The USSR's armed men

Scan page 10

Send letters to Socialist Organiser, 28 Middle Lane, London N8. No longer than 400 words please: longer letters are liable to be cut.

CHRIS Reynolds' reply to my letter (SU 168), together with your centre-page spread on the USSR, and Clive Bradley's article on Lenin (well taken up 168) make clear that the question I originally raised is not just a matter of phraseology or form. Are the "degenerated and deformed workers' states" workers' states at all?

The term "wurkers' state" has just as much precise theoretical content for Marxists as "capitalism". • Lenin, following Engels, saw the state as lat bottom) organised bodies of armed men in the service of the ruling class. If we are, as I agree with Reynolds we should, to pursue working class politics in every country, we must be clear which class the organised bodies of armed men in each country serve.

Trotsky was quite clear in the last analysis, in however deformed and, indeed, counterrevninINFORMATIONI BULLETIN THE RETURN MHACY BM BOX 5965. London WCIN 3XX He drew an analogy between the USSR and a trade union led by gangsters and scabs - like the Teamsters Union in the USA or the Peronist-led CGT unions in Argentina - which is, all the same, a trade union.

The class position is to defend the union, but fight to get rid of its leadership - in the full knowledge that the leadership will rather split the union than lose control, so that ousting the leadership will involve destroying, in a sense, the old union apparatus, and building up a new apparatus more tirmly based on and controlled by the membership. That this sort of stru pole ical revo Trion meane clear from the section on the USSR in the Transitional Programme of 1938.

In Britain today revolutionary Marxists identify the Parliamentary-monarchical regime as a bourgeois state — an organisation based in the last analysis on organised bodies of armed men in the service of the bourgeoisie. This must surely be the basis of your polemic with Labour Briefing: their version of the 'workers' government" slugan is ambiguous about the bourgeois state.

"Degenerated workers' state" , then is not a mere label or sociological category. It is a political assesment of the class character of the special organisations of armed men in the USSR - an assessment which the political concequences. In Lne 'Soviet bloc for instance, revolutionaries would expect to split the state machine, while in the West the army, etc., will have to be destroyed by civil war. And we defend the workers' state both when it is involved in war with capitalist countries, and against internal counterrevolutionary moremenis.

So Reynolds should say plainIr and without equivocation whetber he regards these states as munters stales or not. It's by no means impossible The political assessment that these countries are workers' states is based in the first place on the social ties between the state apparatus and the proletariat. Miliband has pointed to the social ties between the bourgeoisie and the British state;

Peter Green's article on Poland in New Left Review 139 displays similar links between the Polish bureaucratic regime and the proletariat. The same mechansus operate in the USSR, the other East European countries, China, Cuba, Vietnam.

Another point is the material gains of the proletariat in those countries: reported in the Western press as ""overmanning" in the factories, 'unrealistic prices" and "excessive public expenditure." Trotsky wrote The Revolution Betrayed in 1936, at the height of the Stalinist terror, when conditions were many times worse than they are in any "communist bluc" country today - but nonetheless reported the gains of the working class as compared to the Tsarist regime.

Reynolds in effect admits that comparison of the workers' states with the colonial ''Third World" is overwhelmingly favourable to the workers' states. His suggestion that Japan is a better comparison with Russia than India merely displays ignorance of Japanese history. His argument that East Germany is to be compared to West Germany ignores the integrated character of the world economy, the ettects of Marshall Aid, and the imperialist technological blockade. He also conveniently omits to mention that per capita income is higher in East Germany than in Britain, in spite of these limitations.

We still face the problem that some capitalist countries which I continue to insist on calling imperialist - offer the proletariat better standards of living and more aemocratic hberties than the degenerated and deformed workers' states.

The position advanced by Trotsky, is that this is possible under bourgeois rule because of imperialism, because the bourgevisie of the imperialist countries exploits other countries. It can concede high wages (or welfare benefits) because of superexploitation in the colonies.

Because it can concede material benefits, it can also concede the right to organise the proletariat, confident that revolutionists will not win influence.

Reynolds' answer to this is that ... "Western Europe and the USA do not only consume vastly more than the Third Worla, they also produce vastly more." This is vulgar Proudhonism, elevating the labour theory of value into a moral principle of entitlement. Trotskyists reject "socialism in one country" and favour world revolution precisely because capitalism has created an integrated world economy. We cannot simpiy demand the whole product of our labour; rather we must create a workers' state in order to expropriate the bourgeoisie and so begin to build socialism on a world scale. From this standpoint it is clear that the degenerated and deformed workers' states are far closer to socialism than any "Western" country.

The theory of imperialism is not directed to say that workers in the imperialist countries are immoral but that our gains under capitalism are possible because of imperialism, and, conversely, that until we create a workers state in this country, the bourgeoisie will be able to take them away; as Thatcher's attacks on the unions, material living standards, welfare and democratic rights demonstrate all too cleariy.

Reynulds' answer to my letter is decidedly worse than his original article.

Communist greetings, Mike Macnair

Scan page 11

Socialist Organiser no.172 March 29 1984 Page 11. Indus trial i

----- pull-quotes -----

state served the working class. TURKEY