Not a workers' state?

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Please send me .... months' sub, I enclose £ ... To: Socialist Organiser, 28, Middle Lane, London MAY I remind Mike McNair that in the same year that Trotsky defined the USSR as a degenerated workers' state, surgeons were still dealing with gangrenous limbs by reaching for the hacksaw blade. Needless to say, penicillinised anaesthetics have today replaced the guillotine but for comrade McNair the only anaesthetic in operation seems to be the one that is impairing his grasp of political realities.

We live not in 1938 but 1984 and like the rest of the organisms on this planet, the USSR has developed and moved on. Trotsky was amply adept at Partyu Stati Get SOCIALIST door by post!

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Address recognising this process.

In 1925 he had argued that the Soviet leadership had been blown off course and that a sharp tendency battle was necessary to restore a revolutionary policy. By 1930 he saw that a 'Thermidorean reaction" had taken place and a factional struggle was central to reforming the Party, state and Comintern.

By 1940 he was saying that an alien, parasitical caste had usurped power and only a wholesale political uprising could destroy it and recreate soviet democracy. Like tracing Join the socialist inside.

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*JOBLESS KEY TO 1. Tebbit 4у Макту Kent's Stan appeal to ORGANISER each week delivered to £8.50 the evolution of a cancer from a micro-cell to an ubiquitous tumour, Trotsky's political position changed under the impact of the growth of an expanding soviet bureaucracy. Unlike McNair, he critically scrutinised the organically developing social caste, advancing his political position, rather like a chess grand master responds to the movements of his opponent.

For Trotsky, Stalin did not represent a capitalist class, but his social support was rapidly taking on many of its characteristics. He qualified his analysis by stating that the Second World War would either end up destroying the bureaucracy in the flames of counter-revolution or a socialist revolution or, and this he thought most unlikely, it would emerge in a stronger condition. If the latter happened, and it did, Trotsky maintained that the whole analysis of the "degenerated workers' state" would have to be reassessed.

Commodity

Yes, of course, the Soviet economy is not strictly capitalist in that it is not based on generalised commodity production. But is this that important? Is it not merely an ethereal difference? Does not the bureaucracy move just as decisively to crush revolution as any capitalist class? Of course it does.

The term 'bureaucracy' rather than 'class' was applied to the Soviet elite supposedly because it had no role in the mode of production and therefore no historical mission. But who would deny that the Soviet establishment is just as secure in its domain as any capitalist class in Europe, and more secure than quite a number?

It's here to stay so why not admit the fact. The "degenerated workers' state" thesis was predicated on the existence of a tremulous social layer, fragilely balancing above a cauldron of potential proletarian upheaval. Yet for all the factors stated by Martin Thomas in SO 165, the situation of the bureaucracy vis-a-vis the masses has drastically changed over the last fifty years.

Large scale social and economic stratification and differentiation, the growth of a broad-based "middle class" doped on consumerism, the shift from a 30% to 70% demographic mix in 1930 to a 70% to 30% mix in favour of industrial workers today, surely point to the fact that the bureaucracy has beefedout its roots within Soviet society. Many millions must identify their real progress in living standards with the policy of the bureaucracy. This is the basis of the "stability" of the bureaucracy's rule. The influence of genuine revolutionary Marxism or even misplaced illusions in Stalinism must be a slight factor for the vast mass of the population.

Moreover, to dismiss such developments as "revisionism" has nothing in common with Trotsky's own career for he continually related, adapated and revised the concepts of Marxism as the class struggle itself developed.

So what are we saying about the USSR? That it is neither a capitalist or socialist state is certainly true. But it certainly cannot be classified as a workers state either.

Surely the developments within and without the USSR since Trotsky's death have rendered his 1940 classification of the Soviet state redundant?

We need to bring our analysis of the USSR up to date and in line with what it actually does at home and in the world, which certainly has nothing to do with "workers states"

GERRY HOFFA, Bournemouth

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