Degenerate Workers State? In exile Trotsky played the role of loyal opposition to the Stalin regime in Russia. He was very critical of the political aspects of this regime (at least some of them, since he too stood for a one-party dictatorship in Russia), but to his dying day defended the view that the Russian revolution had established a Workers State in Russia (whatever that might be) and that this represented a gain for the working class both of Russia and of the whole world. His view that Russia under Stalin was a Workers State, not a perfect one, certainly, but a Workers State nevertheless, was set out in his book The Revolution Betrayed 3 first published in 1936. This is the origin of the Trotskyist dogma that Russia is a degenerate Workers State in which a bureaucracy had usurped political power from the working class but without changing the social basis (nationalisation and planning). This view is so absurd as to be hardly worth considering seriously: how could the adjective workers be applied to a regime where workers could be sent to a labour camp for turning up late for work and shot for going on strike? Trotsky was only able to sustain his point of view by making the completely unmarxist assumption that capitalist distribution relations (the privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy) could exist on the basis of socialist production relations. Marx, by contrast, had concluded, from a study of past and present societies, that the mode of distribution was entirely determined by the mode of production: The structure of distribution is entirely determined by the structure of production. Distribution itself is a product of production, not only with regard to the content, for only the results of production can be distributed, but also with regard to the form, since the particular mode of mens participation in production determines the specific form of distribution, the form, in which they share in distribution.4 Thus the existence of privileged distribution relations in Russia should itself have been sufficient proof that Russia had nothing to do with socialism. Trotsky rejected the view that Russia was state capitalist on the flimsiest of grounds: the absence of a private capitalist class, of private shareholders and bondholders who could inherit and bequeath their property. He failed to see that what made Russia capitalist was the existence there of wage-labour and capital accumulation not the nature and mode of recruitment of its ruling class. Trotskys view that Russia under Stalin was still some sort of Workers State was so absurd that it soon aroused criticism within the ranks of the Trotskyist movement itself which, since 1938, had been organised as the Fourth International. Two alternative views emerged. One was that Russia was neither capitalist nor a Workers State but some new kind of exploiting class society. The other was that Russia was state capitalist.5 The majority of Trotskyists, however, remain committed to the dogma that Russia was a degenerate Workers State.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 16:15:27 +0000