[TO MY mind Mike McNair has got an…]

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TO MY mind Mike McNair has got an amazing number of important issues confused in his letter (Socialist Organiser 167).

Centrally, Mike starts all his reasoning from labels rather than from facts.

In the 1930s, Trotsky tried to analyse a fact not envisaged by previous Marxist theory: a state where the bourgeoisie had been expropriated and the economy collectivised, but the working class was crushed and oppressed by a totalitarian bureauThe best term he could find for this state was 'degenerated workers' state' . A label like 'state capitalism' or 'bureaucratic collectivism' would better express Marxists' feelings about the USSR: but for Marxists terms like 'capitalism' are not curses but have precise theoretical content.

Mike proceeds from Trotsky's label by formal logic. The USSR is a degenerated workers' state, therefore it is a workers' state, therefore "the workers have made real gains there" and 'it is an element in the class camp of the working class."

Thus Mike sets conclusions derived by formal logic from Trotsky's label against the facts from which Trotsky derived that label.

Mike does not dispute any of the facts I cited about workers' conditions in the USSR.

He merely insists that revolutionary principle requires us to compare workers' conditions in the USSR with those in India and not those in Western Europe or the USA.

Why India? Why not Japan, which was at a similar level to Russia in the early years of this century?

Broadening the field, how can we convince workers in East Germany that they should compare their conditions with India rather than with West Germany? More to the point, why should we want to?

Workers' conditions in the Stalinist states are atrocious compared to what is technologically possible, and that should be our criterion.

Mike's reasons sound rather like the flip-side of the conservative argument socialists hear in Britain: 'Complain as you like, you're still better off here than in Russia.' But Mike squares his logic by arguing that workers in Western Europe and the USA are a privileged class. Rather_than themselves being exploited, they live off the exploitation of the Third World This is not true. Western Europe and the USA do not only consume vastly more than the Third World, they produce ras! more. True, the relative prosperit! of these areas is tied togee: with social relations •i pepetuase low productrI! = the Third World counones and draia resources from them: but that is not the same as 'exploitation' in the precise Marxist sense.

And Mike should not attribute his own Third Worldist views to Trotsky, who always argued for working class politics in every country, not for the politics of camps and blocs which Mike prefers.

A lot more could be said -for example on Mike's presentation of Trotsky's views on Stalin's invasion of Finland -but space forbids.

CHRIS REYNOLDS London Russian troops advancing during WHAT are we to make of an article (Clive Bradley on Lenin, SO, February 9) which says nothing of that fundamental of the Trotskyist tradition, the theory that under Stalin by the 1930s the USSR was a 'degenerated workers' state'?

This is not a phrase Trotskyists may easily dispose of. It means that some of the political and social gains of the 1917 Revolution remain and must be defended both by the Russian working class and by the workers of the imperialist countries. It means that the laws of motion of society in the USSR are fundarum mentally different capitalist society.

Clive Bradley's discussion of Lenin on the state suggests otherwise. If this is not an accident of a bizarre kind, it is a conscious sleight of hand.

He says the existing state machine must be smashed, not taken over. By juxtaposing the need to "smash" the capitalist state and the "bureaucratic Stalinist states" he suggests that the two tasks for revolutionaries are the same in each case. Disgust at the "monstrous perversion" of Stalinism must not IS S be allowed as a reason for dissolving categories of analysis.

If Bradley wishes to abandon elements of the Trotskyist heritage that is his prerogative. Let him say so clearly. I, for one, have no desire to follow his example.

Major threat

If Stalinism was the major threat in the working class movement I could understand the writing of an article which sought to mark a clear line between such ideas and those of major danger at the present time comes from social democratic and liberal ideas about the Soviet Union, from 'state capitalism' to 'totalitarianism' In such a context, Bradley's way of defending Lenin's heritage is nothing more than pandering to the prejudices of those we must win to such concepts as the need to defend the Soviet Union against imperialism. Your paper has attacked Jack Barnes' anti-Trotskyist pursuit of Castro. This is something quite as pernicious.

PAUL HUBERT Leeds

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