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From Socialist Worker, No. 121, 8 May 1969, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
A GOOD review of some of Lenin’s ideas expounded in State and Revolution (April 19) was spoilt by the insertion of a few somewhat obtuse remarks referring to Trotsky’s ‘radically different definition’ of a workers’ state.
Trotsky stated in the Revolution Betrayed that ‘the nationalisation of the land, the means of industrial production, transport and exchange, together with the monopoly of foreign trade, constitute the basis of the Soviet social structure’
However he goes on to emphasise that it is not abstract state ownership which defines socialism but also the historical conditions under which it is established. ‘Through these relations established by the proletarian revolution, the basic nature of the Soviet Union as a proletarian state is for us defined.’
Elsewhere in his book Trotsky even outlines the possibility of a situation in which the bourgeoisie as a whole constitutes itself a stock company which, by means of its state, administers the whole national economy.
Despite the emphasis in Duncan Hallas’s article on the necessity for workers’ control of production in a healthy workers’ state it misses an essential part of Lenin’s analysis. Lenin wrote that ‘bourgeois law in relation to the distribution of the objects of consumption assumes. of course, inevitably a bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of compelling observance of its norms. It follows that under communism not only will bourgeois law survive for a certain time, but also even a bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!’
The theory of state capitalism may be taken to imply that the Stalinist bureaucracy has a historical mission to develop the productive forces – despite the fact that the world is over ripe for socialism.
In this, and in the establishment of industrial democracy as a formal norm for a workers’ state, it is the theory of state capitalism that ‘constitutes a major revision of marxist theory’ (to quote comrade Hallas).
The decimation of the civil war left the working class with little ‘effective control over their work situation’. However Lenin was severely attacked by the Workers’ Opposition who stated that the USSR had degenerated into a form of state capitalism.
Lenin’s genius lies not in adherence to formal criteria but in his persistent attempts to recognise and change conditions.
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Geoff Hodgson, |
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Last updated on 16 January 2021