Re: Degenerated workers state= oxyMORONIC

[Walter Daum <WGDCC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A couple of related comments.

1. Someone asked whether Trotskyists think there are or have been any
socialist countries. Actually, this is one thing I think all Trotskyists
(self-defined) probably agree on: No. The USSR was a transitional society, a
workers' state developing toward socialism. Socialism itself is "the lower
stage of communism" and won't be achieved until capitalism has been
overthrown in at least several of the most industrial countries.

Whether other revolutions (China, East Europe, Cuba etc.) achieved workers'
states or not is much debated. But I can't offhand think of any Trotskyists
who considered them socialist in any but a casual journalistic sense.

2. Neil cited Lenin as saying that state capitalism was a necessary stage
toward socialism. I think this confuses two uses of the same term. Lenin
was writing of "state capitalism under a workers' state" -- that is,
capitalist firms (privately owned, in the NEP period) closely supervised
by the state;  a sector of the economy. He thought it an advance over the
petty capitalism that dominated the Soviet economy at the time (early 20's).
But it is not the same thing as the "state capitalism" under debate,
namely a wholly or largely statified economy.

3. On Tue, 18 Jun 96 17:35:12 GMT Adam Rose said:
>
>And, a degenerated workers state is not an oxymoron - it existed in
>various forms between 1919 and 1928. If such a state cannot exist,
>how did state capitalism come into being in Russia ? Was there no
>workers revolution to start with ? If there was, there must have a
>been a period when it was in the process of degenerating. Obviously.

I agree to the general proposition, differing on the dates. But that
aside, I think Adam is going beyond Cliff here, who to my reading does
not accept the category of degenerated workers' state.

I say that because Trotsky, when he introduced the term "degenerated
workers' state," argued that the workers would have to not just reform
the Soviet regime but defeat the bureaucracy in a political revolution.
("Political revolution" -- change of power within the ruling class, in this
case the proletariat -- as opposed to a social revolution where one class
seizes power from another.)

Cliff in his book argues against the idea of political revolution in
Russia; if the workers need to make a revolution, it has to be social.
But there have been different editions of Cliff's book, and maybe there is
a different way to read it.

Walter Daum


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