Conference Document for the 1946 Convention of the SWP, November 1946.
Transcribed and Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The imperialist war made the USSR the second largest power in the world. It maintained and reinforced the power of the bureaucracy. It opened up for expansion an immense territory, from Berlin to Korea and from Petsamo to the Adriatic. It profoundly modified the orientation and the content of Russian foreign policy.
What are the characteristics of that policy? They have already been described many times by the Minority, notably in the articles of Comrades George, Logan, Morrow, Jeffries, Shays and Shelton. We limit ourselves here to reviewing them briefly once more.
From the economic standpoint: general plunder on a scale, exceeding even that of Nazi imperialism; a food policy which includes not only direct plunder but also confiscation of land whose yield is intended for the Soviet Army or exported to the USSR, a policy aggravated by the plunder of the agricultural equipment, animals and machines of the occupied countries; de-industrialization on a quantitative and qualitative scale which will ruin for years the economic foundations of the affected countries and threatens the material basis of the working classy appropriation, of the most important part of the remaining industrial equipment and utilization of that equipment solely for the benefit of the USSR; forced labor of millions of men, prisoners of war, political or “ethnic” deportees, with mobility of “free” labor more or less openly restricted and forced labor legalized for various political or ethnic categories; exploitation carried but under material and spiritual conditions which add up to a very rapid deterioration of the population; exaction of exorbitant and arbitrary sums for the maintenance of occupation troops; exactions far exceeding those of other powers; exaction of enormous Reparations for indefinite periods; direct annexations of territories without consulting the population; establishment of spheres of influence whose exploitation is practically left to the whim of the USSR; formation of trusts with Russian majority control or participation; signing of bilateral commercial treaties imposed by – diplomatic and military pressure assuring the USSR economic and financial advantages without equal advantages for the affected countries.
This economic policy overflows the borders of the Russian zone, as can be seen in the case of the Scandinavian countries, of Italy, of Switzerland, not to speak of Iran and the pressure now directed at Turkey. The advantages extracted by this policy allow the USSR to extend its weight even further (economic activity of the USSR in Latin America). We thus find ourselves confronted with an economic expansion of unprecedented nature, systematically pursued and projected to an enormous extent.
From the political standpoint: extension to all the Russian zone of the totalitarian control of the bureaucracy and of its methods of governmental terrorism, either directly by means of the administration, of the occupation armies, or indirectly by means of puppet governments; omnipresence and omnipotence of the NKVD and of its national affiliates (OZNA, for example); extension to all the Russian zone of the system
of concentration camps and re-establishment of the Nazi camps; administrative arrests, arbitrary policing of the detained (tortures,etc.), deportations, persecutions, etc. of all opponents or political and economic suspects; ferocious stifling and systematic defamation of the “illegal” opposition (i.e., that not protected by the Anglo-Americans). Besides the employment of pure and simple violence, recourse to various “political” methods: nomination of puppet governments by military pressure and without popular consultation; totalitarian organization of elections, compulsory formation of electoral coalitions, with proportions favorable to the “Communist” minorities; control of the other parties, leading especially to the destruction of the socialist parties and to their forced fusion with the “.communist” parties; or splits instigated by the Kremlin and “transformed” into new parties (“liberal” Tataresco in Rumania,, pro-coalition wing of the peasant party in Poland); efficiency of such methods guaranteed by a highly discriminatory use of rationing, of the re-allocation of lodgings (forced evictions) and of employment. The immediate consequence of this policy, probably the gravest, from the point of view of socialist policy, is the destruction of the entire independent labor, movement, the atomization of the political struggle of the workers and their subjection to a totalitarian machine manipulated by the agents of the Kremlin.
To be especially noted is the forced migrations of the populations by the hundreds of thousands – Germans, Poles, Baltics, Sudetens, Hungarians, USSR minorities – migrations which exceed everything that has been known yet of that kind. They are motivated either by the desire to smash the mass opposition of an ethnic community or to gain the economic wealth of those minorities; or a maneuver to attract certain elements by making concessions to their chauvinistic and vengeful sentiments, i.e., their most reactionary instincts. This policy has as its natural complement the efforts of the Russian government to destroy the international conception of the right of asylum and to obtain the forced repatriation of all the “displaced elements” suspected of opposition to the new governments and Russian “influence”.
The principal instrument of this policy is the Russian army whose brutal and barbarous attitude betrays the real state of social relations in the USSR; whose chauvinistic and reactionary ideology corresponds to the bureaucracy’s need for an instrument capable of carrying out its policy.
Finally, to preserve its economic advantages, to assure the security of the Soviet zone and to extend it, the USSR is obliged to follow a typically militaristic policy. The occupation takes on a chauvinist character in order to separate the population from the occupying forces, to intimidate, the “civilians” and. to increase among the military forces the sentiment of their superiority. An attitude of aggression, of intimidation and of repression towards the smaller nations, which is translated into formulas like this: “Better to be the friend than the enemy of the USSR”, “In the long run it costs less to accept our hegemony than to fight to undermine it”, “Welcome our domination, because we are powerful.” Extension to the entire world of a Stalinist fifth column of agent-provocateurs, of spies and of saboteurs, who not only act without any concern for the socialist interests of the proletariat, but have for their first task the destruction of all means,
including assassination, of all the vanguard revolutionary elements. Part and parcel of this, in order to scare public opinion and to re-assemble the Soviet population around the Stalinist dictatorship, is an alarming agitation, systematically introduces, by formulas such as “War is inevitable, it is imminent, we are encircled, threatened, provoked.” This is a maneuver which has long been used, by the Stalinist clique and which is a false and selfish prostitution of the Marxist analysis of the inevitability of war.
Such is the foreign policy of the USSR, Such are its essential characteristics. Such are the facts. The Minority analyses the content objectively. It concludes from this: that it is a question of a typical policy of exploitation; that it extend over a world area; that it is conceived with a view to objectives of long duration; that it utilizes to the full all the traditional methods of imperialist exploitation; that it is oppressive and devouring in the sale degree as the economic situation of the USSR is backward and its technical and cultural resources impoverished; that only the Nazi exploitation in Europe parallels it in scope and barbarism that it has as its aim the draining of the maximum material and human resources of those countries to which it extends; that it corresponds to the situation and the needs of the Russian economy; that it begins to undermine the foundations of socialism and of the very existence of the working class as such wherever it is carried out, above all in the countries whose technical and cultural level are more advanced than that of the USSR; that it recognizes very consciously its main enemy in the socialist working class movement; that if it is in certain ways different in its objectives and its needs from so-called (finance) imperialism, it must nevertheless be recognized and defined as an imperialism.
To these conclusions of the Minority, the Majority objects that we do not have the right to characterize this policy as imperialism without analyzing and defining the nature of the Soviet state. The objection is not valid. And here the Minority denounces once more the false methods which dominate and pervert the pseudo-analyses of the Majority. It is not only a question of the moral honesty of the representatives of the Majority, of their silence in the face of the facts of soviet policy, and hence, of their monstrous perversion of the whole international situation and perspective, of their refusal to discuss and the ever more serious bureaucratic maneuvers which they have introduced into the SWP and into the International; of the political confusion with which they poison the ranks of the vanguard and the workers with whom they come into contact. It is also a question of something more important than all that. It is a question of their anti-Marxist analysis. The Minority analyses the facts, a given policy; it places the naked facts at the heart of its observation, it seeks the causes thereof, the internal mechanism from which they arise in the USSR, it compares them finally to the methods and to the causes of the so-called finance imperialism and it concludes: “The Soviet foreign policy has become, as a result of the war and of victory, an imperialist policy. It is a question here of a correct induction from the facts ending in the theoretical conclusions which they imply.”
How does the Majority proceed? At the same time that it does everything in its power to pass over these facts in silence, to hide them or deform them and “interpret” them, it answers the Minority: This policy is not imperialist, because the Soviet state is a “workers’ state”. Thus the Majority begins with an abstract formula and tries to impose it on the facts which do not confirm it and which, for that very reason, they refuse to describe and analyze. It applies to the facts, which it does not analyze, the deductive method of starting with a formula void of content, formal with an absurd apriorism. To the facts adduced by the Minority, it answers: I do not even discuss your conclusions, because my formula does not permit it; this policy is not imperialist; by virtue of my formula it could not be imperialist. There is not a trace here of Marxist method; it is scholasticism pure and simple.
Since October 1917, thirty years have elapsed in the course of which the USSR has pursued the curve which we have characterized as degeneration. The results of this degeneration lead inevitably, certain conditions being successively given, to the practice of an imperialist policy. This is what we will undertake to demonstrate, reviewing deductively the road which we have just pursued inductively.
How has the Trotskyist movement traditionally conceived this degeneration? The Soviet degeneration has its roots in the contradiction which results from a proletarian revolution victorious in a backward country. If this revolution would not find the technical and cultural conditions necessary to its development by its extension to Western Europe, if it found itself isolated and subjected to the pressure of the capitalist world market, it would perish. In the first years, we imagined this collapse of the revolution as a dramatic act, easily recognizable by all. In fact, it took place otherwise; the course of this degeneration has proved much more complex and slow. We need not repeat here the history of this degeneration which has been described by us many times. However, it is necessary to analyze afresh the meaning of the industrialization policy. The bureaucracy supported itself consciously on the petty-bourgeois strata from 1923 to 1928 against the workers. This policy of social equilibrium resulted in a rapid increase of petty-bourgeois influence in the institutions of the Soviet state, to the point that they menaced the power of the bureaucracy. Supporting itself this time on the workers, the bureaucracy smashed the petty-bourgeoisie, expropriated them, atomized them, savagely liquidated them. In order to prevent their return, it radically transformed the economic structure of the country by industrialization, collectivization and planning under conditions and methods extremely expensive and precarious. It ended in a system of planned state economy. On the one hand this barred the return of the old bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. On the other hand, and equally part of this economy, more and more completely destroyed the rights and guarantees of the workers and established totalitarian control over the state and production. To achieve this it had unceasingly to resort to oppression such as history has never known, a gigantic police apparatus, the enslavement of the workers, the extension throughout the country of concentration camps. Governmental terrorism became a permanent and normal institution in the USSR. Moreover, in order to try to increase the economic returns and create a stable base relatively interested in its rule, it created among itself and the workers privileged social strata (cadres of officers, Stakhanovite aristocratic workers, favored Kolkhozniks). Finally, crowning its work, it undertook a series of colossal purges, on the one hand against the cadres of the October revolution; on the other against all the technical and military cadres which it thought not entirely reliable. Thus it liquidated all sources of possible opposition and created new positions for the new exploiters. It did not achieve such a transformation without “incidental” expenses. Without speaking of the unprecedented waste in material and human resources and of the enormous quantity of parasites and useless elements in all the interstices of the economy that such a regime necessarily engenders, the bureaucratic growth of the planned state economy, deprived by its very nature all possibility of efficient economic control capable of functioning, normally and permanently, drive the productive activity into one crisis after another and therefore, inevitably limited the development. of the economy. Trotsky defined the bureaucracy as an “absolute obstacle” to the development of the economy. Such, briefly, is a summary of the last work which Trotsky devoted to the theory of Soviet development, in 1937 – his last polemical-theoretical work In Defense of Marxism, is limited to reviewing in this connection the analyses of The Revolution Betrayed.
And now let us, in the light of what has occurred since 1937 and of the course of the second imperialist war, see what factors the traditional Trotskyist analysis has neglected or underestimated.
Let us examine, first of all, the curve of economic development from 1937 to 1941, from the stage of the big purges to the eve of the Nazi invasion of the USSR. The rate of increase of the productivity of labor retrogressed instead of advancing despite the efforts of the bureaucracy. The fund of annual accumulation did not stop falling. Far from progress from the quantitative level to the qualitative level, production deteriorated even on the level of quantitative production. The gap between the industry of means of production and the industry of means of consumption did not stop growing. The economic development stagnated. The enormous efforts of the first two five-year plans ended in relatively very poor results. The functioning, of the Soviet economy proved itself catastrophically deficient when one compares the means to the results obtained. And all that we know of the final development of the economy proceeded in the same way [1]: The rate of accumulation threatened to fall to an insignificant level. In order to prevent this tendency, in order to cover the expenses that its growth imposed on the economy, the bureaucracy had to increase its extortion of the material and human resources everywhere that it could. It had thereby to aggravate the police, terrorist reactionary policy, contrary to all economic efficiency.
We have here the extreme point of the tendency indicated by Trotsky. The bureaucracy constituted an obstacle more and more serious to the economic, development of the country. But it was no longer here a question only of waste or of irrational economic methods. The bureaucracy had become an absolute obstacle in the rigorous sense of the word. Not only did the economy no longer progress, retrogressed. The bureaucracy’s growth drove the planned statified economy into an organic crisis. We will see below the basic reason. But even at the present point of the analysis we see that it is false to think that the bureaucratic growth did not corrupt, did not modify the basic economic structure of the USSR. It is false to speak of the planned statified economy in itself, independent of the conditions of its functioning. The planned statified economy, a progressive factor merely by virtue of its existence and justifying by that alone defense of the USSR, is a vain abstraction, a metaphysical entity. It is the concrete manner in which it functions which alone can determine its social content, its class significance.
Trotsky still continued to call the USSR a degenerated workers’ state for two main reasons. One, the tendency of the nationalized property to exceed the norms of capitalist production, was already disproved in the last years of Trotsky’s own lifetime, as we have already outlined. The other was Trotsky’s conception that there are class limits to the bureaucracy’s domination: that is, that the very existence of the nationalized property would compel the bureaucracy to behave in certain ways entirely differently than a capitalist class. It was this hypothesis that justified to Trotsky the conception that the bureaucracy is not a ruling class but a parasitic excrescence, that the USSR is like a labor union fallen into the hands of a bureaucracy, that in the course of World War II the workers would rid themselves of the bureaucracy or the USSR would collapse into capitalism.
In 1931 Trotsky thought the class limits of the bureaucracy’s domination were sufficient to make it impossible for the USSR to enter the League of Nations. In 1933 he still denied that the relation between the bureaucracy: and the proletariat was one of exploitation. One could draw up a list of such conclusions from the class limits of the bureaucracy’s domination which, one by one, Trotsky, withdrew in the face of new developments. Nevertheless at the time of his death, Trotsky still thought there were such class limits and that they would be demonstrated in the course of the war. Hence the decisive importance which he gave to the reports at that time of uprisings in Poland and Rumania as the armies of the USSR advanced. He considered them signs that the strangled revolution still lived: that the bureaucracy in spite of itself, in order to assimilate the economy of the occupied territories to the economy of the USSR, was compelled to give a “bureaucratic impulse to social revolution”, that whereas in godforsaken Galicia this was inevitably followed by the success of the bureaucracy in crushing the masses, in more advanced countries the “bureaucratic impulse to social revolution” would never again come under the control of the bureaucracy which would be overthrown by the masses of both the occupied countries and the USSR.
Even if the Russian armies were not able to advance and give a “bureaucratic impulse to social revolution”, Trotsky and we expected that a wave of proletarian revolution of European scope would permit the workers of the USSR to take the offensive against the bureaucracy, overthrow it and resume control of the state and production. In this case too the hypothesis of class limits of the bureaucracy’s domination of the USSR played an important role. Trotsky and we assumed that the nationalized property and memories of October endowed the Red Army with a sufficiently different character from that of the army of a capitalist country so that the Red Army would conduct itself differently in the face of European revolution than the British or American armies.
Neither case materialized. The advance of the “Red” Army provided no “bureaucratic impulse to social revolution”. In the face of revolutionary stirrings the “Red” Army conducted itself like any capitalist army still under the control of its officers. Instead of the revolution emerging from the war and Soviet victory to destroy the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Stalinist bureaucracy proved to be the greatest single factor in preventing a socialist revolution in Europe.
The relationship of forces between the isolated USSR and the international proletariat, from which we believed could be traced a hope of regenerating the USSR, was totally reversed as a result of the war and Russian victory, resolving itself into a very serious world setback of the proletarian revolution and into a world advance of the USSR which allowed the bureaucracy to extend its exploitation of the Soviet workers to the dimensions of an imperialist policy which seeks to expand its economic regime throughout the entire world. The regime of exploitation of “socialism in one country” has been transformed as the result of the war into an imperialism of world pretensions.
These events oblige us to reexamine our analysis of the USSR, to ask ourselves again, in the light of these new facts, what is the function of the bureaucracy in the Soviet society? The key to the solution is furnished us in the answer to the question: who controls the State and production in the USSR? The question should always be posed and the answer sought not in “the abstract, not in isolation, but in the actual light of the Soviet development.
The workers’ character of the Soviet state was determined originally not by the economic base of the-country – then constituted essentially of an enormous ocean of small peasant proprietors on which floated some islands of state industry – but in the fact that the workers had conquered the state power and that their interests were expressed throughout the social institutions of the country: soviets, trade unions, cooperatives, communist party. All the Bolshevik theoreticians agreed then in recognizing that the essence of the Soviet regime was expressed in workers’ control of the State and production. For example in the course of the famous trade union dispute, Lenin underlined with the greatest force the function of the trade unions in the Soviet state as representing the workers’ interests, independent of and, if necessary, against the (workers’) State. Up to 1933, workers’ control of the State and production constituted the central axis of the analysis of Trotsky and the Left Opposition. They hoped that the workers could peacefully drive the bureaucracy from power and, in reassuming control through the medium of the Left Opposition, would be able to reform the party and regenerate the Soviet State.
As we know, that perspective was not realized. The Stalinist apparatus of the bureaucracy won. It destroyed completely workers’ control in all the political or economic organs of the USSR.
Nevertheless, Trotsky did not attribute to the triumph of the counter-revolution a decisive character. Why: it is because in the interim the axis of his analysis changed. He no longer placed the stress on workers’ control but on the statified and planned character of the economy. It was after October 1933, which determined the workers’ character of the State and the duty of defending the USSR, according to Trotsky. It is here that the Minority believes that a re-evaluation of the Trotskyist analysis must be made. The tendency of economic development to statification and to planning is not a specifically Soviet phenomenon. It is a general tendency common to all contemporary economy. It has its general origin in the world crisis of modern capitalism, in the tendency to the decline in the rate of surplus value. This tendency, if it is to be checked, demands the intervention of the State. Only the State, controlling economic activity and planning its development, can assure a relative maintenance of the rate of surplus value despite the resistance of individual capitalists and of the working class. It is true that it is only in the USSR that this tendency has ended in its most complete realization under, the form of a statified and planned economy. Said in another way, such an economy can, for the present, reach the completion of this tendency only in such countries where the ground has been cleared by a proletarian revolution. It is true that everywhere else this tendency has come up against the resistance of the organized workers and above all of the individual capitalist interests, particularly of the monopolies, and that it has been able to realize itself only incompletely, in a halting manner and subject to the will of the most powerful monopolies, thus resulting in a mixed form, in state control much more than statification, and partial planning much more than national planning of total production. Yet Nazi planning was carried very far in production and the control of the State was omnipresent. On the other hand, Soviet planning has come up against so many barriers in its realization throughout different spheres of production that certain economists have been able – falsely to contest its reality. Although real its efficiency remains nevertheless very relative.
But this is not the essential point. What counts is the content of the planned statified economy, its class base. What is important is not its form but its functioning. What is the moving force of the state planned economy? To answer this question is to resolve the proble. The economic development of the isolated USSR has been dominated from its beginning by the capitalist world market. The dominating law of that market is the law of value. This law, then, equally controls the development of the Soviet economy. But in the first years of the USSR this law controlled it only indirectly. For it applied in the USSR only against the control of the workers’ state. Soviet production, subjected to the pressure of the world market, was forced to take account of the law of value, but no less decisively soviet production oriented toward the satisfaction of the needs of the masses, consciously affirmed by the workers’ state. To the capitalist principle of the law of value: production for the sake of production, the Soviet state opposed the principle of the socialist economy: production for consumption. Naturally, the backwardness and the isolation of the USSR imposed limits to the application of the socialist principle. If the workers’ state had been deflected from all observation of the law of value to follow exclusively the socialist principle, the economic reconstruction of the USSR would have been carried out more slowly, its inferiority in comparison with the capitalist countries would have grown. What is it that we wish to say? That it is impossible to construct socialism in an isolated country. That workers’ control of production which alone permits a socialist orientation of the economy found itself in this case limited. That that control could not maintain and reinforce itself except by the extension of the proletarian revolution, weakening the pressure of the capitalist market on the Soviet economy and extending the economic base of socialist construction.
A socialist construction of the Soviet economy was thus subordinated, not in general, but directly, in the immediate historic epoch, to the perspective of the permanent revolution. But while awaiting the revolution? The Soviet economy passed through a transitional period and this could not extend very long without being fatal to its socialist orientation. Only workers’ control over the state and production, preserved and gradually extended, could have maintained the socialist orientation.
But the political evolution of the USSR took place in an opposite manner. The bureaucracy established against the masses totalitarian control the state and economy. Henceforth the Soviet economy was an instrument at the service of the bureaucracy. Moreover the bureaucracy had to observe the law of value. But between them, workers’ control no longer intervened. To maintain and reinforce its power, to “catch up to and outdistance” the capitalist countries, to assure the growth of the Soviet economy, it had to submit blindly to the law of value. Deviating from the perspective of the permanent revolution, destroying the economic arm of workers’ control, the bureaucratized USSR could only fall back into the rut of the difficulties and the antagonisms of capitalism. State capitalism under workers’ control which Lenin envisaged as a provisional step, allowing the USSR to wait for the triumph of the proletarian revolution in the West and transitional to socialism, was transformed with the totalitarian victory of the bureaucracy into state capitalism without workers’ control. The statified and planned form of the economy changed nothing. That it had its origin in a proletarian revolution conferred on it no objectively socialist or progressive character. In itself the statified form is inert. What decides its class character are the relations of production which function there. These relations are determined by the relations of classes in Soviet society. It is not the state and planned character of the Soviet economy which decides the nature of the classes of the USSR as a “workers’ state”. Just the reverse. It is the relations of production such as they exist in the USSR between exploiters and exploited which decide the capitalist content of the planned statified economy.
It is true that the property relations, are not in the USSR what they are in the capitalist countries. Property is juridically collective. The bureaucracy is not legal proprietor. In actual fact, however, it has absolute control of the property; it enjoys the property without restriction. The apparatus of the Soviet laws gives it the legal right (private savings, inheritance, etc.). Or, better, its domination of the State gives it possession in fact of the property. What determines the reality of property? It’s juridical definition or its function? To answer this it is sufficient to recall Marx’s analysis of individual property in capitalist society. The bureaucracy disposes unrestrainedly of the means of production in the Soviet economy. It possesses them, then, to all practical purposes. Will this relation of property persist in the USSR or will it be replaced tomorrow by individual appropriation distributing juridically the means of production among the various members of the exploiting class? Later experience will tell. But that does not change the basis of the question. What defines the class nature of a society is not the relations of property but the relations of production. If tomorrow in the USSR the collective property is individualized there will be a change in the property relations, but not in the “class nature” of society. This nature already changed decisively when the bureaucracy, eliminating all workers’ control over the state and production, substituted its totalitarian control, i.e., that of the exploiters. It was then that the socialist orientation of the Soviet society found itself not only weakened and reduced but radically eliminated and the only orientation possible was toward capitalism.
But, then, what is the Soviet state? At first, a “workers’ and peasant’s state with bureaucratic deformations” (Lenin); it was subsequently more and more dominated by the bureaucracy; then entirely, totally bureaucratized when the bureaucracy completely destroyed all possibility for the working masses to control the state and production and legally sanctioned its totalitarian control, in fact by the new constitution, after having liquidated the revolutionary cadres of the Soviet society (a liquidation which surpassed in scope that of the bourgeois cadres of the Czarist society by the October, proletarian revolution). But what is the “class base” of this bureaucratic state? The bureaucracy is a class, in course of formation, a form of the bourgeoisie whose historic transformations have been numerous from the 13th century to our day. What is the economic root of the exploitation of the proletariat by this class? State capitalism on the base of the planned statified economy.
The re-establishment of capitalist relations could have been avoided only if the Communist International had placed in the forefront of it international program the permanent revolution, to weaken capitalism outside at the same time that it put in the forefront in its Soviet program workers’ control of the State and of production, in order to weaken internal capitalist tendencies. If this revolutionary policy did not prevail,if it did not succeed in breaking the world capitalist pressure, the USSR would fall back of necessity into the framework of capitalist difficulties; the socialist revolution, victorious only ir a single country, would be destroyed. The Opposition thus defined what proved to be the work of the bureaucracy in the USSR.
The bureaucracy transformed state ownership of the means of production, precondition of a growth of the productive forces oriented toward socialism, into an arm of violence and of bureaucratic exploitation against the national and international working class. It is on the basis of the whole experience of Soviet development that we can now determine exactly what planned statified economy is. Statification and planning are technical conditions of socialism. They can assist its construction. They are its elements. But they are not the socialist solution. They do not contain the solution in them “virtually”. The orientation and content of a state-economy result from the political conditions existing at the time. A privileged social class, subject to obeying the law of value, orients that type of economy toward capitalism. It makes use of it in order to extract from the workers the maximum of surplus value. It was in that sense that Trotsky wrote in 1935: “The character of the economy in its totality depends oh the character of the state power.” In the USSR it is the totalitarian bureaucracy which holds the state power. The bureaucracy is the state. By means of the state, it directs the economy completely. That is why, in the USSR, planned statified economy dominates and exploits the workers instead of satisfying their needs, i.e., instead of orienting itself toward socialism. Rakovsky already posed the question clearly at the time when the first five-year plan was realized: “The capitulationists refuse to consider what measures ought to be adopted in order that industrialization and planning will not result in the opposite of what is intended. They ignore the principal question. What changes does the five-year plan introduce into the class relations of the country?”
In the USSR the bureaucracy has the reality of power. It is workers’ control, it is the “socialist elements”, which no longer have any more even the appearance of power. They have been reduced to dead forms, booby traps for fetishists and lovers of ritual. Thereby the bureaucracy has already created the economic roots of its exploitation. That is what counts. That is what makes the USSR no longer a workers’ state. The soviet situation is not static. We have always analyzed it as a process of social development (of degeneration, from the socialist standpoint). The whole problem is thus knowing where it is now; what stage it has reached. The bureaucracy has a function in production. It orients production according to the law of value toward capitalist ends in its own class interests. We all recognize that there is exploitation in the USSR. Where, then, are the exploiters? They are the bureaucrats, as a result of their ruling function in production. In the USSR, as everywhere, the relations of production are relations between men; here, relations between exploited workers and exploiting bureaucrats.
One can no longer today separate the bureaucracy from the USSR. It is no longer an excrescence. It is an integral part of the country. It is its motive force. It is its ruling class. The USSR today is. in its essential characteristics, the expression achieved by the bureaucracy by its economic regime of the capitalist type without the control of the masses, by its relations of class inequality, by its totalitarian state, by its exploitative, oppressive, chauvinistic, imperialist policy. Surely the Russian workers are not the bureaucracy. But also they are no longer the USSR. They are nothing in their country, no more than or less than the French workers or the American workers are in theirs. In the USSR today they have nothing to lose. It is necessary to stop playing with the alternative of the “good” USSR and the “bad” USSR that one produces after the events in order to “explain” the facts. Such a procedure can be used in popular agitation, to an audience still the victim of illusions (as it is used in other countries: “The trusts, they are not the USA; the American workers are”). But the Trotskyists ought to bar this absolutely from all theoretical exposition. It is necessary to stop talking of “parasitic excrescence”, because this excrescence” has devoured the organism. Or of “usurpation” of the bureaucracy, “Because there are laws in actuality and even laws juridically confirmed in the new “Soviet Constitution”. It is necessary to stop talking about the “bureaucracy of the working class”, “analogous to the trade union bureaucracy in a capitalist regime”, because in the capitalist country the trade union bureaucracy never transformed the relations of production; in the USSR, on the other hand, the bureaucracy changed production relations and is completely detached from the working class against which it functions like a class to all practical purposes. The bureaucracy is no longer any more “dependent” upon its working class than the American capitalists are on theirs; it is even less so because it has suppressed all workers’ liberties, trade union or political.
”Capitalisr restoration in the USSR” must be conceived, as it is, as a gradual process which, at a certain level, passes sharply from quantitative change to a qualitative change, destroying the workers’ state. The Majority regards this restoration as a dramatic event, which will happen one knows not how, and is thus finally inexplicable. In reality, the counter-revolution has imposed on the USSR economic relations of the capitalist type by long years of civil war, above all unleashed against the masses. The essentials of capitalism are re-established: destruction of all workers’ control, totalitarian government, politically and economically, exclusive domination by the law of value in the functioning of the economy. The Majority objects that there has not been restoration as long as the bureaucracy has not attacked the statified and planned form of the economy. But for that to be true , it would be necessary to demonstrate that this form is in itself oriented toward socialism or at least susceptible of economic progress. Now we have shown that this form is just as easily filled with capitalist content and that the bureaucracy’s growth changed the foundations of the economy radically. One cannot speak of restoration, the Majority insists, as long as this process is not “complete”. That is equally false. It is a static view of a dynamic development. On the contrary, at a certain moment, the process of restoration is essentially accomplished even if some inert vestiges of the past persist. Military intervention seems to be for the Majority the exclusive deus ex machina of capitalist restoration. Let us admit that tomorrow it will contribute to destroy rhe present stage of the bureaucratic regime. What then would be changed in the present relations of production? Nothing. Intervention does not, therefore, constitute an essential factor in the process of restoration. The same goes for the re-establishment or not of individualized property. It is necessary to remember that the forms of capitalist rule have often changed in the course of a process of adaptation to an incessantly changing environment.
When one admits the idea of Soviet degeneration, what other course did one expect it to take than a return to production relations of the capitalist type? A transitional regime between capitalism and socialism, which degenerates under the pressure of its capitalist environment, can only fall, back into capitalism, unless one admits a regime of a new type neither capitalist or socialist. (That is not at all the same thing, we remark in passing, as admitting that a historical stagnation of humanity prolongs capitalism indefinitely, decomposed under the form of totalitarian bureaucratic regimes.) If one can prove in experience the existence of that new regime, the Marxist analysis would be proved false by it. But such a proof has never been made. It is true that the majority of the Workers Party affirms the existence in the USSR of a regime historically new, bureaucratic collectivism. But to prove that such a conception is more than an idea, it is necessary to show
Now observation of the development and the Soviet reality demonstrate the contrary.
The weakness of the international workers’ movement has contributed to precipitate the Soviet degeneration to such a point that revolutionary strategy toward the USSR must change and place in the forefront of immediate struggle the overthrow of the bureaucracy under penalty of an historic decline of the socialist movement. Surely the experience of the war has also aroused in the USSR the toiling classes of the society, has placed them in contact with the realities of the European world, has animated their struggle. But these layers will be able to take heart in their struggle only if they know that their struggle is an integral part of an international struggle whose no. 1 enemy is the bureaucracy which exploits and oppresses them, if they know of the existence of a vanguard whose no. 1 objective is the overthrow of this bureaucracy, and which struggles against the nationalism intensified by the new soviet imperialism. In order to find in the masses, for whom all access to the revolutionary road is closed by the bureaucracy, a base of support for its policy of class imperialism, the bureaucracy incites everywhere nationalist forms. In the USSR itself, it revived and increased Great Russian nationalism and stifled savagely the sentiments of the national minorities at the same time that it gave an illusory and demagogic “solution” to the national aspirations of the Ukrainians and White Russians, whom it persecutes equally in fact. In Europe it exacerbates the nationalisms and utilizes them one against the other (Yugoslavs, Bulgarians, Poles, Germans, etc.). A policy full of antagonisms and explosions. It is in mobilizing the national sentiments of all these people against the oppressive and exploitative nationalism of the Kremlin that the Trotskyist vanguard can clear away to the proletarian revolution in Europe. This revolution will find fertile ground if it nourishes itself on the coming crisis of the Soviet regime.
The later degeneration has lined the one up against the other, the exploiting bureaucracy and the exploited proletarian masses. The incessant civil war carried on by the bureaucracy has deprived the toiling classes, more than others elsewhere, of political rights and social guarantees. That is also why the social and political antagonisms there are much more violent. The planned statified economy is deprived of any regulating control of its functioning. The totalitarianism achieved by the bureaucratic domination does not allow any other social layer to control the functioning of the economy. All measures of control, even when it proves necessary for economic functioning, is pitilessly erased, if it can be detrimental to the stability of the power of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy can only control the functioning of the economy bureaucratically, by police measures,, repressions, purges, which violently destroy the effects of economic functioning, functioning that the economic policy of the bureaucracy has itself engendered but which at a certain level, threatens its power. It is a vicious circle in which the bureaucracy continually runs,
fatally, and in the course of which the economic functioning does not cease to grow worse. Experience shows, that a planned statified economy can function harmoniously and progressively only thanks to control at every step from the base to the top, by the workers who produce and consume. But such a control is excluded when the levers of the economy are in the hands of a privileged class. Hence the economic crisis which, beginning at a certain stage, has become in the USSR an organic crisis of structure. The permanent crisis and the insurmountable low productivity which result from it constantly engender tendencies to restoration of private property forms on the basis of individual initiative and the stimulus of competition. This evolution appears as a solution of much greater economic efficiency assuring both the liberty and the privileges of the exploiting minority. Those tendencies can actively seek to realize themselves in certain international conjunctures, where they will benefit from a sufficient pressure of Anglo-Saxon imperialism.
The bureaucracy, in the broad sense in which we understand it, is heterogeneous politically, including a small revolutionary minority, (in the lower strata) passive and confused, and a tremendously increasing stratum, which wishes to assure and stabilize its privileges by a decentralization and individualization of the planned statified economy, which wishes to adopt, against the Bonapartist arbitrariness, bourgeois democracy of the Western type, i.e., certain democratic forms for the real benefit of the privileged classes; which wishes, finally, “understanding” and “international collaboration” with the traditional imperialisms. The upper cadres of the Soviet army, a privileged caste interested in stability and “order”, naturally is part of this group, with certain individual exceptions. This stratum constitutes, we understand, the bulk of the bureaucracy. At the present stage it finds the possibilities and the decisive bases of stability in imperialist exploitation of the military victory and Russian expansion.
But the bureaucracy is at present obliged to govern by means of the political apparatus of Stalinist Bonapartism. That is why the latter arouses a renewed opposition, not only on the part of the workers, but also on the part of the privileged bureaucracy, always uncertain of its individual future.
Alongside, there are petty-bourgeois tendencies consciously desiring private property forms, in the top layers of the kolkhozes and doubtless in the artisans and small industry. The low level of technique and productivity of the planned statified economy in a USSR still backward and subject to the iron grip of the bureaucratic regime cannot, in effect, absolutely prevent the maintenance (open or more or less disguised) or the constant revival of these types of individual economic activity (the entrepreneur) in certain benches of production, especially agricultures. Such intermediary strata form a base of natural support to the bureaucracy. Finally, there is the Russian labor aristocracy, systematically cultivated by the Stalinist bureaucracy since Stakhanovism which, in a USSR “stabilized” by the bureaucracy, could be the privileged top layers of the proletariat.
Facing these strata, incapable of seriously supporting itself on the working masses against them, the dictatorship the Stalinist Bonapartism is extremely unstable. Hence its necessity to resort periodically to enormous purges to. destroy physically all the political
elements who could be called to succeed it. These purges are waged both against the bureaucracy (“political” cadres, “national” ones, technical and military} and against the revolutionary elements (cadres of October or those in course of formation). It is the eternal history of all Bonapartist dictatorship (the alternating purges of Napoleon against the “Jacobins” and the “Royalists” or, under a modified form, of Napoleon III against the “Republicans” and the “Orleanists”, or even of Franco against the “Reds” and the “Monarchists”). Given the difficulties and the very violent antagonisms of Russian society, the Stalinist dictatorship can maintain itself in power only by a State terrorism elevated to the height of a normal and central institution.
The bureaucracy was a bureaucracy of the working class before Thermidor, when Lenin attacked it already as a bureaucracy, i.e., as a parasitic element which was grafted on the working class. After it triumphed with Thermidor (in 1923) it no longer was a bureaucracy of the worktag class but already a social stratum independent of it and its adversary on a class plane. Its growing power expressed itself through the Bonapartist apparatus of the Stalinist dictatorship, Before the five-year plans, it was also linked with the Soviet Right, and probably in major part favorable to the latter. Its political ascendancy rested then on a coalition with the petty-bourgeois capitalist elements of the NEP, and its future doubtless appeared to a large number of its elements as a return pure and simple to a capitalism of individual property. After the first five-year plans and the elimination of all workers’ control, the bureaucracy finally found an economic base for its exploitation – which was henceforth no longer parasitic but exploitative – upon a planned statified form and the Stalinist Bonapartism found a class base for its political power. It was then, after the purges, that the line of the Soviet policy became much more assured, its class orientation having been defined. But it was then also that the conflict became central between the bureaucracy and its Bonapartist political apparatus, the Stalinist dictatorship, as the purges directed against the bureaucratic elements testified.
The effect of the war on the diverse layers of the Soviet population has considerably increased the intensity of the crisis, It is difficult for it to manifest itself, at the beginning, other than under the forms of a conflict in the interior of the bureaucratic top strata, between the Stalinist apparatus and the elements which are opposed to it. It is necessary to feel all the importance of the reinforcement which the anti-Stalinist bureaucratic wing receives from Anglo-Saxon pressure and the possibility of a “convenient” compromise with Washington on the basis of the joint imperialist victory. But – and this is. far more important – the first sign of a conflict and of a disintegration in the bureaucratic bloc will provoke shortly the eruption of the masses in the arena of political and social struggles. This outburst will repeat itself In the occupied countries in the form of national uprisings (which will also play their part in the USSR itself) and social ones. The contradictions till then repressed by the Bonapartist dictatorship will burst and reveal in full daylight their class character (fascist current, bourgeois democratic, proletarian). The iron ring which the bureaucratic administration imposes on the country will burst asunder. But the structure of the planned statified economy, as a result of the backward characteristics of this economy in the USSR, characteristics which assure a better productive ty to capitalist functioning based on competition, will be endangered The contradictory social forces set free will struggle to remodel the organization of the economy and of the state in terms of their class interests. The proletarian forces will struggle for the maintenance and the “regeneration” of the planned statified economy on the basis, of workers’ control (the quotations indicate that it will be a matter not only of a simple political operation but of a social transformation). This crisis will have immediate foreign repercussions. If it occurs soon (in the years to come) – and it will be the very condition for this – it will be parallel to a revival of the revolutionary struggle in Western Europe. It will provoke the intervention of the social forces on each side of the barricade of international classes. The “Communist parties”, deprived of Stalinist “tutelage”, will in their turn go into an irremediable crisis. They will be transformed into theaters of acute political struggle. It will then depend on th international formation of a revolutionary socialist movement at a pace rapid enough for this crisis to find a solution on the road of a revival of Soviet workers’ democracy – i.e., a social regeneration of the USSR – and in the mass proletarian parties. If the Fourth International has been in the interval able to restore its programmatic homogeneity and its capacity for political initiative, it will play a decisive role in that critical process. The existence then of such a vanguard will condition, moreover, the whole process.
Such is, hypothetically outlined, the most probable variant of the final development of the crisis in the USSR. Naturally, this crisis will develop in the midst of the general crisis of a capitalist world in decomposition. And the bureaucracy is accustomed to utilizing the convulsions of the capitalist world and the resistance which then engender in the masses. As to the revolutionary consequences which result therefrom (including those of the crisis in the USSR itself) Stalinist Bonapartism has shown the efficiency of its apparatus of repression. It is necessary, then, to take account of these two factors, but nevertheless it is not necessary to overestimate them. What counts most is the historical situation of the crisis of the USSR in the contemporary world. In the, epoch of the world decomposition of capitalism and of the national bourgeoisie it is improbable that the process of reformation of a new bourgeoisie out of the exploitative bureaucracy can go victoriously to the end. In the contrary case, the bureaucracy will finally win as against the Bonapartist dictatorship of its Stalinist apparatus. But it is more probable that in the course of their struggle and profiting from it, the European and Russian masses will arrive at the goal of destroying the bureaucracy, its exploitation, its imperialism and its class state.
The Bonapartist dictatorship struggles to continue to impose its services on a reinforced bureaucracy on whom its power weighs much more than is useful to it. It is very difficult for the bureaucracy to pass to the attack against its Stalinist apparatus (difficulties analogous, although greater, than those of the German bourgeoisie in the face of the Hitlerian apparatus). Stalinism profits by this to take the offensive against the bureaucracy. It demotes the cadres of the Soviet army to the last place and maintains them in political insignificance. It represses the nationalist manifestations outside the RSSFR. It strikes blows “as examples” at the political trade union and technical cadres, in order to convince them of the weakness of their positions and of the omnipotence of the state apparatus. It seeks in the eyes of the masses to blame the “faults” of the war and the difficulties of the post-war and of the economic reconstruction on the bureaucratic cadres. It seeks in the youth to forge quickly the political cadres which it devours. Finally, it would like to isolate the USSR from the “capitalist” world in order to reaffirm the necessity of a ”communist” ideology and the dagger of a “capitalist encirclement” and of an “inevitable” war. It tries, in a word, to find again in the masses support against the bureaucracy. But it can no longer find this support in them, not only because they have had their experience of the bureaucracy, but above all because it has nothing to offer them, today less than ever. In a totalitarian regime, the crises in the tops of the government are frequent and inevitable. This or that “accident” – the death of the dictator, etc. – will finally open up the road to a crisis of the Bonapartist apparatus.
The last conclusions which Trotsky drew before the war from his analysis of the USSR were the following: the bureaucracy constitutes henceforth an absolute obstacle to the Soviet development; Stalinism is the worst enemy of the working class; only a victorious proletarian revolution emerging from the new imperialist war can save the USSR from the debacle. Today events have pronounced their verdict. The bureaucracy was forced to enter the war to defend itself against the Nazi aggressor. What did it defend? Its regime and by the only methods proper to maintaining it. It was not defeatist. It entered the war to defend the basis of its power, the State capitalism of the Russian national state. It knew how to profit from the inter-imperialist contradictions in order to emerge from the conflict victorious. And victory permitted it to hurl itself into the arena of imperialist expansion. Stalinism has devoured the substance of the October Revolution. Russian nationalism has destroyed socialist internationalism. And the victory of the “Red” army has stifled in the bud the proletarian revolution. There has been no “revolutionary Stalinism”. There has been no progressive advance of collectivized property as some would like to make us believe in order to console themselves for the defeat. There has been an imperialist occupation.
One cannot find in its opposition to the other imperialisms any basis of hope, independently of the revolutionary action of the proletariat. The bureaucracy arms itself against its imperialist rivals but for totally other historic interests than the proletariat. It does not cease to derive strength from the defeats of the proletariat. And it is as a rival that it opposes itself to the bourgeoisie. What separates it from the proletariat is a class barrier. What puts it into competition with the other imperialisms is the contradictory play of their power politics. Hence, in regard to the bourgeoisie, its policy alternates between concessions and resistance, and finally compromise. It knows how to utilize the contradictions among its rivals, but it is always to its profit and to the detriment of the workers. What it raises up against the other imperialists is its appetite and the difficulties of a nascent imperialism. Against their acquired positions, it plays on the illusions which it has preserved among the masses. What it demands from its rivals is its imperialist “right” to exploit and oppress in its own sphere of expansion. What it wants from them is that they cease to consider it as a parvenu and that they yield to it the position of an equal. Its militarism is moreover more aggressive, its demagogy more unbridled, as it senses its inferiority against them and in relation to its pretensions. If Yankee “pacifism” can effectively play with the small nations its demagogic game of “protector” of peace, of national independence and of democratic liberties, it is because Russian imperialism is compelled, because of its economic inferiority, to exploit and oppress the masses much more than rich and conservative Yankee imperialism. The one has vital need of plundering the people to maintain itself; the other can wait. Moreover, by its polios of pillage and oppression, Russian imperialism in reality helps the imperialism of the USA and opens the road for it.
Under such conditions what does the defense of the USSR mean? Such a slogan has lost today all revolutionary significance. What USSR is it a question of defending? And by what right? The vanguard of international socialism (Trotskyism) engaged itself to defend in the USSR “the socialist dictatorship temporarily isolated in an imperialist world”. The “socialist dictatorship” has succumbed, we have seen, when the bureaucracy succeeded in snatching from the workers the control of the State and of production. As to what is called the isolation of the USSR, the second world war has completely changed the situation. If one can speak today of “isolation” in relation to the USSR, it is in the sense in which one spoke of the Germany of William II or of Hitler. It is a question of “isolation” of a “young” imperialism, its foundations still uncertain, compelled to affirm and defend its existence against the established imperialisms. There is nothing any longer which justifies the defense of the USSR by the international socialist movement.
“But did not the Russian advance end in the falling back of capitalism in Eastern Europe?” To see there a “progressive fact” is precisely to testify that one is still prisoner of the illusions which Stalinism introduces. The “falling back of capitalism” is not progressive in the historic epoch of the socialist revolution when it is the work of Stalinist totalitarianism. What the bureaucracy has destroyed in Eastern Europe are certain forms of capitalist exploitation in order to substitute its own capitalist forms. What it liquidated are certain categories of exploiters, but for the benefit of another imperialist exploitation.
“But does not the struggle of the USSR in the world today contribute nevertheless to weaken imperialism?” It contributes to weakening such Imperialism for the benefit of its own expansion. If tomorrow the Kremlin succeeded in forcing Great Britain to retreat in Iran or the USA in Germany, it would be in order to replace them immediately. (Or does anyone believe perhaps that it would allow the offensive of the masses vhich might result from the evacuation to develop?) And, in that case, where then would be the gain for the workers of the countries concerned? If the struggle between imperialisms ends in the weakening of the one or the benefit of the other (as was the case as a result of the second world war), the workers derive no advantage from that. - We defend against imperialism the armed struggle of the colonial peoples and of oppressed nations, because it weakens imperialism for the benefit of the revolutionary positions, because it has often led to the use of methods which lead to the initiative, of the popular masses; finally, because they do not end in imperialist results. To take the less favorable example, the victorious resistance of China has not (contrary to the case of the USSR) given rise to a Chinese imperialism. If tomorrow India expelled the English, arms in hand, the positions of British imperialism would be hopeless and the Hindu workers would pursue their struggle against their native exploiters under more favorable conditions.
That does not mean to say that the workers ought not to utilize the inter-imperialist contradictions between the USSR and its opponents to improve the position of the world revolution, nor that their struggles against the Russian bureaucracy ought to make them lose from sight that the imperialism of the USA is potentially a still more dangerous enemy. But the defense of the USSR as a tactical task of the socialist movement has lost all reason for being in the arena of revolutionary strategy. The bureaucracy has transformed the class structure of the USSR, has proved itself capable of stifling the germs of the proletarian revolution which could have wrested the USSR from its degeneration. Today our task in the USSR is of defending the Soviet workers against their exploiting bureaucracy. But the defense of the Soviet workers, as an integral part of the international revolutionary struggle, has in no way to be subordinated to the defense of the. bureaucratized USSR. We defend the Russian proletariat by revolutionary methods as we defend the proletariat of any other country.
Above all it is the short-term perspective which matters now. What task is dictated to us immediately? To re-establish the revolutionary unity of the international proletariat against Stalinism. To defend the interests of the European proletariat against the bureaucratic expansion, without which Anglo-Saxon imperialism would never have been able to bring to an end the European resistance. It is the Stalinist yoke which paralyzes the struggle of the European workers. What gives force to the bureaucracy today is the absence of a revolutionary perspective in the masses; that is the stagnation which imposes upon their struggles the perspective of having to “choose” between the Russian camp and the Anglo-Saxon camp. But the internal crisis and the imperialist expansion of the USSR are on the way to tearing away from the European workers the illusions which Stalinism has nourished in them. Their very situation pushes them to find a solution. The vanguard has to show to the Russian workers that they are not isolated between their bureaucracy and Anglo-Saxon imperialism; that international proletarian solidarity is a fact. But on one condition: that it hastens to cut out of the revolutionary socialist camp the poisoned cadaver of a bureaucratized USSR!
October 27, 1946
1. Fourth International, May 1941: The Crisis in Soviet Industry, by Vladimir Ivlev.
Last updated on 18 September 2022