Did Trotsky Point the Way to Socialism?

The debate between the Socialist Party (represented by Adam Buick) and Hillel Ticktin has been uploaded to YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

Inside the Bolshevik cul-de-sac

THOSE WHO still cling to the basic Bolshevik premise — that the Russian insurrection of October 1917 amounted to a Socialist revolution — are caught inside a trap of their own making. Whichever way they turn, they are landed with an uneasy antagonism between their theory and reality.

Those who faithfully follow Moscow, claiming that Russia today is Socialist, are in a ludicrous position, now that more information is available about Russia, and now that Russia is catching up with the West economically, so that East and West grow daily more similar. Therefore the British "Communist" Party is in catastrophic decline, its membership dwindling and ageing, brandishing their confusion now for all to see.

The Maoists, who assert that Russia has only recently become capitalist, are also in a fix. For it is difficult to believe that the changes in Russia's economy since the death of Stalin are so profound as to amount to a change from Socialism to capitalism (terms which, though definitions vary, are universally held to describe diametrically opposed systems). It is also difficult to see any fundamental differences in the Russian and Chinese economies, except that China is more primitive and less centrally directed.

Then, of course, our old friends the trotskyists are still with us. After a bitter struggle between Stalin and Trotsky over which of them should have the privilege of directing the exploitation of the Russian workers, Stalin won. Trotsky became a fierce critic of the Stalin regime, yet he would still not admit that Russia was capitalist — which would have put a question mark over his own revolutionary career. But it wasn't Socialist either. Instead, he came up with the formula that Russia was a "degenerated workers' state," basically a transitional society between capitalism and Socialism, with lots of deformities.

In practice this meant that trotskyists always defended the Russian state against other capitalist powers, whilst at the same time criticising some of its "deformities."

Trotsky and his followers took the view that Russia could not be described as capitalist because the bulk of Russian industry was nationalised. Overall state control, they said, was an advance on capitalism. Bolsheviks have always thought that state ownership was a step in the direction of Socialism, and have sometimes suggested that Socialism itself would be a form of state ownership.

There has long been confusion within Bolshevism on this point. Bogdanov's Short Course of Economic Science (used by the Bolshevik government) as well as The ABC of Communism (written by two leading Bolsheviks in 1919), followed Marx and Engels in characterising Socialism or Communism as a wageless, moneyless society, and emphasising that mere nationalisation or "state socialism" really contained "no trace of Socialism." After all, the Bolsheviks have always claimed to be Marxists.

Yet in 1917 Lenin had introduced a distinction between "Socialism" and "Communism," which till that time all Marxists had given precisely interchangeable meanings. He also produced his famous definition of Socialism as "nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people."

In the 1970s, nationalisation is not the thrilling issue it once was. State ownership has grown in all the western countries, and it has been brought emphatically home to the great majority of workers everywhere that being employed by the state is in no way better than being employed by a private corporation. It is not even very different. And in Russia, the extreme of centralised direction reached under Stalin is widely seen to have been merely a phase of development, now a positive hindrance to further advancement.

As a result of this it has been borne in upon many radicals and leftwingers that Russia is state capitalist. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, once almost alone in taking this view, and heartily ridiculed for it, now finds itself in numerous company. Be warned. The "sectarianism" of today is the truism of tomorrow!

The IS Group

However most of the people who have recently come round to the view that Russia is capitalist have not adjusted all of their political views accordingly, but have merely corrected this one point, failing to notice the inconsistencies which then emerge in the remainder of their ideas. For example the group known as International Socialism (IS) is basically a trotskyist group except that it holds Russia to be state capitalist.

The growth of working-class understanding is a contradictory process. With their emphasis on violence and minority action IS are peddling dangerous deceptions. Yet these are more advanced deceptions than those marketed by the "Communist" Party 20 years ago — more advanced in the sense that they recognise the impracticability these days of equating nationalisation and Russia with Socialism. True, the incorporation of the correct view that modern Russia is capitalist into the fundamentally mistaken and anti-working-class doctrine of Bolshevism, allows this doctrine to gain greatly in immediate appeal. But only at the expense of yet more glaring inconsistencies within the doctrine itself. For instance, the IS claim that capitalism sprang into being in Russia in 1928 after 10 years of transition towards Socialism is breathtaking in its lack of connection with any kind of reality.[1] Even the Bolshevik leaders (with the exceptions, interestingly enough, of Trotsky and Stalin), conceded that state capitalism existed in Russia following 1917.

Kidron and Mandel

There has recently been a controversy [2] between Michael Kidron (IS) and Ernest Mandel (orthodox trotskyist) which is interesting to Socialists since it shows Kidron failing to draw reasonable conclusions from his view that Russia is capitalist (in fact failing to fully understand what this means), and Mandel taking advantage of Kidron's confusion to discredit the whole theory of state capitalism.

Mandel points out that if they were consistent, IS would adopt a position of hostility towards the "Communist" movement. If North Vietnam is state capitalist, how can IS support the Vietcong? If the "Communist" parties are capitalist parties, the potential nuclei of future ruling classes, and if these ruling classes would not be historically progressive, why do IS cooperate politically with them? Mandel might well ask.

Of course, he regards such a position of hostility as unthinkable. But this is precisely the standpoint of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have at no time combined with the "Communist" Party or ceased to expose it, and we have always adopted a policy of opposition to both sides in every capitalist war. Unlike IS, we unite theory and practice.

In order to combat Mandel's argument that Russia is a "transitional society," Kidron says that there can be no transitional society between capitalism and Socialism. Quite correctly, he states: "The only possible transition is a sudden, revolutionary one." This promising statement (astonishing coming from IS) is somewhat undermined by the fact that Kidron hasn't the foggiest clue what Socialism is:

Socialism is a total system. It cannot grow piecemeal within the interstices of a capitalist society. How does workers' control of production coexist with control by a ruling class when the means of production in dispute are one and the same? How does self-determination and consumer sovereignty ('production for use') coexist with the external compulsion and blind accumulation that results from capitalist dispersal?

This is one of several instances where Mandel (who has read Marx) has a field day demolishing Kidron (a mere Keynsian eclectic mouthing misunderstood Marxist phrases). Socialism, of course, has nothing to do with "workers' control of production." Socialism means a classless world society, without commodities, without the state, without frontiers. It is therefore interesting to note that Mandel realises what Socialism is, but relegates it to the distant beyond, whereas Kidron wants "Socialism" as quickly as possible, but his "Socialism" isn't Socialism at all! Mandel's "transitional society" is basically similar to Kidron's "Socialism." and both are actually models of capitalism, since both envisage the retention of the wages system.

Marx argued that wage-labour and capital were quite inseparable. And in a reply to Mandel, C. Harman of IS comments:

Nowhere ... is there a single mention of the working class or a single reference to the wage labour/capital relationship. Now this is curious. For it was not Michael Kidron but Karl Marx who wrote "The relation between wage labour and capital determines the entire character of the mode of production." And this is not an accidental aside . . .

But later we find Harman flatly contradicting this, as he must because wage-labour is to remain a feature of the "workers' state" which is the avowed aim of IS. Harman argues that Russian industry from 1917 to 1928 was not capitalist, though presumably he would not deny that it featured wage-labour.

Neither Mandel nor Kidron seem unduly aware of modern Russian realities. Both seem to believe the Russian economy is "planned" full stop.

What then, is the situation of the Russian worker? He is free to move from factory to factory, from town to town, or occupation to occupation, in pursuit of higher wages, or under pressure of unemployment. And he is forced to do so, since he owns no means of production (except a substantial but dwindling number who have small plots of land, and indeed, need them to keep starvation at bay). He is therefore "doubly free" in Marx's phrase. He sells his labour-power to a state enterprise for a wage which is less than the price of his product. The surplus is mostly reinvested for his further exploitation, with a small proportion going to keep his rulers in the manner to which they are accustomed. In any circumstances (except general forced labour) it would be quite impracticable for the state to plan wages with any accuracy, but this is impossible in Russia where most workers are on piece rates (described by Marx as "the form of wages most in harmony with the capitalist mode of production"). It has been a pretty constant feature of Russian state capitalism that the actual total wages bill has exceeded (sometimes vastly) the amount foreseen by the plan. In Russia, labour power is clearly a commodity.

A popular view of the Russian economy is that a plan is devised at the top, orders are issued, and enterprises promptly fulfil the plan. The goals of the plan are, first, making an overall profit, second, catching up with the West. Yet to possess any effectiveness at all, the plan must be based on reports from the enterprises, which as well as being concerned to fulfil plans, also have their own profit and loss account, with plenty of incentive to get their profits up.

In fact, the long-term (five-year and seven-year) plans are always drastically modified in practice. They are merely guidelines for the annual (and quarterly and monthly) plans. Even so, several of the long-term plans could not be decreed until long after they were supposed to have started, and one (the sixth five-year plan) had to be abandoned altogether.

In the process of adapting the long-term plan year by year, all sorts of unforseen factors have to be taken into account, many of whieh are even by Mandel's account, unambiguously the products of market forces. Much of the Russian state's "planning" is thus a matter of anticipating, or even subsequently conforming to, these market forces. It is, however, true that they can exercise considerably "arbitrary" influences. Any capitalist state can do this to some extent (development grants, SET, etc.). The Russian state has much more power, mainly because, with the state monopoly of foreign trade functioning as a protective tariff, and with prevailing internal scarcity, the Russian capitalists have a seller's market. In relation to the peasants they have a buyer's market. It is exactly in such monopolistic situations that commodities can sell consistently above or below their values. [3]

But what happens as the disappearing peasant reserve strengthens the workers' bargaining power? As consumer goods production is increased to raise the workers' productivity? As consumers (workers and capitalists) get greater choice in their purchases, so that enterprises must become more responsive to the market, hence freer of central direction? What happens as the era of telescope development passes, so that Russian industry must imitate less and innovate more? The Russian capitalists are compelled to abandon by degrees the system of planning with material targets, which served them well as a method of rapid industrialisation, but has now outlived its usefulness.

There are many defenders of western capitalism who assert that "Socialism" has failed in Russia, which is therefore "returning" to capitalism. Mandel plays into the hands of these people by describing the current decentralisation of profit-seeking initiative as "degeneration" when it is clearly necessitated by advancement. He also thereby gives ammunition to those who argue that "Socialism" is suitable only for backward countries.

What has failed in Russia is not "planning", much less Socialism, but the attempt to plan a capitalist economy. It is not impossible to operate a technologically advanced society according to a common plan, but it is quite impossible to do this if there are competing economic interests, and if all those working for the plan have to be provided with a monetary incentive for everything they do. In a Socialist economy, with all work entirely voluntary and the price system abolished, it will be entirely feasible to plan all production according to democratically decided criteria.

Between capitalism and Socialism there cannot exist a stable, lengthy transitional period. This point seemed to have dimly penetrated the brain of Trotsky, who recognised the silliness of a "transitional" society which stably maintained itself for generation after generation. He therefore described Stalin's regime as a pyramid balanced on its head, and predicted it would be toppled in a major war. When the war came, it demonstrated the Russian system to be rather a pyramid stood firmly on its base. [4]

Far from Russia being on the road to Socialism, workers there still have to win the elementary political and trade union rights already gained by western workers. Capitalism continues to exist throughout the world because workers put up with it, and can be abolished as soon as the majority of workers desire Socialism, though this is most strikingly evident in countries which, unlike Russia, have effective workers' suffrage. It is therefore quite wrong to believe, as Mandel does, that we should support Russia or China against America. It is not worth a single worker's life or limbs to advance the interests of the Russian rulers against their rivals. Neither does it matter whether Russian enterprises remain formally, legally state - owned or not. This has no bearing on workers' interests and is beside the point anyway — a nationalised industry can be as free from de facto central control as some "privately-owned" firms.

Mandel's view would have slightly more plausibility if all his "transitional societies" were politically united under one state. But they compete economically and militarily, and if the whole world were owned by them alone, the danger of our species being exterminated in a war would be no less than it is today — "transitional" indeed!

Russia must of course be seen in its international context. It is here that the IS arguments against Mandel are strongest. As Harman rightly says, there is no such thing as the "inner logic" of a plan. The goals of Russian national planning have been fixed by international competition.

But the force of the IS attack here only throws into more startling relief their position on the national question (especially now that they have taken to supporting, not only the Vietcong, but also the Chinese state which they admit to be capitalist). It is no get out to proclaim, as Harman does, that they also supported the Kenyan anti-colonial movement, or "the Cypriot struggle led
by the cleric Makarios and the fascist Grivas." That is nothing to be proud of. Neither is this justified by calling it "the Marxist position." What conceivable excuse can there be for people who claim to be Socialists supporting the slaughter of workers which is a side-effect of the rival capitalist powers' perennial jostling for a place in the sun ?

Notes
[1] In case the point is missed, this is not only an exercise in labelling the past. So long as IS maintain that the 1917 revolution was Socialist they will be unable to seriously criticise all the garbage that comes in its train, Lenin's ignorant theory of Imperialism; the concept of the vanguard party and "transitional demands," etc. So long as they fail to do this, they are an obstacle to the establishment of Socialism.

[2] Kidron in International Socialism 36; Mandel's pamphlet The Inconsistencies of State Capitalism; Debate between Kidron and Mandel at Hull University, 4/11/69; Harman in International Socialism 41.

[3] If Mandel's reasoning were correct, and Russia lacked some of the essential features pf capitalism, this would show not that it was transitional between capitalism and Socialism, but "transitional" between asiatic feudalism (tsarism) and caipitalism. The peculiarities of Russian capitalism are the outcome of an unprecedented combination of backward peasant production and advanced industry.

[4] It is revealing that Mandel doesn't dare use Trotsky's long-since shattered argument that a state bureaucracy cannot constitute a ruling class. Trotsky was prepared to concede that state capitalism could in theory exist provided there was individual ownership of shares in the state.

S Socialist Standard April 1970

Trotsky: the prophet debunked

Trotsky was born Lev Davidovitch Bronstein, the son of moderately well-off peasant farmers in the southern Ukraine, in 1879. As a student at the University of Odessa he became an anti-Tsarist revolutionary. He soon fell foul of the authorities and was sentenced to prison and exile in Siberia from where he escaped in 1902 using the name of one of his jailers on his false identity card; this name — Trotsky — he was to use for the rest of his life.

Trotsky played a prominent part in the 1905 revolt that followed Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, being elected the Chairman of the St. Petersburg "soviet" ("soviet" is simply the Russian word for "council"). Oddly in view of his later political evolution, when the split occurred in the Russian Social Democratic movement in 1903 between the Mensheviks (orthodox Social Democrats like Kautsky in Germany) and the Bolsheviks (supporters of Lenin and his concept of a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries). Trotsky tended to favour the Mensheviks. Stalin and his supporters later took great pleasure in publishing one of Trotsky's writings from this period in which he violently criticised Lenin's conception of the party. Trotsky in fact tried to develop a middle position, evolving his own theory of how the anti-Tsarist revolution would develop.

Both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks saw the anti-Tsarist revolution as being one that would lead to the establishment of a bourgeois Democratic Republic in Russia (the difference between them was that the Mensheviks tended to see this as being done by the liberal bourgeoisie while the Bolsheviks said it would have to be the work of the vanguard party). Trotsky took up a different position, arguing that if the working class were to come to power in the course of the coming bourgeois revolution in Russia it was unreasonable to expect them to hand over power to the bourgeoisie; they would, and should according to Trotsky, take steps to transform society in a socialist direction.

Anti-Tsarist revolutionary

This theory, which Trotsky called "the theory of the permanent revolution", latching on to a phrase used by Marx in one of his articles on the abortive German bourgeois revolution of 1848-9, was absurd in that it implied that socialism could be on the agenda in economically backward Russia. It was however important historically as it was adopted by Lenin himself in April 1917 when he returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland. As a result Trotsky himself then rallied to the Bolsheviks.

In a very real sense Bolshevik ideology can be seen as a combination of Trotsky's theory of the revolution and Lenin's theory of the party. In 1930 Trotsky wrote a book called The History of the Russian Revolu¬tion, which is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand this event, not only because the author was an active participant in it but also because it unintentionally shows how this wasn't a working class socialist revolution but an anti-feudal revolution led by a vanguard party.

After the Bolshevik seizure of power Trotsky became, first, Commissar for Foreign Affairs and, then, Commander of thep Red Army which successfully won the Civil War against the "White Guards" supported by the Western powers. This gave him an immense prestige both in Russia and among sympathisers with the Russian revolution in the rest of the world. His attitude on other issues during this period was even more anti-working class than that of Lenin who, on one occasion, was forced to intervene to attack as going too far Trotsky's proposal to "militarise" labour and the trade unions.

After Lenin's death Trotsky was gradually eased out of power. He was exiled first to Alma Ata in Russian central Asia and then to Turkey, Norway and finally Mexico. If he had stayed in Russia he would almost certainly have been tortured, tried and shot like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and the other original leaders of the Bolshevik Party. All the same he still ended up with a Stalinist ice-pick in his head

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 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. 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.

Trotsky's 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. The most easily accessible example of the first view is James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and of the second Tony Cliff's Russia: A Marxist Analysis. Both books are well worth reading, though in fact neither Burnham nor Cliff could claim to be the originators of the theories they put forward. The majority of Trotskyists, however, remain committed to the dogma that Russia is a "degenerate Workers State".

Transitional Demands

Trotskyist theory and practice is rather neatly summed up in the opening sentence of the manifesto the Fourth International adopted at its foundation in 1938. Called The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, and drafted by Trotsky himself, it began with the absurd declaration: "The world political situation is chiefly characterised by historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat". This tendency to reduce everything to a question of the right leadership (Trotsky once wrote a pamphlet on the Paris Commune in which he explained its failure by the absence of a Bolshevik Party there) reminds us that Trotskyists are 100 per cent Leninists and believers in the vanguard party. They believe, in other words, that workers by their own efforts are incapable of emancipating themselves and so must be led by an enlightened minority of professional revolutionaries (generally bourgeois intellectuals like Lenin and Trotsky). Thus they fall under the general criticism of Leninism and indeed of all theories which proclaim that workers need leaders.

The other important point in the manifesto of the Fourth International was the concept of "transitional demands". The manifesto contained a whole list of reform demands which was called "the transitional programme". This reform programme was said to be different from those of openly reformist parties like Labour in Britain and the Social Democratic parties on the Continent in that Trotskyists claimed to be under no illusion that the reforms demanded could be achieved within the framework of capitalism. They were posed as bait by the vanguard party to get workers to struggle for them, on the theory that the workers would learn in the course of the struggle that these demands could not be achieved within capitalism and so would come to struggle (under the leadership of the vanguard party) to abolish capitalism.

Actually, most Trotskyists are not as cynical as they pretend to be here: in discussion with them you gain the clear impression that they share the illusion that the reforms they advocate can be achieved under capitalism (as, indeed, some of them could be). In other words, they are often the victims of their own "tactics".

Splits and sects

After the Second World War, all the Trotskyists in Britain were united for a time in a single organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party, which was affiliated to the Fourth International. All the leaders of the various Trotskyist sects (Gerry Healy, Ted Grant, Tony Cliff, etc) were together in the RCP.

Most of the splits that subsequently occurred were over the attitude to adopt towards Russia and the Cold War. The group around Cliff, as we have already noted, took the view that Russia had been state capitalist since about 1928 (up till then it had supposedly been a "Workers State"). Logically they adopted the slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow". Longtime known as the "International Socialists" they are now the Socalist Workers Party. Except on Russia they share all the other Trotskyist illusions (vanguard party, transitional demands, etc).

In 1949 the RCP dissolved itself and most Trotskyists decided to join the Labour Party and "to bore from within". This tactic, known in Trotskyist parlance, as "entryism", is again based on the premise that the mass of the workers need leaders and are there to be manipulated. As would-be leaders of the working class, the argument goes, we must be where the workers are; as in Britain the Labour Party is "the mass party of the working class" this is where we Trotskyists must be if we are to have a chance of influencing (that is, manipulating) the workers.

After the general strike in France in May 1968, which seemed to show that student activists could influence the working class directly without needing to pass through "the mass party of the working class", most of the Trotskyist groups decided to abandon entryism and openly form their own parties. Thus parliamentary elections in Britain came to be enlivened by the presence of parties bearing such titles as "Workers Revolutionary Party", "Socialist Workers Party", "Revolutionary Communist Party", "Socialist Unity", etc. Needless to say, they got no more votes than we in the Socialist Party did.

This abandoning of entryism should not be interpreted as meaning opposition to the Labour Party, because nearly all the Trotskyist groups continue to support the election of a Labour government and to call on workers to vote Labour.

One Trotskyist sect, however, decided not to abandon the Labour Party after 1968 but to continue boring from within: the sect now known as the Militant Tendency (leader: Ted Grant). The absence of the other sects meant that they had a monopoly of this particular hunting ground. So when Labour turned left after 1979 they were there ready to recruit new members and increase their influence. In fact the Militant Tendency has undoubtedly been the most successful of all the Trotskyist groups that have ever infiltrated the Labour Party. They control a number of constituency parties as well as the Labour Party Young Socialists. There are even two or three Trotskyist MP's sitting on the Labour' benches at Westminster.

From an ideological point of view, the Militant Tendency follows orthodox Trotskyism. Thus, for instance, they regard Russia as a "degenerate Workers State" — which means they are more backward than many Labour Party members who willingly recognise that Russia is state capitalist.

Trotsky entirely identified capitalism with private capitalism and so concluded that society would cease to be capitalist once the private capitalist class had been expropriated. This meant that, in contrast to Lenin who mistakenly saw state capitalism as a necessary step towards socialism, Trotsky committed the different mistake of seeing state capitalism as the negation of capitalism. Trotskyism, the movement he gave rise to, is a blend of Leninism and Reformism, committed on paper to replacing private capitalism with state capitalism through a violent insurrection led by a vanguard party, but in practice working to achieve state capitalism through reforms to be enacted by Labour governments.

ALB - Socialist Standard August 1990

further reading
Are the managers really in control? parts one and two (pdf) looks at Burnham.