As we have seen, it is impossible to pass directly from capitalism to socialism. Even in an advanced society, a transitional period would be necessary in which the state would continue to exist for a time, along with money and the law of value. But, as Marx explains, the working class would not require the kind of monstrous state that exists under capitalism, but a very simple state, a workers’ state, which would begin to disappear from the first day. Two months before the seizure of power, Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution:
The proletariat needs a state – this is all the opportunists can tell you, but they, the opportunists, forget to add that the proletariat needs only a dying state – that is, a state constructed in such a way that it immediately begins to die away and cannot help dying away.
A transitional state inevitably has a contradictory character. The Soviet regime was based on the new property relations that issued from the October Revolution, but still had many elements taken over from the old bourgeois society. The nationalisation of the means of production is the prior condition for moving in the direction of socialism, but the possibility of really carrying society onto a higher stage of human development depends on the level of the productive forces. Socialism presupposes a higher level of technique, labour productivity and culture than even the most developed capitalist society. It is impossible to build socialism on the basis of backwardness.
In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky explains the dual character of the transitional state:
The bourgeois norms of distribution, by hastening the growth of material power, ought to serve socialist aims – but only in the last analysis. The state assumes directly and from the very beginning a dual character: socialistic, insofar as it defends social property in the means of production; bourgeois, insofar as the distribution of life’s goods is carried out with a capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences ensuing there from. Such a contradictory characterisation may horrify the dogmatists and scholastics; we can only offer them our condolences. (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 54.)
Only the victory of the revolution in Western Europe, particularly Germany, could have changed this state of affairs. The union of German industry and technique with the huge natural and human resources of Russia in a socialist federation would have created the material conditions for the reduction of the working day, the prior condition for the participation of the working class in the running of industry and the state. But the betrayal of the Social Democrats shipwrecked the German Revolution and doomed the Russian Revolution to isolation in a backward country. The victory of the bureaucracy flowed directly from this. From 1920 onwards, the bureaucracy legally or illegally absorbed part of the surplus value produced by the working class.
This would be the case to some extent even in a healthy workers’ state. The officials and managers would receive part of the surplus value, but they would only be entitled to what Marx called “the wages of superintendence”. We would have, to use Lenin’s expression, “a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” or, in Trotsky’s expression, a state without Mandarins, a general staff without Samurai. In such a state, the officials would have no special privileges. But given the extremely low level of the productive forces and culture in Russia, the working class was unable to run the state without the aid of the old tsarist officials and army officers who from the beginning demanded, and got, salaries far in excess of the average. Given the isolation of the Revolution in a backward country, this was inevitable. This was the fundamental reason why the proletariat was unable to maintain its hold on power. After the end of the civil war, the workers were gradually pushed aside by the upstart officials who felt themselves to be indispensable to the running of society.
Lenin and Trotsky did not envisage a situation where the Revolution could survive for long in the absence of the victory of the workers of the advanced capitalist countries. They assumed that, under such conditions, the capitalist elements would liquidate the gains of October. This did not take place, although it was possible in the 1920s, particularly in the period of the NEP, when the Bolsheviks were compelled to make big concessions to the rich peasants and the nascent bourgeoisie. Shortly before his last illness, Lenin proposed a bloc with Trotsky to fight against the bureaucracy, which he feared was creating the conditions for the victory of open bourgeois counter-revolution.
In January 1921, Lenin wrote:
I stated, “our state is in reality not a workers’ state but a workers’ and peasants’ state.”… On reading the report of the discussion, I now see that I was wrong … I should have said: “The workers’ state is an abstraction. In reality we have a workers’ state with the following peculiar features, (1) it is the peasants and not the workers who predominate in the population and (2) it is a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations”. (LCW, Vol. 32, p. 48.)
The question of the class nature of Russia continued to occupy Trotsky’s attention right up to his death. How could this type of reaction develop on the basis of a proletarian revolution? Shortly before his expulsion from the Soviet Union, Trotsky grappled with this question:
We must say clearly and distinctly: The five years after the death of Lenin were years of social and political reaction. The post-Lenin party leadership became an unwitting, but all the more effective, expression of this reaction, as well as its instrument.
Periods of reaction, as distinct from those of counter-revolution, arise without changing which class rules. Feudal absolutism knew periods of ‘liberal’ reform and periods of counter-reform strengthening serfdom. The rule of the bourgeoisie, beginning with the epoch of the great revolutions, knew alternating periods of stormy advance and periods of retrogression. This among other things determined the succession of different parties in power during various periods of the domination of one and the same capitalist class.
Not only theory but also the living experience of the last 11 years shows that the rule of the proletariat can go through a period of social and political reaction as well as through a period of stormy advance. Naturally, it is not a matter of reaction ‘in general’ but of reaction on the basis of the victorious proletarian revolution, which stands opposed to the capitalist world. The alternation of these periods is determined by the course of the class struggle. The periods of reaction do not change the basis of class rule – that is, they do not signify the passage of power from one class to another (that would mean the counter-revolution) – but they signify that there is a change in the relation of class forces and a regrouping of elements within the class. In our country, the period of reaction that followed the period of powerful revolutionary advance was called forth chiefly by the fact that the former possessing classes, defeated, repulsed, or terrorised, were able, thanks to objective conditions and to the errors committed by the revolutionary leadership, to gather their forces and pass gradually to the offensive, using mainly the bureaucratic apparatus.
On the other hand, the victorious class, the proletariat, not supported from without, encountered ever new obstacles and difficulties; it lost the strength and spirit of the first days; differentiation set in, with a bureaucracy emerging at the top and acting more and more in its own interests, and with tired or completely despairing elements breaking off down below. Correlative to the decreased activity of the proletariat came the growing activity of the bourgeois classes, above all, those strata of the petty bourgeoisie striving to advance by the old ways of exploitation.
It is unnecessary to demonstrate that all these processes of internal reaction could develop and gain in strength only under conditions of cruel defeats of the world proletariat and an ever-stronger position of the imperialist bourgeoisie. (Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1928-29, pp. 304-5.)