Trotsky and the Stalinist state: Workers' Liberty 3/31

Why did Trotsky hold on to the view that Russia remained a degenerated workers’ state, when others - basing themselves on his account of the realities of Stalinism and his formula of 1936 about the bureaucracy “owning” the state - argued that it was a new form of exploitative class society? In fact, by the end, Trotsky held on to the idea that Russia remained a workers’ state with increasing tentativeness. I will come back to that. He rejected the idea that Stalinist Russia was a viable class-exploitative society for the same reason that he had rejected Stalin’s and Bukharin’s programme of...

A competing alternative society to capitalism, emerging from its margins, could only thrive and develop if capitalism were in irreversible decline and fated to be overtaken by a historic reversion to a more rudimentary system. Within his framing ideas about broad historical development, and as aspects of them, Trotsky rejected the notion that Russia should be classified as a new class society for two linked reasons. What existed in the USSR was a by-product, seized and transformed by the bureaucracy, of the 1917 revolution. That revolution, in turn, was a product of the world crisis of...

Wasn’t it possible to admit that the Russian system was an exploitative class society, but with all the instability, ephemerality, and lack of scope for historical development imposed by the limitations of its competition with capitalism? Logically, yes. In Trotsky’s concrete assessments of Stalinist society, and in his programme for a new working-class socialist revolution in it, he did in effect define it that way. He wrote of the Russian conquest of eastern Poland as making the people there the “semi-slaves” of Stalin; and declared that “historically, no class in society has ever...

That is the significance of Trotsky’s discussion “with” Rizzi. Rizzi was a political crank, an anti-semite, and believed that both fascism and Stalinism were routes to one and the same goal, “bureaucratic collectivism”. That was a progressive system that would ultimately lead peacefully into socialism. Anti-semitism was a mode of anti-capitalist opinion and feeling. Fascism and Stalinism (“communism”) should unite into one movement. In a sharp definition, Rizzi was a quirky fascist, but on Russia he avowedly based himself on Trotsky. Nothing he said on Russia, specifically, was original or new...

Trotsky once compared his conception of Russia as a “degenerated workers’ state” to Lenin’s theory of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”. The democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry had proved in its broad framework to be wrong. Lenin had postulated an equal alliance of workers and peasants to bring about bourgeois-democratic revolution. Until 1917 he considered a purely workers’ revolution for working class goals impossible in Russia’s economic and social backwardness. It turned out that the only revolution possible in 1917 was a working...