The idea that predominates the views of Trotsky when he made his assessments on the fate of the Soviet Union can be summarised as follows: when a proletarian revolution that has failed to proceed on an international scale, isolated within national borders is hindered by the formation of a bureaucratic power, it will end up with its collapse. Examining the problem in the concrete context of the Soviet Union, Trotsky thought that the gains of the October Revolution were not abolished and the revolution did not completely collapse yet, while revealing by all evidence on the other hand that the Stalinist power constituted a bureaucratic structure. He maintained this view up until the eve of the Second World War. As soon as the war became a fact, he reconsidered the problem and tried to find out the possibilities in relation to war.
One possibility he expressed was that, by overthrowing the bureaucratic dictatorship, a proletarian revolt could save the “betrayed revolution” from collapsing. Unfortunately, this did not happen. Just the opposite happened. By building similar bureaucratic dictatorships in the countries of its sphere of influence after the Second World War the Stalinist dictatorship gained a central hegemonic position over these countries militarily and politically, and became more powerful. The new conditions meant that even a somewhat understandable ground for Trotsky’s “cautious” attitude in assessing the character of the Soviet state no longer existed now. Now the apparent reality had nothing to do with the dictatorship of the proletariat and preserving of the gains of proletarian revolution. This reality implied the existence of a ruling class that had raised itself to the position of a dominant class over workers and toilers, through the domination of the state ownership in a society where the predominant form of property was state property. This class was neither like the dominant classes based on private ownership, nor the proletariat, the producing class of modern industrial society. This dominant class took its strength neither from bourgeoisie nor from the working class. It was a dominant class that subsisted itself resting upon the state property and despotic-bureaucratic power apparatus it created. Furthermore, this class had become an international power by creating similar examples after the Second World War.
Trotsky unfortunately did not live long enough to see this new post-world war scene and the scale of the international power of the despotic state established by the Stalinist bureaucracy alongside the capitalist states. If he did, we believe that he would re-assess his analyses concerning the nature of the Soviet State and cleanse his theses of certain shortcomings and faults, reaching more integral and coherent views.
After his death, his analyses should have been carried on and his theses re-examined in the light of new circumstances that emerged in the aftermath of the war. But who was to do that? This task was of course the responsibility of Trotsky’s followers, and in the first place of the leadership of the Fourth International. And what happened then? Have the “Trotskyists” who claim to be the followers of Trotsky fulfilled this task adequately? To be honest, it is hard to answer this question in the affirmative.
Those who took on the leadership of the Fourth International after Trotsky’s death have frozen the theoretical analyses he had made for his own period and have transformed his theses into dogmas instead of grasping the essence of his ideas and trying to develop them under changing conditions. In fact this attitude meant turning a revolutionary theoretical legacy into a finished stencil rather than keeping it alive. Since a proper theoretical discussion could not be managed within the Fourth International, Trotsky’s theses could not be taken up and improved. As a result, every Trotskyist circle interpreted the ideas of Trotsky as they wished and tended to establish a separate political sect.
However, in order to be genuine followers of Bolshevik-Leninist tradition, as Trotsky named it, a course should have been followed where this tradition is kept alive not verbally but in reality and a revolutionary internationalist unity should have been formed accordingly. What happened was just the opposite. After the death of Trotsky, a deep political-organisational crisis took place within the Fourth International the foundations of which had been laid by Trotsky. What lied behind this crisis was the incapability of the Fourth International leadership to provide theoretical solutions for the problems of the postwar period and especially the fact that it continued to define the Stalinist dictatorship in the Soviet Union and the other new bureaucratic dictatorships established under its hegemony as a kind of “workers’ states despite everything”. A similar mistake can be seen in their attitudes towards national liberation movements, which was a result of a misconception of the theory of permanent revolution.
In the end, the failure to improve Trotsky’s theoretical analyses under changing circumstances and the turning of his theses into finished stencils, caused the crisis in the Trotskyist movement to deepen and organisational-political splits and disintegrations occur frequently. These sects that appeared after these splits, in turn, moved away from the perspective of getting themselves organised on the basis of the proletarian class and leaned towards petty bourgeois elements and increasingly built on them. This made the Trotskyist movement, in a broad view, a political movement that is constantly in crisis and constantly suffering from splits. Of course it is not the concern of this book to elaborate on the details of this question which is about the organisational-political aspects of the problem. However, there certainly is a correlation, and a strong one, between the organisationally-politically divided state of the Trotskyist movement and the problem we are dealing with here.
After dealing with the ideas and appraisals of Trotsky on the controversial theoretical problems, our subject matter inevitably extends towards his successors. In this context, the views of Mandel, who, after Trotsky’s death, has been a prominent figure as an official representative of the Fourth International tradition, are the main focus of attention. When we look into the views of Mandel as a whole, it is hard to say that the tendency he represents has grasped the essence of Trotsky’s views and developed correct theoretical answers to the present problems. Even we can say that, in many respects Mandel plays one of the most leading roles in freezing Trotsky’s theoretical analyses and ossifying his views and turning them into finished stencils in the name of “deepening” them.
We shall try to reveal here, on the basis of certain important examples, that the tendency Mandel represents has not proceeded on the road opened by Trotsky, and that it has frozen his ideas in many points. It will help clarify the problems to be discussed if we deal with these examples in the company of Trotsky’s views.
The principal theoretical question Mandel blurred in the name of deepening and carried to a wrong conclusion is the question of “workers’ state” and, in connection with it, the class nature of the state in the Soviet Union and the peculiar position of the bureaucracy. Although he claims to base his positions upon Trotsky, his “theory” on this subject is completely “original” and, from a Marxist point of view, one based on errors. Mandel draws a wrong theoretical conclusion on the question of workers’ state on the basis of the assumption that the state in the Soviet Union is “still a proletarian dictatorship despite its bureaucratic degeneration”. According to him a workers’ state can be with bureaucracy, and moreover, if a workers’ revolution takes place in a backward country, the workers’ state will inevitably be with bureaucracy.
If we accepted this “theory” of Mandel, then the Marxist position that the workers’ state should be one without bureaucracy would be nothing more than wishful thinking. However, we know that the prediction of Marx on this matter, far from being wishful thinking, is a possible and necessary goal for the existence of a workers’ state. Whereas it is a rightful effort to consider out of what objective and subjective reasons this goal could not be, or cannot be, achieved, it is, on the other hand, a wrong attitude to endeavour to prove that a workers’ state can be with bureaucracy on the basis of an example in which this goal could not be achieved. This is precisely what Mandel does with his generalisation of “workers’ state with bureaucracy”, and this constitutes an example of the kind of wrong attitude that diverges from the Marxist understanding of workers’ state.
It has been stated in the previous chapter that Trotsky’s assessments also had erroneous aspects. But in the final analysis, Trotsky’s starting point was the Marxist understanding that “the workers’ state cannot and should not be one with bureaucracy”. He was just dealing with the phenomenon of “bureaucratic degeneration” in an endeavour to reveal the causes of the change taking place in the Soviet Union in those years. On the other hand, Trotsky gave important hints that “a monstrously degenerated workers’ state” would after all cease to be a workers’ state. But Mandel continued to base his theory on Trotsky’s earlier appraisals despite the bare reality being more and more explicit with time. By doing this he has frozen the moving analyses of Trotsky. Thus Mandel’s theory implanted a kind of understanding that suggests “bureaucracy will never disappear as long as the state exists” or “bureaucracy will always exist” into the Trotskyist movement.
This idea of Mandel leaves the door open for a possibility that even a workers’ state without bureaucracy would not perhaps exist if the proletarian revolution was not isolated in one country and a backward one such as Russia. And this line of thinking fosters a tendency so as to accept the idea of “workers’ state with bureaucracy”, to submit to the existing reality and even to envisage the future on this basis. This is indeed what happened. It is not difficult to find the traces of an implicit submission and various concessions in the face of the reality of the Soviet Union, all of which flow from this point.
Trotsky, who came near to defining the bureaucracy as a dominant class in the course of the process of bureaucratic counter-revolution in the Soviet Union, emphasised openly in his last writings that the bureaucratic rule was a counter-revolutionary force which should be overthrown by the proletariat. He was saying that, far from defending the historical conquests of the proletariat, the bureaucracy could function as an instrument of the international bourgeoisie in the heart of the Soviet state. But if you say that, then it becomes senseless to talk about the dual character of the bureaucracy which suggests that “while it is conservative on the one hand, it continues to defend –although by its own methods– the workers’ state on the other hand”. What is to be concentrated on is the counter-revolutionary character of the bureaucracy, which emerges as a hindering factor in front of the world revolution.
But Mandel’s explanations on “the dual character of the bureaucracy” are in contradiction with what Trotsky hinted in his last writings, and moreover he bends the stick in favour of the bureaucracy to such an extent that Trotsky never had done. Mandel says the following in 1968s:
This role reflects the essentially contradictory and dual nature of the Soviet bureaucracy. On the one hand it is really dependent on the new social order that emerged in the Soviet Union out of the October Revolution and of the repression by way of violence of private agriculture through forced collectivisation by Stalin and seeks to protect this order –which is the basis of its power and privileges– in a way that suits its own narrow private interests. By protecting the Soviet society it serves objectively to spread the revolution on an international plane independently of its desires and motives. [1]
Such kind of assessments made by Mandel also constitute the basis for the arguments of the apologetics of Stalinism, who say that “despite all subjective errors of the bureaucracy, the Soviet Union objectively continues to be the centre of the world revolution”. Mandel has not made any essential modification in his analyses of the dual character of the bureaucracy. And he has carried on resting his thesis that the bureaucracy does not constitute a dominant class upon the allegation that it has an aspect of defending –although by its own methods– the social order that had come into being with the October revolution.
On the other hand Mandel states in an interview with him in 1978 on “the class nature of the Soviet state” that those who label bureaucracy as “a new class” would be bound to admit its progressive role compared to the bourgeoisie. Such kind of arguments have caused an effect of stifling those intellectual efforts within Trotskyist movement with a view to finding out the truth. They had also the effect of obscuring the fact that the Soviet bureaucracy constitutes not a caste but a dominant class.
On the other hand, in his mentality, Mandel himself attributes a “progressive” role to the bureaucracy and points to the enormous economic and cultural achievements of the USSR as a proof of this. In fact this progress, as noted by Trotsky, was the product of the labour of the proletariat forced to work under the whip of the bureaucracy. To assess the bureaucracy in terms of a comparison with the bourgeoisie and not in terms of its reactionary role in the face of the working class and world revolution is a great concession made to the bureaucracy, as well as to count the achievement of industrialisation in the USSR as the success of the bureaucracy in the final analysis. And this is despite the fact that Trotsky himself expressed that the bureaucratic rule was not an advancing but a hindering factor for the development in the USSR. Trotsky said: “The further unhindered development of bureaucratism must lead inevitably to the cessation of economic and cultural growth, to a terrible social crisis and to the downward plunge of the entire society.”[2]
It was again Mandel who created the “theory” that the Soviet economy under the dictatorship of the bureaucracy recorded such a progress that even excels capitalism. The thesis, which he has defended for years and tried to implant into Trotskyist movement, is as follows:
Plan after plan, through successive decades, the Soviet Union has been sustaining a somewhat balanced economic growth without the accumulation of past progress creating an obstacle on the possibilities of future growth... All laws of capitalist development that reduce the speed of economic growth has been eliminated. [3]
In the context of revealing that the regime in the Soviet Union was not state capitalism, Trotsky was right when he said that the bureaucracy was not a dominant class in the sense that the bourgeoisie was. On the other hand, although he did not draw the necessary conclusion when he defined the Soviet bureaucracy as the gendarme of distribution process, Trotsky, by doing this, was implicitly pointing to the fact that under these conditions the working class could not be considered as the lord of production process. The ultimate meaning of this was that the bureaucracy, as a dominant force in control of the production process, was something more than a privileged layer, a sui generis class controlling the social surplus-labour and basing itself on state property, unlike those classes that own private property. Unfortunately, Trotsky could not advance his analyses up to this point.
Under conditions where the bourgeoisie was expropriated but the working class was not able to maintain its domination and the means of production was under state ownership, the bureaucracy who owns the state was something different from the bureaucracy in the service of classes based on private property. It has clearly turned out that the bureaucracy had lifted itself to the position of a ruling class which has based itself not on private ownership but on state ownership and that it had formed a state class.
Trotsky’s expositions about the condition of the working class “which is forced to work under the whip of the bureaucracy” revealed clearly the dominant position of the bureaucracy over the working class. Should this position be legalised and solidified, he noted, all social conquests of the proletarian revolution would be liquidated. Despite the fact that years have passed and events have developed in the very same direction pointed out by Trotsky (as a matter of fact, that was the case even before he stated that), some Trotskyists still tried to prove that “the historical conquests of the working class would continue to be preserved as long as the state ownership lasts”. But they were gravely mistaken. And what lies behind this mistake was the erroneous tendency to identify state ownership with socialist property in an exaggerated way. Yet the fallacies of petty bourgeois-socialism on such problems as “statism” and “state ownership” had been subjected to a lot of criticism from Marx’s time onwards. The theoretical criticisms directed by Marxism against petty bourgeois socialism on this issue constitute a rich revolutionary Marxist literature.[4]
In fact, the effort to rationalise such claims that are at variance with reality inevitably leads to contradictions. Ignoring the important hints given by Trotsky and constraining himself into finished stencils Mandel confined his appraisals on the nature of the Soviet state into a vicious circle. When compelled, by force of questioning, to go beyond the thesis of “bureaucratically degenerated workers’ state”, he dared to fall into contradiction with himself but he did not dare to abandon this finished stencil. This is exactly the case, for instance, when he re-asserts the nature of the Soviet state under changing conditions. He keeps claiming that the bureaucracy is still a very crowded social group made of people of working class origin. Since the definition of “bureaucratically degenerated workers’ state” cannot withstand criticism by 1978, he seeks apologetic excuses for his attitude of maintaining this definition. He says that this Trotskyist definition is by no means the same with a workers’ state. But, in spite of this, he prefers keeping the word “workers” in this definition, since, in his opinion, its elimination will make things more confusing. Mandel’s excuses represent a call for giving up the endeavour to find out the truth for the sake of avoiding confusion. Or they are manifestation of concessions to the bureaucracy. Mandel says:
If we allow that the bureaucracy is a new class, are the Communist Parties in power then “bureaucratic” parties? (...) Or is the bureaucracy the only class in history that becomes a class only after seizing power, although it was not a class prior to the seizure of power?
In the end Mandel has “avoided confusion” by ignoring the hints given by Trotsky and taking refuge once again in the old safe haven:
... when the Fourth International –following Trotsky- asserts that there is still a bureaucratically degenerate workers’ state in the Soviet Union, and that in this sense the Soviet Union still preserves a form of dictatorship of the proletariat, it does so in a quite precise way which implies no more than it says. Up to now this state has objectively continued to defend the structures, the hybrid relations of production, born of the October Revolution. Thus up to now this state has prevented the restoration of capitalism and the power of a new bourgeois class; it has prevented the re-emergence of capitalist property and capitalist relations of production.[5]
Yet the fact that the bureaucracy had not yet accomplished capitalist restoration by the time Mandel wrote above lines (1978) does not mean that the Soviet Union “preserved a kind of proletarian dictatorship”. It is not correct that the Soviet state “objectively defends the institutions flowed from the October Revolution”. As the Soviet state completely ceased to be a workers’ state after a bureaucratic counter-revolution, the idea that “the bureaucracy is a social caste dependent on the institutions that had flowed from the October Revolution” lost any objective ground after 1929. Thus, what the bureaucracy defends “by preventing the rule of a new bourgeois class, not allowing capitalist ownership and capitalist relations of production to emerge” is not any more “the institutions flowed from the October Revolution”. It has preserved the workings of the bureaucratic regime which is linked with the interests of its own nation-state.
Avoiding from a reassessment of the objective nature of the Soviet state and Soviet bureaucracy, Mandel has not managed to elevate his analyses to a level which enables one to grasp the changes of our time, and thus he was caught unaware by the process of collapse of the bureaucratic regimes. That’s why his positions (which we demonstrated by examples from 1978) are essentially wrong and they serve as the source of the inadequate understanding of the changes of our time. Because Mandel has insisted on his argument that the conquests of the October revolution have not been abolished in spite of the counter-revolution the bureaucracy has accomplished before. For this reason, he has contented himself with reiterating that a capitalist restoration is possible in the Soviet Union and countries alike only through a bourgeois counter-revolution.
Clinging to old appraisals for the sake of “avoiding confusion” Mandel seeks to overcome his uneasiness resulting from the incompatibility of these appraisals with concrete reality by playing with the content of Marxist concepts. However, it is precisely such attitudes that lead to confusion. Mandel says:
… if one interprets “dictatorship of the proletariat” to mean “direct government by the working class”, then this dictatorship certainly does not exist. For us, the dictatorship of the proletariat exists in the Soviet Union only in the derived, indirect, and socio-theoretical sense of the term.[6]
“The direct government of the working class”, which is the condition of existence for the dictatorship of proletariat, is presented here as if one of its versions. Thus Mandel provides us with a new definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat: a proletarian dictatorship in a “socio-theoretical” sense, “derived” from the definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, signifying the “indirect” government of the working class. As a matter of fact, this kind of explanations have no meaning beyond theoretical sophistry.
Mandel’s effort to demonstrate that the bureaucracy cannot constitute a dominant class independent from the proletariat, that the Soviet state, despite everything, is in the final analysis a “bureaucratically degenerated workers’ state” defending the conquests of the October Revolution compels him to make interpretations which are incompatible with reality. For this reason he is so heedless as to talk about “unfinished processes” years after Trotsky who said that the Soviet bureaucracy had “outweighed the head of the October Revolution with its leaden rump” and that the existence of the bureaucracy was “the dialectical negation of Bolshevism”. The following lines are a meaningful testimony:
… although the bureaucracy may try to sever entirely the umbilical cord with its past, the working class and Marxist ideology, it is one thing to try and quite another to succeed. What is involved here is an ongoing process which is far from completed; and it is obvious that there may be very violent reactions.[7]
Whatever the intention be, these kind of explanations turn into concessions to the bureaucracy. Mandel and his followers, who theorised the phenomenon of the “bureaucratic dictatorship” on the basis of a conception of “workers’ state with bureaucracy”, make even the “national revolutionary powers” that are product of national liberation revolutions fit into the category of “workers’ states”. The revolutions of Yugoslavia, China and Vietnam, which kept the working class away from power from the very beginning and only had an anti-capitalist content on the basis of national socialism, are appraised as “socialist revolutions deformed from the beginning”. About the revolutions in these countries Mandel says the following:
The partial and not total break with their Stalinist past meant the leadership of these parties still held bureaucratic organizational positions both in terms of their internal regime and their relations with the masses. Consequently these revolutionary victories were not accompanied by the institutionalisation of direct (soviet) workers’ and people’s power. From the beginning the party apparatus was identified with the state. Bureaucratisation and depoliticisation of the masses - both of which were reinforced by the rapid emergence of exorbitant material privileges of a new bureaucracy - become more and more firmly established. So we can legitimately speak of socialist revolutions bureaucratically manipulated and deformed from the start. [8]
Thus Mandel enriches Marxist literature with another “theoretical” concept after “the bureaucratic workers’ state”: “socialist revolutions deformed from the very beginning!”
Besides, Mandel and his followers define the revolutions in Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada as “genuine popular socialist revolutions” just because they were not led by parties of Stalinist origin (!):
Later in Cuba, Grenada, and Nicaragua, authentic socialist popular revolutions took place that are clearly distinguished from the Yugoslav, Chinese, and Vietnamese revolutions because they were led by revolutionary parties coming not out of Stalinism but from differentiation and development of anti-imperialist and socialist currents from their own countries. Consequently the processes of bureaucratisation of power have been much less in these countries compared to the others. Also limited and still insufficient steps have been taken towards an institutionalisation of workers’ and people’s power, more locally than nationally.[9]
What is the measure used in these assessments? The scope of revolutions or whether these revolutions take the revolutionary proletariat to power or not? Or that their effective leaderships are not of Stalinist origin, or whether they assumed an attitude against the Soviet bureaucracy without completely breaking away from it? There is no doubt that to make a proper assessment it is not enough to take into account the position of the leaderships of these revolutions in the face of the Soviet bureaucracy. Essentially one has to analyse the class nature of the revolutionary leadership, the scope of revolution and whether it takes the proletariat to power. How far a correct attitude could it be to characterise a revolution that cannot end up in a proletarian dictatorship and can never in the final analysis go beyond a “nationalist” outlook as a “social revolution” just because it starts liquidating capitalist relations (by the way, this happens on the basis of military, political, economic relations with the Soviet bureaucracy) and begins to implement a national development strategy on the basis of “nationalisations”.
The fundamental fallacy of the tendency represented by Mandel is so striking that they have kept characterising the Cuban revolution, which developed on the basis of a national liberation revolution and submitted to the Soviet bureaucracy after a national revolutionary power was established, as an “authentic popular socialist revolution”. The power of national liberationist “Cadillist” leadership of the Cuban revolution has been compared with the dictatorship of the proletariat flowed from the October Revolution. Again, the power of Sandinist leadership (which included bourgeois elements) of the Nicaraguan Revolution that did not go beyond the scope of a national revolution is characterised as a “much less bureaucratised power” coming out of “an authentic popular socialist revolution”. Mandel has always sought to overcome the problem he has faced by simply coupling the concepts of socialism and people.
However, it is well known that the theory of permanent revolution defended by Trotsky puts the founding of the dictatorship of the proletariat as necessary condition for the revolutions to elevate to a level that will comprise the socialist goal of the proletariat. Some Trotskyist tendencies put the October proletarian revolution in the same pot with the other revolutions that remain within limits of national liberation revolutions and end up in the establishment of national liberationist powers. And this attitude of those Trotskyist tendencies is, above all, at variance with the perspective of permanent revolution advanced by Trotsky.
It is a theoretical monstrosity established by the Mandelite tendency to put national liberation revolutions into the category of socialist revolutions and define all national states founded after these revolutions as “workers’ states bureaucratised from the very beginning”. For instance the following lines constitute a typical example for this strangeness: “it must also be stressed that, as long as it is not linked to the emergence of direct power of workers based on democratically elected workers’ councils, those workers’ states that issue from the overthrow of capitalism in many underdeveloped countries are destined to be bureaucratised from the very beginning.”[10] Just as in Mandel’s other theoretical sophistries such as “a derived”, “indirect”, “dictatorship of the proletariat in socio-theoretical sense”, we have here the same strangeness of “a workers’ state bureaucratised from the very beginning” which opens its eyes to life without the birth of “a direct power of workers based on democratically elected workers’ councils”, i.e. without the working class coming to power.
Another thing to be remembered here is the schematic grading system of Mandel on which he bases his assessments such as “bureaucratised workers’ states”. That the soviet power emerged after the October Revolution underwent a bureaucratic deformation as Lenin himself put it and that this evil grew into a fully-fledged bureaucratic degeneration, these two phenomena, have been used to invent a mechanical classification such that we end up with as if there is a generalised distinction of “deformed workers’ states” and “degenerated workers’ states”. Yet, the phenomena such as bureaucratic deformation and degeneration are peculiar to the history of the Soviet Union and it is not correct to apply them to countries where no workers’ revolution has ever happened. But such kind of approaches have been established in the name of Trotskyism for years and even in some cases those Trotskyists who say “deformed workers’ state” and those who say “degenerated workers’ state” in relation to appraising certain historical events could come against each other. However, what is wrong with this is not one of degree, but of the approach itself on the whole.