The starting point of the present work was the brilliant analysis made by Leon Trotsky in his masterpiece The Revolution Betrayed written in 1936, which even today retains all its original vigour and relevance. No one who seriously wants to understand what has happened in Russia can ignore this great work of Marxist analysis. However, for understandable reasons, Trotsky did not provide a finished, once-and-for-all analysis of the class nature of the Soviet state, but left the question open as to which direction it would finally take.
The great Russian Marxist understood that the fate of the Soviet Union would be determined by the struggle of living forces, which was in turn inseparably connected with developments on a world scale: such developments could not be precisely predicted in advance. In fact, the peculiar way in which the Second World War unfolded had a decisive effect on the destiny of the Soviet Union, which was anticipated by nobody. Trotsky wrote:
It is impossible at present to answer finally and irrevocably the question in what direction the economic contradictions and social antagonisms of Soviet society will develop in the course of the next three, five or ten years. The outcome depends upon a struggle of living social forces – not on a national scale, either, but on an international scale. At every new stage, therefore, a concrete analysis is necessary of actual relations and tendencies in their connection and continual interaction. (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 49)
Trotsky was careful to place a question mark over the future of the Soviet state. His prediction that the Stalinist bureaucracy, in order to preserve their privileges, “must inevitably in future stages seek support for itself in [capitalist] property relations”, was shown to be absolutely correct. The disgusting spectacle of long-standing Communist Party leaders, managers and officials tearing up their Party cards and openly transforming themselves into ‘entrepreneurs’, with the same ease as a man moving from one compartment on a train to another, shows how far the Stalinist regime was from genuine socialism.
Trotsky did not expect the Stalinist regime to last as long as it did. True, in his last work Stalin, he did suggest that the regime might last for decades in its present form, but the book was unfinished at the time of his assassination and he was unable to develop this idea further. The Soviet Union emerged from the Second World War enormously strengthened. The Stalinist regime, which Trotsky regarded as a temporary historical aberration, survived for decades. This had a profound effect on everything, particularly the consciousness of the masses and the bureaucracy itself.
Trotsky had hoped that the Stalinist regime would be overthrown by a political revolution of the working class. But if that did not happen, he raised the possibility at a certain stage that the process of bureaucratic counter-revolution would lead to the overthrow of the property relations established by the October Revolution:
The counter-revolution sets in when the spool of progressive social conquests begins to unwind. There seems no end to this unwinding. Yet some portion of the conquests of the Revolution is always preserved. Thus, in spite of monstrous bureaucratic distortions, the class basis of the USSR remains proletarian. But let us bear in mind that the unwinding process has not yet been completed, and the future of Europe and the world during the next few decades has not yet been decided. The Russian Thermidor would have undoubtedly opened a new era of bourgeois rule, if that rule had not proved obsolete throughout the world. At any rate, the struggle against equality and the establishment of very deep social differentiations has so far been unable to eliminate the socialist consciousness of the masses or the nationalisation of the means of production and the land which were the basic socialist conquests of the Revolution. Although it derogates these achievements, the bureaucracy has not yet ventured to resort to the restoration of the private ownership of the means of production. (Ibid., pp. 405-6)
The perspective of capitalist restoration in Russia and its repercussions was explained with remarkable foresight by Trotsky in 1936:
A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead inevitably to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus the abolition of state property. The bond of compulsion between the trusts and the factories within them would fall away. The more successful enterprises would succeed in coming out on the road of independence. They might convert themselves into stock companies, or they might find some other transitional form of property – one, for example, in which the workers should participate in the profits. The collective farms would disintegrate at the same time and far more easily. The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture. (Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, pp. 250-1)
What strikes one is the brilliant way in which Trotsky anticipated the main lines of what actually took place in Russia. In complete contrast to the clarity of Trotsky’s approach we see the theoretical and practical bankruptcy of the theory of ‘state capitalism’, which in different forms has occupied the minds of different ultra-left sects for decades. After the Second World War, Ted Grant developed and extended Trotsky’s analysis of proletarian Bonapartism, particularly in The Marxist Theory of the State, which comprehensively demolished the idea of state capitalism in Russia.
According to this ‘theory’, the regime in the USSR had been capitalist for a very long time. Thus, the workers need not bother to defend the old forms of state ownership (state capitalism) against the nascent bourgeoisie, since there was no difference between them. This line of argument, which would completely disarm the working class in the face of the capitalist counter-revolution, is a glaring example of how a false theory leads inevitably to a disaster in practice.
The crisis of Stalinism had nothing whatsoever in common with the crisis of capitalism (or ‘state capitalism’). The latter is the result of the anarchy of the market and private ownership. But there was no question of a crisis of overproduction in the case of the USSR, which was based on a nationalised planned economy, although one afflicted with all the evils of bureaucracy, corruption and mismanagement.
To this must be added the limiting character of the nation state, which has outlived its usefulness and become a gigantic fetter on the productive forces. This explains why every country, even the biggest superpower, is compelled to participate in the world market. This was predicted in advance by Marx. It is also the reason why the idea of socialism in one country is a reactionary utopia.