as smooth as Conrad maintains. By 2017, dozens of civil wars had erupted along the former Soviet Union’s southern rim, killing an estimated 130,000 people and displacing thousands more.5 Since February 2022, a similar border war has added thousands more deaths in the post-Soviet Ukraine. Admittedly, such wars were not in response to the overthrow of nationalised property relations per se. But they were in response to the overthrow of a federal structure that nationalised property relations helped produce. Just as Stalinism undermined economic socialisation, it also undermined democratic national policies that flowed from the same source.
“He who asserts that the Soviet government has been gradually changed from proletarian to bourgeois is only, so to speak, running backwards the film of reformism,” Trotsky observed. That is a judgment that still holds true. Conrad is not only wrong about the nature of the Soviet state, but wrong about the nationalist warfare that has been part and parcel of its destruction.
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‘Serious problem’, Letters, July 27 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1453/letters).↩︎
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See ‘Not a workers’ state’ Weekly Worker August 3 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1454/not-a-workers-state); ‘Other theories, other labels’, August 10 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1455/other-theories-other-labels); and ‘The Soviet Union in history’, August 31 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1456/the-soviet-union-in-history).↩︎