Burma Is Not Cuba: Pierre Frank and the Property-Form Trap

What Made a Workers’ State

This version of the piece incorporates a substantial correction, prompted by Alex Green’s comment on the original publication. The postscript at the end sets out what was overstated and what has been revised.

TL;DR

Pierre Frank’s Le stalinisme took property forms as the primary criterion for the class character of a state, but insisted that ‘property forms’ meant the destruction of capitalist class rule, not public ownership as such. Ne Win’s compensated nationalisation of Burmese industry in 1962 left the Burmese bourgeoisie intact as a class. Fidel Castro’s expropriation of Cuban and American capital between 1959 and 1961 destroyed capitalist class rule. Same balance sheet in state accounts, categorically different states. The principle commits the tradition to defending Cuba on grounds different from defending the late USSR, and it refuses the recurring temptation, visible in CWI and RCI history, to treat any state nationalisation as socialist progress regardless of what happened to capitalist class rule.

In November 1976, Pierre Frank wrote the introduction to a collection of his essays on Stalinism. He had been a member of Trotsky’s secretariat at Prinkipo, a founder of the Fourth International, a survivor of the Vichy detention that had killed many of his comrades. Le stalinisme was the synthesis of a working life. The introduction begins with an admission that does not appear in the simplified accounts of his framework: ‘the problem of bureaucracy in the workers’ state proved more complex than Marx and Lenin had thought’.

The reading lists that turned Frank into a categorical theorist of property forms missed what he was actually doing. The framework in Le stalinisme is not a matter of fitting states to boxes. It is an argument about what property forms have to do to count, what the bureaucracy does and does not do, and what the tradition owes the answer it had worked out by the late 1970s.

Half a century later, with the workers’ states of Eastern Europe restored to capitalism for three decades and the Soviet successor regime an oligarchic capitalism whose imperialism is now invading Ukraine, the question might seem antiquarian. It is not. The principle Frank was defending has practical consequences that have not aged: how socialists today should think about Cuba, about state nationalisations carried out by military regimes, about the recurring temptation to treat any expansion of state property as socialist progress regardless of what has actually happened to capitalist class rule.

Property forms and process

Frank’s starting point was Trotsky’s thesis defining Stalinism as the political expression of the bureaucracy of a degenerated workers’ state. The Soviet bureaucracy, on this reading, was not a new ruling class. It rested on social property forms it had not created. It defended those forms ‘in its own way’, because those forms were the basis of its own privileges. Its international policy, however, aimed at the maintenance of the status quo, not at the victory of world revolution. The two halves of the formulation pull in different directions, and the second is doing analytical work the first looks like it has settled.

For Frank, property forms are the primary criterion for whether a state is a workers’ state at all. But ‘property forms’ does not mean ‘public ownership’. It means the destruction of capitalist class rule: expropriation of the bourgeoisie as a class, the dismantling of the old state apparatus, the removal of the productive forces from private ownership on a scale that makes capitalist restoration impossible without political rupture. The IMG pamphlet on the class nature of the workers’ states makes the point sharply: the nationalisation of the coal industry by agents of the bourgeoisie in England is not the same thing as the nationalisation of industry in Russia by agents of the revolutionary proletariat. Both produced public ownership. One left capitalist class rule intact; the other destroyed it. The difference is not quantitative but categorical.

The process by which the destruction of capitalist class rule was achieved then determines what kind of workers’ state results. The 1917 revolution produced a workers’ state whose degeneration under Stalinist bureaucratic counter-revolution Trotsky documented in The Revolution Betrayed. The Red Army’s occupation of Eastern Europe after 1945 produced what Frank called deformed workers’ states: workers’ states because the Cold War drove the bureaucracy to complete the destruction of capitalist class rule as a defensive measure; deformed because the working class had not been the agent of its own emancipation, and the bureaucracy that ruled would have to be overthrown by political revolution before genuine socialist construction could begin.

Readers get Frank wrong in two directions. Some turn him into a property-form fetishist: any expansion of public ownership counts as socialist progress. Others turn him into a workerist: only mass revolutionary action from below can produce a workers’ state. Neither is Frank’s position. Property forms decide whether a workers’ state exists. What counts as a property form for these purposes is the destruction of capitalist class rule, not the extension of the state sector. The process then determines what kind of workers’ state has been produced.

Burma is not Cuba

The principle has a sharp edge when applied to the post-war wave of nationalisations beyond the Soviet sphere.

Cuba between 1959 and 1961 destroyed capitalist class rule. Batista’s army and state apparatus were dismantled by armed struggle. Agrarian reform expropriated the large landowners. The nationalisation of American capital in 1960 was not a compensated acquisition of major industries; it was the confiscation of enemy property in an open class confrontation with US imperialism. By 1961, substantially all of the means of production were in the hands of the state, from which the Cuban and American bourgeoisies had been driven as classes. The 26th of July Movement was a petty-bourgeois guerrilla formation drawing primarily on the peasantry rather than the urban proletariat; the working class largely tailed rather than led. All of this complicates the picture without overriding it. Capitalist class rule was broken. That is why the Fourth International characterised Cuba as a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations rather than a deformed workers’ state in the Eastern European sense: the rupture with capitalist class rule was carried out through a genuine popular process, even where the political forms of that process were structurally bureaucratised from the outset.

Burma in 1962, when General Ne Win’s military government nationalised industry under the rubric of the ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’, did not destroy capitalist class rule. The 1962 coup was a military takeover that preserved the state apparatus rather than dismantling it. The nationalisations were compensated acquisitions of major industries and foreign holdings; the Burmese bourgeoisie was not expropriated as a class. Trade and agriculture remained substantially in private hands. Capitalist social relations continued to organise the countryside and much of the urban economy. The result was a Bonapartist capitalist regime with a large state sector, not a workers’ state, however extensive its public ownership.

The distinction is not simply ‘generals versus masses’. Bureaucratic action can destroy capitalist class rule when it goes far enough, as the Red Army’s actions in Eastern Europe demonstrate. The distinction is what the political action was capable of doing to capitalist class rule. Ne Win’s coup was capable of nationalising major industry. It was not capable of expropriating the bourgeoisie as a class, because it did not need to and did not want to. Castro’s revolution destroyed the bourgeoisie as a class because the confrontation with US imperialism forced it to; the state apparatus that could have protected private property had already been dismantled.

The CWI tradition, in its various incarnations, has at moments been willing to extend the workers’-state category to states like Burma and Syria on the strength of the size of their public sectors. The RCI carries the residue of that habit forward. Frank refused it. Public ownership is not sufficient. What is sufficient is the destruction of the bourgeoisie as a class.

Mass pressure and its temptations

Frank’s framework contains a corollary that has been more difficult to handle. The bureaucracy’s existence is tied to the survival of property forms it did not create and cannot indefinitely manage on its own. Under sufficient mass pressure, in conditions of acute crisis, bureaucratic leaderships can be pushed into actions whose consequences they did not intend. The Yugoslav Communist Party’s break with Stalin in 1948, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Cuban transition: all involved bureaucratic or post-bureaucratic leaderships taking actions whose property-form consequences exceeded their starting intentions.

Pablo and Frank in the early 1950s drew from this the conclusion that revolutionary working-class upheavals could be projected through Stalinist mass parties under sufficient pressure, that the strategic task was to position revolutionaries inside the mass parties to assist this objective revolutionary process. The Pabloist deviation was not the recognition that mass pressure acts on bureaucracies. It was the leap from observation to strategy: assigning the role of revolutionary instrument to bureaucratic leaderships, dissolving the case for independent revolutionary parties, treating the objective process as a substitute for the subjective factor.

The substantive point worth keeping from this argument is the one the orthodox critics were right about: the recognition that bureaucracies sometimes act against their own intentions does not generate a strategy. It does not authorise the dissolution of independent revolutionary politics into the slipstream of bureaucratic action. It does not turn the property-form consequences of bureaucratic decisions into evidence that the bureaucracy is leading a revolution.

That is the live application today. The recurring temptation to treat the residual state property of Bonapartist regimes as evidence of socialist content, the willingness to extend solidarity to such regimes on grounds of what they have nationalised rather than what they have done to their own working class to put those property forms in place: all of this reproduces elements of the Pabloist error in degenerated form. The agency decides. What the regime did to its own working class is the determining question, not what appears on the balance sheet.

What the principle commits us to

Three contemporary commitments follow.

Cuba is to be defended against imperialist pressure and the threat of capitalist restoration on the grounds that the 1959-1961 process destroyed capitalist class rule through a genuine popular rupture, and that the property forms established by that rupture remain the social basis on which any future political revolution would have to build. That the revolution was led by a petty-bourgeois guerrilla movement rather than an independent workers’ party, that the urban working class largely tailed rather than led, is why Cuba is a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations rather than a deformed workers’ state in the Eastern European sense: the distinction carrying the weight of the difference between a revolution that happened and then hardened, and one that was administered into existence from above. The defence is not unconditional. It does not require defending the Castroite leadership’s bureaucratic deformations, or pretending the regime is something other than what it is. It requires recognising that capitalist restoration in Cuba would be a historical defeat for the working class, and that the principle distinguishing Cuba from Burma is the principle that distinguishes the cases.

The Fourth International, in The Cuban Revolution, the Castroist Current, and the Fourth International (1981), was explicit that Cuba had not yet produced a crystallised bureaucratic caste comparable to those of the Eastern European workers’ states, that the tendencies toward bureaucratisation remained reversible through internal transformation and the extension of the revolution in Latin America, and that revolutionary Marxists therefore did not advance the same strategic objective for Cuba, political revolution to overthrow a bureaucratic caste, as they did for the USSR. The revolution has not spread sufficiently and durably in Latin America. As a result the tendencies the resolution identified have deepened, and the question of reversibility is harder to answer than it was in 1981. The analytical framework that distinguished Cuba from Eastern Europe on grounds of the popular character of the process, however, remains the correct one.

State nationalisations carried out by regimes that have not broken capitalist class rule do not constitute socialist progress, and the fact of nationalisation generates no solidarity with the regime that carried it out. The Burmese state-property of the 1960s, the Syrian state sector at various moments of its history, the residual public ownership of various Bonapartist regimes in the post-colonial world: these are matters of fact about who owns what. They tell you nothing about the class character of the regimes that own them. If imperialist pressure moves to restore nationalised industry to private capital, socialists have reasons to oppose that restoration, not because the regime deserves solidarity but because capitalist restoration serves imperialism and weakens the conditions for future working-class advance. The grounds for opposition are anti-imperialist, not defencist. No workers’ state is being defended. The distinction matters: collapsing it produces exactly the campist drift this principle was designed to prevent.

And, returning to the Soviet case where this argument began: the bureaucratic management of nationalised property over the heads of the working class did not exhaust the political questions posed to socialists inside the workers’ state, and it could not override the rights of the nations the bureaucracy oppressed. The defencist subordination of Ukrainian self-determination to the workers’-state question, which Red Mole’s campism coverage has traced through the uneven educational programme of the Fourth International, treated the property forms as if they were the whole answer. They were not the whole answer even where they were the correct answer.

The Fourth International made the same argument about Eritrea in 1981, pressing Cuba to recognise that its support for the Ethiopian regime did not constitute internationalism and that the rights of an oppressed nation could not be subordinated to the defence of a workers’ state or an alliance within the socialist camp.

What the tradition owes the answer

Frank died in 1984. He did not see the collapse of the workers’ states he had spent forty years trying to defend politically while attacking bureaucratically. The framework he left behind anticipated the collapse without naming its date: the bureaucracy could not indefinitely manage the property forms it had not created, and the choice between political revolution and capitalist restoration would eventually be forced. Capitalist restoration won.

That outcome does not retire the framework. It clarifies what the framework was always doing. Property forms mattered to Frank because the destruction of capitalist class rule mattered. Public ownership as such was never the point. The framework was about how socialists distinguish revolutionary action from bureaucratic manoeuvre, how a workers’ state is built and how it is unmade, what the working class itself contributes to its own emancipation that no regime can substitute for.

That principle survives the workers’ states. It is the resource the tradition has for refusing the campist drift that calls Russian state action anti-imperialist, the residual statism that calls Burmese nationalisation socialist, and the property-form fetishism that calls anything with public ownership a step toward socialism. Frank had worked the principle out by 1977. The tradition’s task is to remember what it was for, and to state it accurately when it is invoked.

Postscript: on the correction

The original version of this piece, published on 1 June, stated that Frank held ‘the class character of a state is determined by the process that produced its institutions, not by the property forms in isolation’. Alex Green pointed out in the comments that no such formulation appears in Le stalinisme. He was right, and the piece has been substantially revised in the sections dealing with the process principle and the Burma-Cuba distinction.

Frank’s actual position is that property forms are the primary criterion for the class character of a state, but that ‘property forms’ means the destruction of capitalist class rule: the expropriation of the bourgeoisie as a class, the dismantling of the old state apparatus, the removal of the productive forces from private ownership on a scale sufficient to make capitalist restoration impossible without political rupture. Public ownership as such is not sufficient. What is sufficient is what Frank called, following Trotsky, the social conquests of the revolution.

The class process through which the destruction of capitalist class rule was achieved then determines what kind of workers’ state results: healthy (which since 1917 has meant nothing more than the first months of the Bolshevik power), degenerated (the USSR after 1923), or deformed (Eastern Europe after 1945, where the Red Army completed the destruction of capitalist class rule as a defensive measure of Soviet foreign policy).

The Burma-Cuba distinction survives on the corrected basis but on different grounds than the original piece suggested. Burma is not a workers’ state because Ne Win’s compensated nationalisations left the Burmese bourgeoisie intact as a class, preserved the state apparatus, and did not extend to the countryside or to commerce. Cuba is a workers’ state because the 1959-1961 process dismantled Batista’s state apparatus, expropriated both Cuban and American bourgeoisies as classes, and extended to substantially all of the means of production. The difference is not the presence or absence of mass mobilisation as such. It is what the political action was capable of doing to capitalist class rule, which in Cuba’s case was inseparable from the popular character of the confrontation with US imperialism.

The lesson is a general one and it belongs on the record. Characterisations of the tradition’s positions must be verifiable against primary sources. That editorial standard exists precisely because the temptation to push a framework beyond what its authors actually argued is a recurring one, particularly in contemporary polemic where the framework is being made to do work against present-day opponents. Thanks to Alex Green for holding the piece to that standard.