by AJ Byrne

The great mix-up in the debate over the class nature of the state in the USSR, Eastern Europe and China is the identification of the economic basis with the superstructure. A workers’ state came into being in October 1917 in Russia, despite the fact that the economy remained in capitalist hands until the months after January 1918.  The political intentions of the Bolsheviks and the fact that they held state power left no doubt on that. They only question was how that transition was to be implemented. They were forced to take control by dictat as grass roots workers’ democracy was not sufficiently developed and later the best and most class conscious Bolshevik workers were fighting and dying in the civil war.

This is the IMT stuff on this photo:
“Ted was the founder and theoretical inspirer of the Militant Tendency, which Michael Crick once described as the fifth political party in Britain. The book traces the rise and fall of Militant. It provides a fascinating insight into a subject that remains a closed book to most political analysts even now.”

SF Comment: Of course we have profoiund political differences with the IMT, nevertheless when he made a corect political estimation we will acknowledge it as such.

Ted Grant has a 1948 article placing transitional demands on the communist party of Czechoslovakia where a Stalinist communist party with substantial ranks existed because a far stronger tradition of workers’ control existed there. In his article, Czechoslovakia: The Issues Involved, 13 April 1948, Grant writes:

“Lenin reduced the essence of a workers’ state to four fundamental principles. After the expropriation of the capitalists and the statification of the means of production, there would be: 1. The election of soviets with the right of recall of all officials. 2. No official to receive a wage higher than that earned by the average worker. 3. The abolition of the standing army and its replacement by the armed people. 4. No permanent bureaucracy. Each in turn would fulfil the functions of the state. When everyone was a bureaucrat, no-one could be a bureaucrat.”

He goes on to explain that:

“The backwardness of Russia and the isolation of the revolution rendered this process impossible. But on the basis of the cultural level in Czechoslovakia the advantages of communist methods would be apparent to the whole world…. Czechoslovakia under Stalinist leadership will develop in the same direction. There will not be a process of the withering away of the state apparatus and the GPU. All the rights which the workers still possess will be strangled and an uncontrolled bureaucracy will ride roughshod over the masses as in Russia.”

And that’s what happened, Stalinism eventually crushed that moment in the antisemitic Slánský show trial in 1952-3. Jack Conrad objects that he is not a state capitalist despite picking the same date for the overthrow of the USSR workers’ state in 1928-9 as Tony Cliff. And although he does not champion the state capitalists it is clear he prefers the right bureaucratic collectivists to them like Max Shachtman, James Burnham, Joseph Carter and Bruno Rizzi. Better again are the left bureaucratic collectivists like Hal Draper, CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and others until eventually Sean Matgamna (from the County Clare) shouldered the Shachtman burden and raised the flag of ‘genuine Trotskyism’ after about 1983, he claimed. This impressed the CPGB so much that the left bureaucratic collectivists waltzed in the early 2000s in that famous fusion attempt. No doubt they waltzed to the song in the tune of My Darling Clementine by the old semi-Shachtmanite Walter Gourlay (Walter Cliff), which has Volga boatmen sailing the Rhine): “In old Moscow, in the Kremlin, In the fall of thirty-nine, Sat a Russian (Stalin) and a Prussian (Hitler), Writing out the party line.”

Dictatorship, State and Soviets

In opposition to all state capitalists and bureaucratic collectivists Trotskyism holds that there were five successive phases of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR from October 1917.

1. The rule of the soviets led by the Bolsheviks from October 1917 to the period just prior to the death of Lenin, January 1924. Then the Soviets, workers’ councils, ruled, inspired by the Paris Commune of 1871. This was real workers’ democracy. The Bolsheviks correctly suppressed the capitalist class, they were not allowed to vote, and their parties were banned; for or against the revolution is the criterion for all legality and freedom of speech etc. But inner-party democracy still operated, working class organisations were all allowed, albeit restricted by the unfortunate decision of the 10th Party Congress “ban on factions” in 1921.

2. The Interregnum, 1924-1928. The Fifth Congress of the Comintern, June/July 1924 began the degeneration. Still relatively democratic in inner-party democracy to begin with but an increasingly repressive period of political struggle between Zinoviev, Stalin, Bukharin, Kamenev and Trotsky. Zinoviev dominant initially, the Right Communist Bukharin in alliance with Stalin from the mid-1920s, Stalin emerged at the top in 1928.

3. Consolidation of the rule of the bureaucracy, Stalin as its central representative, 1928-1934, the end of the original Bolshevik party as a political entity. Some non-Bolshevik opposition like Sergei Kirov still existed, increasingly repressed. The working class was totally politically expropriated by the bureaucracy, yet that same bureaucracy still ruled on its behalf as shown in the universal free welfare, health and education systems, the total absence of unemployment and homelessness, paid holidays for all, etc. Production was according to the central state plan (albeit hideously undemocratic and bureaucratically distorted) and not for profit. No inheritance, no private ownership and no last testaments/wills were allowed; Stalin’s daughter Svetlana inherited nothing on his death. Trotsky’s analogy is a trade union bureaucracy capturing state power in one country, still loyal to the capitalist class internationally.

4. The Great Purges etc., December 1934 (Stalin’s assassination of Kirov) to March 1953 (the death of Stalin). The secret police (OGPU/NKVD/MGB/KGB) mass executed and assassinated all real and imagined opponents unchecked on Stalin’s instructions in this time. The heads of the secret police in this period were: Yagoda 1934–36 (shot), Yezhov 1936–38 (shot), Beria 1938–43, again Beria 1953 (Mar–Jun), shot December 1953 (maybe).

5. Return of rule of bureaucracy, 1953-91, Nikita Khrushchev, with help from former Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov, smashed the rule of the NKVD in a violent coup in June 1953; the secret police then became an arm of the bureaucracy again as in 1928-34. Defence Minister Nikolai Bulganin ordered the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division and Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division to move into Moscow smash the two NKVD regiments surrounding the Kremlin and prevented them from rescuing Beria in June 1953. Beria was arrested in June, and his execution was announced in December, although some accounts say he was actually killed in the Central Committee meeting by Khrushchev in June. The distorted dictatorship of the proletariat still remained in the economic planning and in the welfare state up until the destruction of the degenerated workers’ state by Yeltsin in August 1991. ▲