In Defence of Trotskyism No. 6 £1 waged, 50p unwaged/low waged, €1.50 The Marxist theory of the state: Deformed and Degenerated Workers’ States and Capitalist States Reply to RCIT Part 3 (assessment also of the positions of Workers Power/LFI, Ted Grant and the Socialist Party/CWI, Socialist Appeal/ IMT, the Spart family ICL/IBT/IG, Mandelites/USFI/US SWP, David North’s SEP/WSWS/ICFI and a passing look at the Cliffite UK SWP). Berlin Airlift-June 24, 1948 to May 12, 1949 and debate on Buffer States Page 2 The Marxist theory of the state Where We Stand ets/workers’ councils to sup- reformist leaders of the Labour press the inevitable counter- party and trade unions 1. WE STAND WITH revolution of private capitalist 5. We oppose all immigra- KARL MARX: ‘The emancipa- profit against planned produc- tion controls. International tion of the working classes must tion for the satisfaction of so- finance capital roams the planet be conquered by the working cialised human need. in search of profit and Imperial- classes themselves. The struggle 3. We recognise the necessity ist governments disrupts the for the emancipation of the for revolutionaries to carry out lives of workers and cause the working class means not a serious ideological and political collapse of whole nations with struggle for class privileges and struggle as direct participants in their direct intervention in the monopolies but for equal rights the trade unions (always) and in Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan and duties and the abolition of the mass reformist social demo- and their proxy wars in Somalia all class rule’ (The International cratic bourgeois workers’ parties and the Democratic Republic of Workingmen’s Association despite their pro-capitalist lead- the Congo, etc. Workers have 1864, General Rules). erships when conditions are the right to sell their labour 2. The capitalist state con- favourable. Because we see the internationally wherever they sists, in the last analysis, of trade union bureaucracy and get the best price. Only union ruling-class laws within a judicial their allies in the Labour party membership and pay rates can system and detention centres leadership as the most funda- counter employers who seek to overseen by the armed bodies mental obstacle to the struggle exploit immigrant workers as of police/army who are under for power of the working class, cheap labour to undermine the the direction and are controlled outside of the state forces and gains of past struggles. in acts of defence of capitalist their direct agencies themselves, property rights against the inter- we must fight and defeat and ests of the majority of civil replace them with a revolution- Subscribe to Socialist Fight society. The working class must ary leadership by mobilising the and In Defence of Trotskyism overthrow the capitalist state base against the pro-capitalist and replace it with a workers’ bureaucratic misleaders to open Four Issues: UK: £12.00, EU: state based on democratic sovi- the way forward for the struggle £14.00 for workers’ power. Rest of the World: £18.00 Socialist Fight produces IDOT. 4. We are fully in support of Please send donations to help It is a part of the Liaison Com- all mass mobilisations against in their production mittee for the Fourth Interna- the onslaught of this reactionary Cheques and Standing Orders Con-Lib Dem coalition. How- to tional with the Liga Comunista, ever, whilst participating in this Brazil and the Tendencia Mili- struggle we will oppose all poli- Socialist Fight Account No. 1 tante Bolchevique, Argentina. cies which subordinate the Unity Trust Bank, Sort Code Editor: Gerry Downing working class to the political 08-60-01, Account. No. Assistant Editor: John Barry. agenda of the petty-bourgeois 20227368. Introduction IG and Workers Power/LFI, who parted This is the third part of a reply to the Austri- company with the RCIT just a few years ago. an-based Revolutionary Communist Interna- We also looked at the history of Ted Grant tional Tendency (RCIT) on a wide range of and his successor groups because these have political and historical issues that have been been neglected by left Trotskyists for far too controversial in the history of Trotskyism. In long. Other groups are dealt with as occasion tackling these issues we found it necessary to arises during the polemic. This publication address the whole history of Trotskyism and concentrates on the Marxist position on the how various groupings saw it. In particular state. we addressed the ‘left-Trotskyist’, groupings, The post WWII debate in the Fourth Inter- the Spart ‘family’, the ICL, the IBT and the national of the late 1940s and early 1950s on Socialist Fight: PO Box 59188, London, NW2 9LJ, [email protected]. The Marxist theory of the state Page 3 the class character of the ‘Buffer States’ in on this Eastern Europe was resurrected in 1989-92 question. with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the col- And also lapse of the USSR following the Yanayev the politics coup and Yeltsin’s counter-coup of August of the 1991. We will see from the struggles we have I n t e r n a - outlined below that the Stalinist bureaucra- tional Bol- cies became divided into three camps follow- s h e v i k ing the defeat of the Brezhnevites by Gorba- Tendency chev in 1989; those Gorbechevites on the left (IBT) as it who wished to retain the degenerate and intervened deformed workers’ states by opening up the in these economic plan by glasnost (openness) and events. But perestroika (restructuring), those in the mid- first we dle (Yanayev and Deng in China) who sought will look at the restoration of capitalism by slow, planned Grantism measures, maintaining the Stalinist bureau- and the cracy as the vehicle of restoration and those state, its prime revision of Marxism as identi- on the right like Yeltsin who sought a rapid fied by almost every other far left group. capitulation to western Imperialism and their own enrichment by plundering the state as- Problems of Grantism On The sets in alliance with western transnational State corporations. We can observe at least ele- The problems of Grantism on the state go ments of these three tendencies in most of back at least to 1949 [1] when Ted Grant the counter-revolutionary overturns of 1989- wrote his Reply to David Jamesin which his 92. erroneous theory of Proletarian Bonapartism The first debate on the nature of the East first made its debut, as far as we know: European countries behind the ‘iron curtain’ “Stalinism is a form of Bonapartism that ba- in the FI in the late 1940s eventually resulted ses itself on the proletariat and the institution in the correct conclusion that they were de- of state ownership, but it is as different from formed workers’ states, but much confusion the norm of a workers’ state as fascism or remained. We will look at the position again bourgeois Bonapartism differs from the as it emerged in the debate over the class norm of bourgeois democracy, which is the character of Cuba in the early 1960s and the freest expression of the economic domina- debate about the class character of Cambodia tion and rule of the bourgeoisie. Now it in the late 1970s following the invasion by seems that Stalinism, once having become Vietnam on 25 December 1978. And of the government, is based on the proletariat course, as we have mentioned, the debate because it is based on proletarian property following the victory of the counter- forms, “the institutions of state ownership”. revolutionary restoration of capitalism in Thus it has ceased being counterrevolution- Eastern European and Asian states in the late ary in NATURE because it has performed a 1980s and early 1990s. progressive historical act. The confusion here We will look at the politics of Workers Pow- is between its essential class character and its er Britain (WPB) and Ted Grant’s groups manoeuvres. Stalinism, leaning on the prole- (CWI and IMT today) as it manifested itself Socialist Fight: PO Box 59188, London, NW2 9LJ, [email protected]. Page 4 The Marxist theory of the state tariat can, under given conditions, balance not an owner of enterprises, but only an in- between the opposing classes to strengthen termediary between their owners. These two itself for its own ends. We have seen how things are not identical. Popolo d’Italia says this was accomplished in Eastern Europe. on this subject: “The corporative state directs We now have a similar development taking and integrates the economy, but does not run place before our eyes in China.” [2] it (‘dirige e porta alla unita l’economia, ma Stalinism was and is not really “leaning on non fa l’economia, non gestisce’), which, with the proletariat” at all but using the working a monopoly of production, would be nothing class threat to lean essentially if indirectly on but collectivism.” (June 11, 1936) Toward the Imperialism and far more directly on the peasants and small proprietors in general, the peasantry to accomplish this. However the fascist bureaucracy takes the attitude of a above quote is also wrong because it directly threatening lord and master. Toward the equates the assumption of state power by the capitalist magnates, that of a first plenipoten- Stalinists with “the institutions of state own- tiury. “The corporative state,”correctly writes ership”, as if that represented a deformed the Italian Marxist, Feroci, “is nothing but workers’ state. In fact this phrase does not the sales clerk of monopoly capital … Mus- define any real Marxist scientific category at solini takes upon the state the whole risk of all.