Degenerated Workers' State - The Trotskyist Definition

The Trotskyist Definition

The Soviet state of the period between the 1917 October Revolution and Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power, was held to be a genuine workers' state, as the bourgeoisie had been politically overthrown by the working class and the economic basis of that state lay in collective ownership of the means of production. Contrary to the predictions of many socialists such as Lenin, the revolution failed to spread to Germany and other industrial Western European countries (although there were massive upheavals of working people in some of these countries), and consequently the Soviet state began to degenerate. This was worsened by the material and political degeneration of the Russian working class by the Civil War of 1917–1923.

After the death of Lenin in 1924, the ruling stratum of the Soviet Union, consolidated around Stalin, was held to be a bureaucratic caste, and not a new ruling class, because its political control did not also extend to economic ownership. The theory that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers' state is closely connected to Trotsky's call for a political revolution in the USSR, as well as Trotsky's call for defense of the USSR against capitalist restoration.

As the wording implies, a degenerated workers' state is a state where the working class has succeeded in seizing power from the bourgeoisie and the means of production taken into social ownership, but where subsequently, power has been usurped by an undemocratic and unaccountable bureaucracy: the revolution has degenerated.

Trotsky explained the term thus:

Perhaps this is a workers’ state, in the last analysis, but there has not been left in it a vestige of the dictatorship of the proletariat. We have here a degenerated workers’ state under the dictatorship of the bureaucracy.

The term "degenerated workers' state" is commonly used to refer only to the Soviet Union.

The term deformed workers' state was coined by Trotskyists of the Fourth International to describe those states, like the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe as well as China, which are or were based upon collectivised means of production, but in which the working class never held direct political power. The two terms are therefore similar as they both describe states where the bourgeoisie no longer holds power, where the means of production has been socialised and where an unaccountable bureaucratic elite now holds the political reins, where they differ is in the history of how this situation has arisen: the bureaucratic degeneration of a genuine workers' democracy, as in Russia; or the creation of a deformed workers state resulting from the overthrow of bourgeois rule and ownership by some force other than the mass action of the organised working class, such as an invasion, a guerrilla army, or a military coup.

Trotsky always emphasised that the degenerated workers' state was not a new form of society, but a transitional phase between capitalism and socialism (and closer to capitalism) that would inevitably collapse into one form or the other. He argued however that whether this downfall led to the restoration of workers' democracy or to capitalist restoration would depend on whether the movement to overthrow the dictatorship of the bureaucracy was led by the organised working class:

"The inevitable collapse of the Stalinist political regime will lead to the establishment of Soviet democracy only in the event that the removal of Bonapartism comes as the conscious act of the proletarian vanguard. In all other cases, in place of Stalinism there could only come the fascist-capitalist counter-revolution" Trotsky (1935)

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