Defend the Gains of the Chinese Revolution

(Quote of the Week)

Drawing on his analogy between the Soviet degenerated workers state and a trade union, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky asserted the critical need to defend the USSR against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution. Today, this question is urgently posed in regard to defense of China, which, despite the Stalinist bureaucracy’s undermining of the gains of the 1949 Revolution, is the largest of the remaining deformed workers states and the imperialists’ strategic target for counterrevolution.

From the point of view of our program, the trade union should be an organization of class struggle. What then should be our attitude to the American Federation of Labor? At its head stand manifest agents of the bourgeoisie. Upon all essential questions, Messrs. Green, Woll, and Company carry out a political line directly opposed to the interests of the proletariat.... But the AFL does not because of this cease to be an organization of the trade unions....

The function of Stalin, like the function of Green, has a dual character. Stalin serves the bureaucracy and thus the world bourgeoisie; but he cannot serve the bureaucracy without defending that social foundation which the bureaucracy exploits in its own interests. To that extent does Stalin defend nationalized property from imperialist attacks and from the too impatient and avaricious layers of the bureaucracy itself. However, he carries through this defense with methods that prepare the general destruction of Soviet society. It is exactly because of this that the Stalinist clique must be overthrown. But it is the revolutionary proletariat who must overthrow it. The proletariat cannot subcontract this work to the imperialists. In spite of Stalin, the proletariat defends the USSR from imperialist attacks.

Historical development has accustomed us to the most varied kind of trade unions: militant, reformist, revolutionary, reactionary, liberal, and Catholic. It is otherwise with a workers’ state. Such a phenomenon we see for the first time. That accounts for our inclination to approach the USSR exclusively from the point of view of the norms of the revolutionary program. Meanwhile the workers’ state is an objective historical fact which is being subjected to the influence of different historical forces and can as we see come into full contradiction with “traditional” norms.

—Leon Trotsky, “Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State?” (November 1937)