Trotsky had argued that the Soviet Union could not be “reformed” into capitalism, without some form of violent counter-revolution.[1] But Eastern Europe, Russia and China have all made the transition back to capitalism without armed counter-revolution, without even major confrontations between the different wings of the bureaucracy.
This observation confirms that we should not take from Trotsky single sentences isolated from their historical context. Trotsky’s argument rested on Russia as it was in 1933, where the traditions of the revolution were still alive. The Russian working class had played the key role in the October Revolution, they had suffered dreadfully in the imperialist war and fought heroically to defeat the White Armies. Despite the severe hardships imposed by the bureaucracy they would have resisted capitalist restoration. The purges had not yet physically removed the Bolshevik heritage of the Communist Party and, despite the growing bureaucracy, Party members were committed to maintaining the Soviet regime.
Trotsky was writing a few months after Hitler had come to power in Germany, but before finally concluding that the bureaucracy was irrevocably counter-revolutionary. It was nearly two years later, in August 1935, that he issued his open letter calling for the formation of the Fourth International and the removal of the bureaucracy by a political revolution.
However, the Stalinist regime survived in the USSR for far longer than Trotsky could have anticipated, for more than 60 years in fact. In that period the revolutionary traditions were eradicated from the consciousness of the workers. The generation that had experienced the revolution was gone. The new generations witnessed a gluttonous bureaucracy hoisting itself further and further above the masses. They saw only mismanagement, waste and corruption at every level, and towards the end all that was left facing them was a system which was grinding to a halt.
However, we should remember that Stalin did, in fact, carry out a civil war against Bolshevism. Vadim Rogovin in his detailed and authoritative history of the purges[2] concluded that the number of political prisoners during the Stalin period reached approximately four million, and between 700,000 and 800,000 were actually executed. Three times as many Party members were killed in the Siberian slave camps as in the Civil War against the Whites. The purges were the logical response of the bureaucratic caste as it sought to protect itself by eliminating actual and potential opposition in the communist movement, both within the USSR and internationally.
During Trotsky’s life the Stalinist bureaucracy retarded the development of the Soviet economy which, because of its planned nature, nevertheless surged ahead. But, as industry and commerce became increasingly advanced, until in its final stages the bureaucracy became an unqualified brake on economic development. The bureaucrats protection of their own interests had higher priority than the performance of soviet industry, so they never considered introducing the one measure, the most effective measure, for solving the problems of the Soviet economy – workers’ democracy.
However, Trotsky did warn that as the bureaucracy developed, the more senior the bureaucrat the more they would want to pass their privileges on to their children. And this was best done through private ownership. He predicted that the bureaucracy could and would adapt very easily to capitalist restoration.
Transforming the workers’ state into a bourgeois regime would be realised largely by the bureaucrats themselves, who would become the captains of capitalist industry or its favoured servants. Few bureaucrats would have to be purged. On the other hand, a political revolution would impose on those bureaucrats a worker’s wage and remove their privileges. For most bureaucrats there was a bigger conflict with workers’ democracy than capitalism! Trotsky’s prognosis of capitalist restoration was almost a blueprint for the actions of the Chinese Stalinists:
… The chief task of the new (bourgeois) power would be to restore private property in the means of production. First of all, it would be necessary to create conditions for the development of strong farmers from the weak collective farms …. In the sphere of industry, denationalization would begin with the light industries and those producing food. The planning principle would be converted for the transitional period into a series of compromises between state power and individual ‘corporations’ – potential proprietors, that is, among the Soviet captains of industry … and foreign capitalists.[3]
It must also be remembered that the 1949 Chinese Revolution was not made by a Leninist Party. The CCP was a Stalinist organisation long before it came to power, so in China there was never a period of workers’ or soviet democracy and it was natural for the leaders of the CCP to see China’s future in terms of their own wellbeing.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting chaos was a very powerful factor in the thinking of the Chinese bureaucrats. The leadership of the CCP, in its majority concluded that in order to prevent the same thing happening in China market methods must be introduced, but under tight CCP control. They began a series of steps each of which was an attempt to increase the rate of development of the economy. It is now generally accepted that the Chinese bureaucracy staggered from one support to the next to avoid the collapse that had taken place in Russia. Three factors slowed the process: lack of understanding of a market economy, important special interest groups that opposed the reforms and – most important of all – fear of how the masses would respond. But the process had a logic of its own and empiric step by empiric step eventually ended in the restoration of capitalism.
While generally peaceful, and often welcomed. it would not be correct to say there were no protests against the bureaucracy and the measures it was taking. In 1989 there were demonstrations of protest across China but centred on Tien An Men Square in Beijing. These were crushed by the PLA under the direction of the hard line Stalinists within the Party. These people took the protests as a sign that reform needed to gather pace, and within five years the CCP had ended the monopoly of foreign trade, allowed unfettered foreign currency exchange, ended state planning of the economy, and were using the giant State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) to support private industry at the expense of the Chinese workers. When these measures were carried through China ceased to be a workers’ state. However, important sections of industry and the banks remain in state hands, the better to support privatisation and the growth of Chinese capitalism.
Among the top layers of the bureaucracy there is no evidence that any group wanted to retain the old state-owned, centrally planned economy. From the viewpoint of the Party tops the present system is working. For them it is doing very well, because now the bureaucrats are successfully passing their privileges on to their offspring. Many of the sons and daughters of the bureaucrats have been transformed into owners of the means of production and amongst this layer there is no desire to return to a nationalised planned economy. There is no material basis for them to wish to do so. They would resist any attempt to turn the clock back, and they would have the backing of the CCP and the state.
It is also worth noting that the tops of the army have also been transformed into owners of property. In fact, for a period the PLA was spearheading the creation of private enterprises. In 1996, for example, the South China Construction Company, possibly the largest in China, was just completing the Diwang Building, one of the tallest buildings in Asia. But the South China Construction Company was an off-shoot of the PLA. Its senior personnel alternated between wearing their army uniforms and business suits. The officer caste within the “armed bodies of men” forming the power of the state, has been integrated into the new property relations that have been established.