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Leon Trotsky on the Soviet Workers State (Quote of the Week) The Left Opposition of Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, led the struggle against the usurpation of political power in the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy beginning in 1923-24 and the degeneration of the Third International (Comintern). Writing in 1936, Trotsky insisted that revolutionary Marxists must fight for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state and for workers political revolution to oust the parasitic bureaucracy. Today, we apply this program to the remaining deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. The decision of the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern, according to which socialism in the Soviet Union has “finally and irrevocably” triumphed—regardless of the low level of labor productivity as compared with the advanced capitalist countries and independently of the course of development of all the rest of the world!—is a crude and dangerous lie…. The principal mass of the means of production in the industry of the Soviet Union has grown tremendously and remains in the hands of the state—in agriculture, in the hands of the kolkhozes, which stand between state and private property. But not even state property is as yet socialist property, for the latter has as its premise the dying away of the state as the guardian of property, the mitigation of inequality and the gradual dissolution of the property concept even in the morals and customs of society. The real development in the Soviet Union in recent years has followed a directly opposite road. Inequality grows and, together with it, state coercion. Given favorable domestic and international conditions, the transition is possible from the present state property to socialism; given unfavorable conditions, however, a reversion to capitalism is also possible…. If a social counterrevolution—i.e., the overthrow of state ownership of the means of production and of the land as well as the reestablishment of private property—is necessary for the return of the USSR to capitalism, then for the further development of socialism a political revolution has become inevitable, i.e., the violent overthrow of the political rule of the degenerated bureaucracy while maintaining the property relations established by the October Revolution. The proletarian vanguard of the USSR, basing itself upon the toiling masses of the whole country and upon the revolutionary movement of the whole world, will have to batter down the bureaucracy by force, restore Soviet democracy, eliminate the enormous privileges, and assure a genuine advance to socialist equality…. The USSR is a state which bases itself upon the property relationships created by the proletarian revolution and which is administered by a labor bureaucracy in the interests of new privileged strata. The Soviet Union can be called a workers’ state in approximately the same sense—despite the vast difference in scale—in which a trade union, led and betrayed by opportunists, that is, by agents of capital, can be called a workers’ organization. Just as revolutionists defend every trade union, even the most thoroughly reformist, from the class enemy, combating intransigently the treacherous leaders at the same time, so the parties of the Fourth International defend the USSR against the blows of imperialism without for a single moment giving up the struggle against the reactionary Stalinist apparatus. —Leon Trotsky, “The Fourth International and the Soviet Union” (July 1936)
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