On the basis of events, Trotsky was able to extend and deepen his analysis of the class nature of the USSR even further, making his definitions more precise. By 1935, he had abandoned the term ‘centrism’ to describe the bureaucracy, and adopted a more suitable definition of its nature: a form of proletarian Bonapartism. In order to understand Trotsky’s reasoning, it is first necessary to restate the Marxist theory of the state.
According to Marxists, the state arises as the necessary instrument for the oppression of one class by another class. The state can be defined in various ways. One of the most common ways for Marxists to do so is by referring to the state as “armed bodies of men in defence of private property”. In the last analysis, all forms of state are reduced to this. But in practice, the state is much more than the army and the police. The modern state, even under capitalism, is a bureaucratic monster, an army of functionaries absorbing a huge amount of the surplus value produced by the working class. From that point of view, there is a germ of truth in the arguments of the monetarists, whose demand for cutting down the state is a modern echo of the demand of the nineteenth century liberals for ‘cheap government’. Of course, as Marx explains in The Civil War in France, the only way to get cheap government is by the revolutionary abolition of the bourgeois state, and the setting up of a workers’ state, or semi-state, like the Paris Commune.
Marx, Engels and Lenin all explained that the state is a special power, standing above society and increasingly alienating itself from it. As a general proposition, we can accept that every state reflects the interest of a particular ruling class. But this observation does not at all exhaust the question of the specific role of the state in society. In reality, the state bureaucracy has its own interests, which do not necessarily and at all times correspond to those of the ruling class, and may even come into open collision with the latter. The state in the last analysis, as explained by Marx and Lenin, consists of armed bodies of men and their appendages. That is the essence of the Marxist definition. However, one must be careful in using their broad Marxist generalisations, which are undoubtedly correct, in an absolute sense. Truth is always concrete but if one does not analyse the particular ramifications and concrete circumstances, one must inevitably fall into abstractions and errors. Look at the cautious way in which Engels deals with the question, even when generalising. In The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels writes:
But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order,’ and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the State. (MESW, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, by Engels, p. 194.)
And later he adds:
…It is enough to look at Europe today, where class struggle and rivalry in conquest have brought the public power to a pitch where it threatens to devour the whole of society and even the state itself.
Engels goes on to show that once having arisen, the state within certain limits, develops an independent movement of its own and must necessarily do so under given conditions:
In possession of the public power and the right of taxation, the officials now present themselves as organs of society standing above society.
As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the political ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class… Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both… (Ibid., p. 196, my emphasis.)
Again, Engels says that:
The central link in civilised society is the state, which in all typical periods is without exception the state of the ruling class, and in all cases continues to be essentially a machine for holding down the oppressed, exploited class… (Ibid., p. 201, my emphasis.)
Note the extremely careful, scientific way in which Engels expresses himself. “In all typical periods”, “it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class”, etc. Engels clearly understood that there were untypical and abnormal situations in which this general principle of Marxist theory could not be applied. This dialectical approach to the question of the state was developed by Marx in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where he explains the phenomenon of Bonapartism, in which the relationship between the state and the ruling class does not correspond to the norm. Marx pointed out how the drunken soldiery of Louis Bonaparte, in the name of “the law, order and the family”, shot down the bourgeoisie whom they presumably represented. Were the bourgeoisie under Louis Bonaparte the ruling class? It does not require a profound knowledge of Marxism to answer this question. The bare generalisation “armed bodies of men” does not take into account either bourgeois or proletarian Bonapartism. If we take the history of modern society, we get many examples where the bourgeoisie is expropriated politically and yet remains the ruling class. This is what we call Bonapartism, or as Marx calls it, “the naked rule by the sword over society”. Let us consider some examples.
In China after Chiang Kai-shek had crushed the Shanghai working class with the aid of the dregs of the Shanghai gangs in 1927, the bankers organised banquets in his honour, and applauded him as the benefactor and saviour of civilisation. But Chiang wanted something more material than the praise of his masters. Unceremoniously, he clapped all the rich industrialists and bankers of Shanghai in jail and extracted a ransom of millions before he would release them. He had done the job for them and now demanded the price. He had not crushed the Shanghai workers for the benefit of the capitalists, but for what it meant in power and income for him and his gang of thugs. Yet who will presume to say that the bankers who were in jail were not still the ruling class though they did not hold political power? The Chinese bourgeoisie must have reflected sadly on the complexity of a society where a good portion of the loot in the surplus value extracted from the workers had to go to their own watchdogs and where many of their class were languishing in jail.
The bourgeoisie is politically expropriated under such conditions; naked force dominates society. An enormous part of the surplus value is consumed by the top militarists and officials. But it is in the interests of these bureaucrats that the capitalist exploitation of the workers should continue, and therefore while they squeeze as much as they can out of the bourgeoisie, nevertheless, they defend private property. That is why the bourgeoisie continues to be the ruling class, although it has lost direct political power. Here lies the answer to those advocates of state capitalism who assert that it is sophistry to claim that Russia was a deformed workers’ state, and the Soviet working class could be a ruling class when they were under the heel of Stalinism and a proportion of them were in labour camps. Unless we are guided by the basic property forms of society we will lose our bearings completely.
Many examples could be given in history of the way in which one section of the ruling class has attacked other sections and the state has risen above society. For example, in the wars of the Roses in Britain, the two factions of the ruling barons virtually exterminated one another. At one time or another big sections of the ruling class were either in jails or were executed, and the throne occupied by adventurers of one gang or another. Finally, a new dynasty emerged, the Tudors, which balanced between the classes to establish an absolutist regime. Analogous processes occurred in other countries. What was the class nature of absolutism? These absolute monarchs, in an attempt to consolidate themselves as a power standing above society, and increasingly alienating themselves from it, frequently leaned on the nascent bourgeoisie to strike blows against the feudal nobility. Yet the class nature of the regime remained feudal. It was determined by existing property relations, not by the political configuration of the government. A similar situation existed in the period of decay of slave society. The Roman emperors rose above society and viciously oppressed the ruling class, the slave owners, who found themselves looted by taxation, arrested, tortured and murdered by the emperors, who were ‘elected’ by the Praetorian Guard. In fact, Marx originally used the term ‘Caesarism’ to describe this phenomenon. Yet this fact did not change one iota the class nature of the Roman state as a slave state. And the slave owners remained the ruling class even under the iron heel of Caesarism.
As Trotsky explains, following the classical analysis of Marx, Engels and Lenin:
Caesarism, or its bourgeois form, Bonapartism, enters the scene in those moments of history when the sharp struggle of two camps raises the state power, so to speak, above the nation, and guarantees it, in appearance, a complete independence of classes – in reality, only the freedom necessary for a defence of the privileged. (L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 277.)
In the present century, in the period of capitalist decay, we have seen the phenomenon of fascism, which differs from Bonapartism in its origins, but also has many things in common with it. A fascist regime, unlike Bonapartism, comes to power on the backs of a mass movement composed of the enraged petty bourgeoisie and lumpen-proletariat. Once in power, however, it rapidly loses its mass base and becomes a Bonapartist regime, leaning on the army and the police. Trotsky likened the Nazi bureaucracy in Germany to the ‘Old Man of the Sea’ who sits on the shoulders of the bourgeoisie, and, in return for guiding it on the road to safety, at the same time abuses it, spitting on its bald patch and digging its spurs in its sides.
In In Defence of Marxism, Trotsky outlines the difference between Bonapartism and fascism:
The element which fascism has in common with the old Bonapartism is that it used the antagonisms of classes in order to give to the state power the greatest independence. But we have always underlined that the old Bonapartism was in a time of an ascending bourgeois society, while fascism is a state power of the declining bourgeois society. (Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, p. 227.)
One has only to consider Hitler’s treatment of his capitalist opponents. The Nazis, who defended capitalist property relations, not only robbed the bourgeois and confiscated their property, but also occasionally executed them. Of course, there is no doubt that the class nature of the Nazi state was bourgeois. But, on the other hand, the German bourgeoisie lost control of the state, which fell into the hands of Hitler’s irresponsible and criminal adventurers, who used it for their own advantage. Here the relation between the state and the ruling class is dialectical and contradictory. In fact, by 1943, the interests of the ruling class in Germany were in open conflict with the state. By that time, Germany had already lost the war. It was in the interests of the ruling class to arrive at a peace with Britain and America, in order to wage war against the Soviet Union. But surrender would have been the death sentence for the Nazi clique that controlled the state. The German bourgeoisie tried, and failed, to remove Hitler by a military coup (the generals’ plot). Hitler fought the war to the bitter end and Germany paid the price with the loss of its eastern half to Stalinist Russia.