When a Fourth International classic from 1967 provides sharper analysis than contemporary Trotskyist debates

Pierre Frank died in 1984. Shame. He would’ve enjoyed watching the AWL and Socialismo o Barbarie reinvent arguments he’d already demolished in 1967.

Ideas for Freedom, November 2025. Highbury Roundhouse. Elaine Jones from the AWL, Daniela L from Socialismo o Barbarie, arguing whether the Soviet state was progressive. Not whether it was capitalist—Elaine’s more sophisticated than that. She calls it “bureaucratic collectivism.” But listen to the actual argumentation? It echoes Tony Cliff’s state capitalism theory beat for beat. Same theoretical moves. Same inability to explain why the bureaucracy collapsed in 1991.

Frank saw it coming. They didn’t.

This isn’t academic point-scoring. It matters because China, Vietnam, Cuba—these formations won’t wait for the left to sort out its theory. The working class in Beijing faces choices the Soviet working class couldn’t navigate. Political revolution or capitalist restoration. Those were always the options. Understanding why requires going back to Frank’s 1967 speech, “The Class Nature of the Workers’ States.”

Fourteen pages. Delivered at a Fourth International school in August 1967, fifty years after October. Frank systematically addressed every theoretical problem still dividing the contemporary left: Was the Soviet Union progressive despite bureaucratic degeneration? Is the bureaucracy a ruling class or a social layer? Why did bureaucratic “rule” collapse so easily, leaving the working class unable to defend nationalized property?

The answers Frank provided weren’t abstractions. They explained why the Fourth International’s analysis—the USSR as a degenerated workers’ state ruled by a parasitic bureaucratic layer—was vindicated by history. State capitalism theory? Failed. New class theory? Failed. Both couldn’t predict or explain what actually happened.

Part One: Frank’s Demolition of “State Capitalism” and Its Bureaucratic Collectivist Variant

Elaine calls the AWL’s position “Bureaucratic Collectivism.” A theory claiming the Soviet Union was neither capitalist nor socialist but a new form of class society. She’s careful about terminology. But the argumentation? It echoes state capitalism theory. Perhaps because Martin Thomas, the group’s central leader, has explicitly defended Cliff’s state capitalism analysis in the past.

Frank refuted both variants. The explicit state capitalism of Cliff and the implicit version hiding behind bureaucratic collectivist language.

Frank traced state capitalism theory back to the Mensheviks in 1917. Martov’s faction. Defeated by the Bolsheviks, nursing grudges, arguing that Russia—being economically backward—couldn’t build socialism. Had to develop capitalism first. After October? The Mensheviks claimed the Bolsheviks had simply created a new form of capitalism where “the bureaucracy was the ‘collective capitalist.’”

This theory got picked up by the Italian Bordigists. Then by Bruno Rizzi and James Burnham. By the 1950s, Tony Cliff was developing his own variant in Britain. Different names, same fundamental confusion.

Here’s Frank’s core refutation:

“The trouble for those people who speak of ‘state capitalism’, is that there is no genuine capitalist in the world who will recognize, in the Soviet Union and other similar states, a capitalist society. The development of society in the Soviet Union and other such states, does not follow the laws of capitalist development. Their economic growth is altogether different from capitalist society with its crises, booms, depressions, etc.”

That’s the decisive point. If the USSR were capitalist—or a variant form of capitalism dressed up as “bureaucratic collectivism”—it would follow capitalist laws of motion. Periodic crises. Boom-bust cycles. Competition between competing capitals. The tendency toward concentration of capital.

Instead? The Soviet economy displayed planned growth. Elimination of cyclical crises. Accumulation directed by state planning, not market competition.

Now, this doesn’t mean the Soviet economy had no problems. It had profound ones. Ernest Mandel spent decades tracking them. But—and here’s what both Elaine and Daniela missed at Highbury Roundhouse—these were crises of a different character.

Mandel tracked Soviet growth rates from the 1950s onwards. The numbers tell the story. Average annual growth of national income: 11.3 percent in 1951-55. Down to 9.2 percent in 1956-60. Still at 6.5 percent in 1961-65. Then the slide accelerates. 7.75 percent in 1966-70. Down to 5.75 percent in 1971-75. By 1981-85? 3.5 percent. Abel Aganbegyan, Gorbachev’s chief economic advisor, went further: once you adjusted for hidden price rises, the growth rate during the eleventh five-year plan was effectively zero.

Crisis? Absolutely. But not a capitalist crisis.

The Soviet crisis was a crisis of underproduction of use-values—scarcity. Not capitalism’s characteristic crisis of overproduction of exchange-values. As Mandel put it, “a specific crisis of a specific society in transition,” not a crisis following capitalist logic.

Look at how the problems manifested:

Declining growth rates from double digits to zero over three decades. Generalized waste from bureaucratic mismanagement—Andropov estimated one-third of work hours wasted, and Gorbachev repeated it because it was true. Technological backwardness relative to advanced capitalist countries, growing more pronounced from the late 1970s. Chronic shortages of consumer goods despite massive industrial capacity.

These problems arose from the bureaucracy’s inability to manage the transition from extensive to intensive industrialization. That’s a problem of planning mechanisms and political control. Not capitalist market dynamics.

The distinction is decisive. A capitalist crisis produces unemployment and unused capacity alongside unsold commodities. The Soviet crisis? Labor shortages alongside unfilled consumer demand. The problem wasn’t “too much.” It was “too little.” Specifically, the bureaucracy’s inability to efficiently allocate resources and respond to actual social needs.

Ernest Mandel, writing in 1990 as the USSR was collapsing, vindicated Frank’s analysis with devastating clarity. Mandel showed that Trotsky and the Left Opposition had proposed the opposite of Stalin’s command economy: voluntary collectivization, raising workers’ living standards, reducing bureaucratic expenses, market mechanisms operating within the framework of socialized property. As Mandel put it in Trotsky’s Economic Ideas and the Soviet Union Today, the Opposition’s program was “marked by an internal coherence that is still impressive today”—raising productivity through workers’ initiative, not bureaucratic coercion. Stalin’s actual program? “Full-scale industrialization was accompanied by a lowering, not a raising of real wages, by a catastrophic deterioration, not an improvement of labor conditions.” The bureaucracy absorbed resources that should have gone to workers. The crisis of the 1980s proved Trotsky right: “Without a firm monetary unit, commercial accounting can only increase the chaos.” Without workers’ democracy, quality collapses. Without market feedback mechanisms, planning becomes bureaucratic fantasy. This wasn’t capitalist crisis—overproduction and market collapse. This was planning crisis—bureaucratic methods incompatible with advanced industrial economy.

Picture the absurdity Mandel documented. The USSR in the 1980s: world’s primary producer of mineral fertilizers. Producing 4.5 times more tractors than the United States. And yet? Smaller quantity of vegetables. Because bureaucratic priorities created fundamental disproportion between industry and agriculture. Over-expansion of armaments production and unproductive administrative expenses choked off growth by taking vital resources from both means of production and consumer goods.

A capitalist crisis this was not.

So was the Soviet state progressive despite these problems? That’s what Elaine and Daniela were actually debating at Highbury Roundhouse.

Frank’s answer: yes, but conditionally: progressive nationalised property but a bureauractic state that needed to be smashed through political revolution. The collectivised economy was progressive in relation to capitalism because it abolished capitalist property relations and demonstrated the superiority of planning over market anarchism. The USSR transformed from a backward agricultural country into the second-largest industrial power on earth. No recessions, no crises of overproduction for over fifty years. That’s not nothing.

But—and this is crucial—progressive doesn’t mean socialist. Doesn’t mean acceptable. The bureaucratic degeneration was a catastrophe that eventually destroyed those gains. The question wasn’t whether to defend bureaucratic rule. The question was whether to defend the property relations established by the revolution against both bureaucratic mismanagement and capitalist restoration.

Elaine’s position collapses this distinction. If the USSR was bureaucratic collectivism—a new class society—then there’s nothing progressive to defend. No reason to call for political revolution rather than supporting any force that would overthrow the bureaucracy, including pro-capitalist forces.

And when the AWL logic gets pressed on this—what about the mass privatizations of the 1990s, were those progressive?—the response gets disasterous. Because if the USSR wasn’t a workers’ state, even degenerated, then capitalist restoration wasn’t really counter-revolution. It was leaving a dead-end and returning to the path to socialism, since socialism follows capitalism. The destruction of the planned economy was good news to the AWL, which is why it supported Yeltsin.

Frank anticipated this confusion:

“The development of society in the Soviet Union did not bring about an expansion, a development of the bureaucracy and of Stalinism. In other words, this so-called ‘new ruling class’ has shown itself as being, not linked with the development, but on the contrary, in contradiction to the almost immediate development of the productive forces in society itself.”

Here’s the historical vindication. After Stalin’s death and the beginning of destalinization, did the bureaucracy strengthen and consolidate like a ruling class would?

No. It began to decompose.

Economic development created conditions that undermined bureaucratic rule. The bureaucracy faced contradictions it couldn’t resolve through its own mechanisms. Eventually, it collapsed.

If the bureaucracy were a genuine ruling class defending a new mode of production—as both explicit state capitalism theory and the bureaucratic collectivist variant claim—it should have been able to defend itself. Ruling classes reproduce themselves. That’s what defines them. The capitalist class does this through control of private property and market mechanisms. The feudal class did it through control of land.

What was the mechanism by which a “new class” bureaucracy could defend itself?

Frank’s answer cuts to the bone: the bureaucracy had no independent material base. It could only exist by controlling state property. When the working class didn’t make political revolution to democratize that state property, and when economic development undermined bureaucratic control mechanisms, the bureaucracy itself began to disintegrate.

Part Two: Why “New Class” Theory Contradicts Marxism

Frank also demolished the “new class” theory. Associated with Milovan Djilas in Yugoslavia, later picked up by Frank Furedi and others. The theory claims the Soviet Union represented a new exploiting society based on bureaucratic control of nationalized property.

The bureaucratic collectivist position Elaine defended at Highbury Roundhouse is essentially a variant of this. Different terminology, same structure. The USSR as a new social formation with the bureaucracy as its ruling class.

The logic is seductive. The USSR obviously isn’t capitalist. It’s not socialist either. Therefore—must be a new form of class society. The bureaucracy, unable to restore capitalism and unable to accept workers’ democracy, becomes a ruling class sui generis. A class unto itself.

Frank’s refutation is brief. Devastating. Relies on historical materialism:

“The new class theory is complete revisionism. Its supporters do not deny that the relationships of property are collective as they would be in a socialist society. They come then to the conclusion that you may have on the same relationships of property two totally differing societies, one socialist (if the working class rule) and another bureaucratic. It is in contradiction with Marx’s views, as expressed in his introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, where he maintained that according to the definite mode of production, there arises a definite kind of society.”

That’s the hammer blow.

If you accept that property relations are collective—nationalized—then according to historical materialism, those property relations will generate a specific form of society. You cannot have the same property relations producing two entirely different social formations simultaneously. A “socialist” one under workers’ rule and a “bureaucratic collectivist” one under bureaucratic rule.

The confusion comes from conflating the political superstructure (the form of rule) with the economic base (the property relations). A degenerated workers’ state has collective property relations as its base. Bureaucratic political rule as its superstructure. These aren’t contradictions requiring a new class theory to resolve. They’re a contradictory unity creating instability and pressure for change.

This is why the question of whether the Soviet state was progressive has a clear answer: progressive in its property relations, reactionary in its political form. The task wasn’t to defend the bureaucracy or to support capitalist restoration. The task was political revolution—workers overthrowing the bureaucracy while maintaining socialized property.

Critically, Frank pointed out that this pressure for change comes from economic development itself. As productive forces advance within a non-capitalist framework, the need for planning becomes more sophisticated. The need for input from educated workers increases. Bureaucratic methods of rule become increasingly incompatible with economic necessity.

“Trotsky was the only one to foresee, in The Revolution Betrayed, that the progress of the productive forces would enter into contradiction with bureaucratic rule.”

This is why both new class theory and state capitalism theory—including the bureaucratic collectivist variant—failed historically. They assumed the bureaucracy (or the bureaucratic class) could indefinitely reproduce itself.

History showed otherwise.

Part Three: Bureaucracy as a Social Layer, Not a Ruling Class

Frank’s analysis becomes most precise here. Most useful for understanding what actually happened in 1989-1991.

Frank made a fundamental distinction: bureaucracy isn’t just a method of rule. It’s a social layer with a specific material basis. This distinction isn’t semantic. It’s materialist. And it’s why the debate at Highbury Roundhouse kept talking past itself—neither Elaine nor Daniela adequately grasped this.

Frank explained the origin of this social layer through reference to Christian Rakovsky’s brilliant analysis from the 1920s:

“Bureaucracy is a social layer. We should not consider it, as many do, as a method of rule only... [The revolutionaries] became leaders of regiments, leaders of universities, leaders of big plants. These functional differences resulting from their shift brought with time social differentiation in the new society.”

The point is crucial. The bureaucracy emerged because the revolution succeeded in a backward country. The working class, despite its political consciousness, lacked the cultural and educational capacity to manage a complex economy immediately after taking power.

The revolutionaries themselves—workers, journalists, intellectuals—were transformed from clandestine operatives into administrators of state machinery. The party member who’d been running an underground printing press in 1916 found himself managing a steel plant in 1919. The worker who’d organized strikes became commissar of a Red Army regiment. The intellectual who’d written pamphlets became rector of a university.

This created social differentiation. A layer of specialists separated from productive labor. With access to material privileges unavailable to ordinary workers. With interests potentially in conflict with the revolution’s goals.

But—and this is the key Frank emphasizes—this is very different from a ruling class.

A ruling class is defined by its relationship to the means of production. The capitalist class owns private property. Reproduces itself through market mechanisms. The feudal class owned land. Reproduced itself through hereditary succession and control of the feudal hierarchy.

What was the material basis by which the Soviet bureaucracy could reproduce itself as a ruling class?

Frank identifies the answer: it could not.

The bureaucracy depended entirely on the continued existence of nationalized property and state control. If capitalist property were restored, the bureaucracy would lose its entire social foundation. The bureaucracy couldn’t, like a ruling class, adapt itself to multiple property forms.

This explains what state capitalism and new class theories—including the bureaucratic collectivist variant—cannot explain: why did the bureaucracy collapse so suddenly in 1989-1991? Why didn’t it fight harder to defend “its” state property against capitalist restoration? Why did key sections of the bureaucracy itself facilitate the transition to capitalism?

Picture Moscow, 1991. Yeltsin standing on a tank. The Communist Party—seventy-four years in power—folds within days. No serious resistance. Large sections of the nomenklatura calculating they could better defend their privileges through privatization than through maintaining state property.

Some became oligarchs. Transitioned directly from party secretaries to capitalist property owners. Others were overwhelmed by forces they couldn’t control. But the point stands: no ruling class behaves this way. A ruling class fights for the preservation of its property relations. The Soviet bureaucracy abandoned its base. Frequently facilitated its own dissolution.

And this is why the question “was the Soviet state progressive?” requires Frank’s analysis to answer properly. The state embodied contradictory elements: progressive property relations established by the revolution, reactionary political forms imposed by the bureaucracy. As the bureaucracy decomposed, it couldn’t defend those progressive property relations because it had no independent material stake in them.

Part Four: The Historical Test—Decomposition, Not Stability

Frank delivered this speech in 1967. Fourteen pages that cut through decades of confused debate. By that date, the Soviet bureaucracy had already begun its long decomposition. Frank cataloged the evidence:

“We have seen the tremendous crisis of Stalinism, a decomposition of Stalinism. It started in 1948 when there was the break between Yugoslavia and Moscow. Then we had in 1953 the uprising in East Berlin, the uprisings in the concentration camps in the Soviet Union, in 1956 the Twentieth Congress and the big events in Poland and Hungary, and then in 1959 the beginning of the Sino-Soviet conflict. And now we see, and see almost every day, manifestations of the decomposition of Stalinism.”

What’s crucial: Frank distinguished between the bureaucracy’s continued existence and power, and the decomposition of Stalinism as a cohesive system.

The bureaucracy didn’t disappear. Its regime persisted. But its capacity to maintain unified control over the international communist movement? To enforce a single line? To prevent splits and contradictions within the communist bloc? Shattered.

This is precisely what state capitalism and new class theories—including the bureaucratic collectivist variant—couldn’t predict. If the USSR were a stable capitalist state or a new class society with the bureaucracy as its ruling class, it should have become more powerful and consolidated as its productive forces developed.

Instead it became more unstable. More internally contradictory. More prone to splits and decomposition.

Tito broke with Moscow in 1948. Stalin couldn’t bring him to heel. East German workers rose in 1953. Polish and Hungarian workers rose in 1956. The Hungarian revolution required Soviet tanks to crush—the local bureaucracy couldn’t manage it alone. Sino-Soviet split in 1959. Prague Spring in 1968. Solidarity in Poland in 1980.

Each crisis revealed the same pattern: economic development creating conditions that undermined bureaucratic control. The bureaucracy responding with repression. The repression generating new contradictions.

Frank’s fourteen-page analysis provided the framework for understanding what happened from 1989-1991. The decomposition continued until the bureaucracy could no longer hold state power. At that point, significant sections of the bureaucracy itself—now called “oligarchs”—transitioned into capitalist property owners. Others were displaced.

The Fourth International theory predicted this trajectory. State capitalism and new class theories—including the bureaucratic collectivist variant—did not.

So was the Soviet state progressive? In 1967, yes—but already decomposing. By 1991? The progressive elements had been so thoroughly undermined by bureaucratic mismanagement that restoration became possible. The tragedy is that the working class, deprived of independent organization by decades of Stalinism, couldn’t carry out political revolution to preserve those progressive elements.

Part Five: What Both Organizations Missed at Highbury Roundhouse

The November 2025 debate clarified disagreements between Elaine and Daniela. Useful for that. But both missed something crucial that Frank’s analysis illuminates in just fourteen pages: the material basis of bureaucratic emergence and the conditions necessary for its reproduction.

Frank emphasized a factor nearly absent from contemporary debates: the lag between political consciousness and cultural development.

“There is a time lag between the political development of the working class and its cultural development. The masses are brought by the conditions of capitalist exploitation into conflict with capitalism... They can even, in certain conditions, overthrow capitalism, seize power, before, long before, they are able to manage the society which they have just taken into their hands.”

Frank continued:

“The conditions of the working class in capitalist society are such that workers give the best of their abilities to capitalism and are therefore exhausted by their work for the capitalists and do not have the possibility nor the material means to control even their own organisations. Then it comes to the society after capitalism has been overthrown, with the problem of managing the economy, the army, the universities... this lag between the political ability of the masses and their cultural capacity is something which—for a certain period—must unavoidably leave its influence.”

This is the material explanation for why bureaucracy emerged in the Soviet Union.

Not the result of Stalinist conspiracies. Not the inevitable nature of state property. It resulted from the fact that the working class, despite its revolutionary consciousness and political capacity to overthrow capitalism, lacked the cultural and educational resources to immediately manage a complex economy.

Picture the Leningrad worker in 1918. Literate—maybe. Educated in technical management? No. Experienced in running a factory? Only from the shop floor. Capable of organizing a soviet, leading a strike, fighting in the Red Army? Absolutely. Capable of managing steel production, calculating optimal resource allocation, coordinating transport networks? Not yet.

That gap created the need for specialists. Specialists became administrators. Administrators became a social layer.

This is why the question “was the Soviet state progressive?” can’t be answered with a simple yes or no. The state was progressive in that it created space for unprecedented economic development and proved planning’s superiority over market anarchism. But the bureaucratic form that development took created contradictions that eventually destroyed those gains.

Elaine’s position at Highbury Roundhouse was essentially: without genuine democracy, there’s no progress, so the Soviet state wasn’t progressive. True as far as it goes. But it doesn’t explain the material conditions that made bureaucracy nearly inevitable. Offers no program for raising the cultural level of the masses necessary for sustained workers’ control. And it doesn’t explain why massive sections of the Soviet working class resisted capitalist restoration even as the bureaucracy facilitated it.

Daniela’s response emphasized that despite bureaucratic degeneration, the Soviet state achieved real gains through nationalized property. Better healthcare, education, housing than capitalism would have provided. Also true. But doesn’t adequately explain why the bureaucracy became so ossified. Why it eventually collapsed. Why it couldn’t defend the very property relations it supposedly ruled through.

Frank’s analysis transcends both positions. Explains the material basis for bureaucratic emergence while insisting bureaucracy wasn’t inevitable forever. It was a product of specific historical conditions.

As those conditions changed—as the cultural level of the masses rose, as education expanded, as economic development advanced—the material basis for bureaucratic rule was undermined.

The political lesson is clear. Preventing the restoration of capitalism required political revolution by the working class. The working class had to seize control of the state apparatus from the bureaucracy. Establish workers’ democracy. Without this, capitalism would be restored.

This didn’t happen.

The working class in the Soviet Union, weakened by decades of bureaucratic rule and deprived of independent organization, was unable to carry out political revolution. The bureaucracy, unable to adapt and facing a choice between sharing power democratically or accepting capitalist restoration, frequently chose the latter.

Part Six: What This Means for Understanding China, Vietnam, and Cuba Today

Frank’s fourteen pages aren’t merely historical analysis. They provide a framework for understanding what happened to these non-capitalist formations—and what that means for revolutionary strategy today.

If we understand the bureaucracy as a parasitic social layer dependent on state property, rather than as a ruling class with an independent material base, we can understand exactly what happened in China and Vietnam: the bureaucracy facilitated capitalist restoration to preserve its privileges.

China isn’t a workers’ state anymore. Hasn’t been for decades. The Communist Party presides over a capitalist economy where workers have no control over production, where billionaires proliferate, where market mechanisms determine allocation. The commanding heights may have state involvement, but that’s state capitalism, not a degenerated workers’ state.

Vietnam followed the same trajectory. Đổi Mới wasn’t “market socialism”—it was capitalist restoration managed by the bureaucracy. Workers lost what minimal gains nationalized property had provided.

Cuba’s different. Still has nationalized property as its base, though the bureaucracy keeps testing how much capitalism it can introduce without losing control. The private sector expands. Foreign capital penetrates. The trajectory points toward restoration, not consolidation.

Frank’s analysis explains why this happened. The bureaucracy, lacking an independent material base, couldn’t defend nationalized property against restoration pressures. When economic crisis hit—when bureaucratic methods became obstacles to development—significant sections of the bureaucracy calculated they could better preserve privileges through transitioning to capitalism.

Moscow 1991 was the template. Party secretaries becoming oligarchs. State factory managers buying their own plants. Beijing followed the same logic, just more gradually. Deng Xiaoping’s faction understood what Gorbachev’s faction learned too late: you could manage the transition to capitalism, position yourself to benefit from it, rather than being swept away by it.

The Chinese working class never got the chance to make political revolution. By the time workers had the education and technical sophistication to potentially manage the economy democratically, the bureaucracy had already begun restoration. Tiananmen 1989 showed what happened when workers and students tried to assert democratic control: tanks.

So the questions facing revolutionaries aren’t about defending workers’ states in China or Vietnam. Those states are gone. The questions are:

How do we build working-class movements in these countries that can challenge capitalism—whether it’s the Western variant or the Chinese state-capitalist variant?
How do we learn from the failure of political revolution in the USSR and China to prevent future revolutions from degenerating the same way?
How do we support workers in Cuba who face the contradiction of defending nationalized property while fighting a bureaucracy that’s actively undermining it?
What would a genuine workers’ revolution in contemporary China look like? Not restoration of the Maoist bureaucratic state—that’s finished. Not defense of the current state-capitalist system. A new revolution, establishing genuine workers’ democracy and re-socializing the economy.

That’s a more daunting task than political revolution would have been in 1989. Because now Chinese workers face the full apparatus of a developed capitalist state with characteristics of both Western capitalism and the old bureaucratic forms. The surveillance state. The co-opted unions. The nationalist ideology. The economic dynamism that keeps living standards rising—for now—making revolution seem unnecessary.

But Frank’s analysis suggests the contradictions will intensify. Chinese state capitalism, like Soviet bureaucratic rule before it, creates conditions that undermine its own stability. An educated, technically sophisticated working class concentrated in massive urban centers. Growing inequality. Environmental crisis. The structural impossibility of indefinite high-growth rates.

The Chinese working class today is larger, more educated, more strategically positioned than the Soviet working class ever was. Wildcat strikes in manufacturing. Protests over COVID lockdowns that briefly terrified the regime. Tech workers organizing against 996 culture, learning labor organizing from scratch because the official unions are useless.

When Chinese workers rise—not if, when—they won’t be making political revolution to democratize a workers’ state. They’ll be making social revolution to overthrow capitalism. The organizations that understand this distinction, that grasp how Frank’s analysis explains both the Soviet collapse and the Chinese restoration, will be better positioned to provide solidarity and strategic clarity.

The ones still debating whether China is a workers’ state, still arguing about whether it’s “progressive,” will miss what’s actually happening. Again.

And Cuba? The immediate task there is supporting Cuban workers and youth who understand that neither the bureaucracy’s managed opening to capitalism nor a US-backed counterrevolution offers a path forward. Political revolution—establishing workers’ democracy while defending what remains of nationalized property—might still be possible. But the window’s closing. Every concession to private capital, every joint venture with foreign corporations, every expansion of the private sector makes restoration more likely and political revolution harder.

Frank would’ve seen the pattern. The bureaucracy in Cuba, like bureaucracies everywhere, lacks an independent material base. When it faces crisis—economic pressure from US sanctions, declining Venezuelan support, pandemic devastation—it reaches for the same solution Moscow and Beijing chose: let capitalism develop, hope to control it, preserve privileges through the transition.

Sometimes that works for the bureaucrats. Usually catastrophic for workers. The Russian and Chinese working classes can testify.

This is why Frank’s fourteen-page analysis from 1967 matters in 2025. Not because it provides a blueprint—the world’s changed too much. But because it explains the dynamics: how bureaucracy emerges, why it can’t be reformed, how it eventually either gets overthrown by political revolution or facilitates capitalist restoration.

The Fourth International understood this in 1967. Should’ve prepared revolutionary organizations for what actually happened in 1989-1991 and what’s happening now in the remaining bureaucratized societies. Some learned the lesson. Others are still arguing about whether the USSR was progressive, still echoing state capitalism’s errors under new terminology, still unable to explain why restoration happened or what it means.

That’s the real divide the Highbury Roundhouse debate exposed. Not whether the Soviet state was progressive in some abstract sense. Whether contemporary revolutionary organizations can analyze what actually happened, learn from it, and develop strategy for the struggles ahead.

Frank’s answer was clear: the bureaucracy will either be overthrown by workers or will destroy the workers’ state itself. History vindicated him. The question is whether the left has learned anything from that vindication.

Why the AWL’s Theory Cannot Explain History

Frank’s fourteen pages reveal why the AWL’s “Bureaucratic Collectivism” theory—despite Elaine’s careful terminology—cannot adequately explain the USSR’s collapse.

The theory echoes state capitalism’s fundamental error: treating the bureaucracy as a ruling class with an independent material base. And if that’s true, then certain predictions follow.

If the USSR were a new class society ruled by a bureaucratic ruling class, then:

The bureaucracy should have fought to defend its state property against capitalist restoration. It frequently did not.
The bureaucracy should have been unable to transition into capitalist property owners. Many did.
Economic development should have strengthened bureaucratic rule. It undermined it.
The system should have been stable and capable of indefinite reproduction. It collapsed.

None of these predictions were confirmed by history. Not one.

The Fourth International theory, by contrast, predicted exactly what happened. The bureaucracy, lacking an independent material base, would eventually be forced to choose between political revolution or capitalist restoration. When the working class failed to carry out political revolution, restoration occurred.

This isn’t a minor theoretical disagreement. It’s the difference between a theory that explains history and a theory that doesn’t.

And when Elaine at Highbury Roundhouse got pressed on this—why did the bureaucracy collapse so easily?—the answer amounted to: well, bureaucratic societies are inherently unstable.

True. But that’s not an explanation. That’s a restatement of the problem.

Frank provided the explanation in just fourteen pages. The bureaucracy was a parasitic social layer, not a ruling class. It depended on controlling state property but had no mechanism to defend those property relations against either workers’ democracy or capitalist restoration. When economic development created contradictions it couldn’t resolve, it fractured.

Some sections transitioned to capitalism. Others were displaced. But no section successfully defended the property relations that supposedly constituted their class base.

Because they didn’t have a class base. They had a bureaucratic base. And bureaucratic bases collapse when they lose control of the state apparatus.

The Strategic Lesson for Revolutionary Organization Today

Frank’s analysis contains an important lesson about revolutionary strategy obscured in the 2025 debate.

The problem wasn’t capitalism versus Stalinism, as if these were the only two options. Wasn’t even whether the Soviet state was progressive—it was, in a contradictory way. The problem was that the working class in the Soviet Union didn’t make political revolution to democratize the workers’ state while defending nationalized property.

This wasn’t because the working class lacked political capacity. It was because:

Decades of bureaucratic rule had deprived the working class of independent organization. Every genuine workers’ organization Stalin could reach, he crushed. Replaced with bureaucratically controlled unions. Workers learned to distrust collective action because collective action got you arrested.
The working class was exhausted by the demands of rapid industrialization and war. Collectivization. Five-year plans. The Great Purge. World War II. Post-war reconstruction. By the 1950s, the Soviet working class had been through more in thirty years than most working classes experience in a century.
The bureaucracy monopolized information and prevented the working class from understanding its own strength. No independent press. No genuine debate. Workers knew their own factory, their own city. Didn’t know that workers across the entire Soviet Union faced the same problems. Couldn’t coordinate.
Revolutionary organizations capable of leading political revolution were crushed by Stalin. The Left Opposition? Destroyed. The Right Opposition? Destroyed. Trotskyists? Hunted down and murdered. By the 1950s, no organization existed capable of providing leadership to political revolution.

The historical tragedy isn’t that the October Revolution was a mistake. Isn’t that nationalized property could never work. The tragedy is that the working class, having conquered power, couldn’t hold it against bureaucratic usurpation. Ultimately couldn’t prevent capitalist restoration.

This poses strategic questions for revolutionaries today.

How do we build organizations and movements capable of carrying out political revolution when the moment arrives? Not just seizing power—that’s the relatively easy part. But holding power. Managing society. Preventing bureaucratic degeneration.

How do we prevent the emergence of a bureaucratic layer in our own organizations? Every revolutionary organization faces this pressure. Leaders who become separated from productive labor. Who develop material privileges. Whose interests potentially diverge from the membership. Frank understood this. Called it out repeatedly in Fourth International debates.

How do we educate and develop the working class so that it can manage society directly? This isn’t about “political education” in the abstract. It’s about building the technical capacity, the cultural resources, the organizational experience necessary for workers to actually run factories, hospitals, universities.

These aren’t abstract questions. They determine whether future revolutions will consolidate into genuinely socialist societies or degenerate into bureaucratic regimes that eventually restore capitalism.

Frank’s fourteen-page analysis doesn’t answer these questions. But it clarifies them. And that clarity is more valuable than either the AWL’s denial of the Soviet state’s progressive character—which ignores the material advances nationalized property enabled—or Socialismo o Barbarie’s emphasis on defending those advances—which doesn’t adequately address how bureaucratic degeneration undermined them.

The Fourth International, through Frank and others, has always insisted on both: defending nationalized property while fighting for workers’ democracy. Recognizing the progressive character of socialized property relations while opposing the reactionary political form bureaucratic rule imposed. This isn’t a compromise between two poles. It’s the synthesis of what’s necessary for genuine socialism.

Why 1967 Clarity Matters in 2025

Pierre Frank’s fourteen-page speech wasn’t merely historical analysis. It was a theoretical intervention defending the Fourth International position against competing theories. Providing a framework for understanding contemporary developments.

The theories Frank refuted—state capitalism and new class theory—are still alive in contemporary Trotskyism. The AWL calls theirs “Bureaucratic Collectivism.” But listen to the actual argumentation? It echoes Cliff’s state capitalism. Same fundamental error: treating the bureaucracy as a ruling class with an independent material base.

The strategic problems Frank identified—the gap between political consciousness and cultural development, the material basis of bureaucracy, the necessity for both property defense and democratic control—remain central to revolutionary strategy today.

The debate at Highbury Roundhouse was serious engagement with these questions. Both Elaine and Daniela brought theoretical rigor. Both were genuinely grappling with whether the Soviet state was progressive and what its collapse means for contemporary strategy.

But both lacked the clarity Frank’s fourteen-page analysis provides.

Red Mole’s readers seeking to understand the theoretical foundations of revolutionary strategy would benefit from studying Frank’s work. It provides:

A clear refutation of state capitalism theories and their variants. Not just saying “I disagree.” Showing why these theories cannot explain the actual historical trajectory.

A materialist explanation for why the bureaucracy emerged and why it eventually collapsed. Based on property relations, cultural development, and the contradictions between bureaucratic rule and economic development.

A framework for understanding contemporary non-capitalist formations. China, Vietnam, Cuba—these aren’t puzzles requiring new theory. They’re variations on dynamics Frank analyzed.

Strategic clarity about the necessity for political revolution. Not as moral imperative but as material necessity for defending gains of nationalized property.

An understanding of how historical analysis informs revolutionary practice. Theory isn’t abstract. It’s a guide to action.

The 1967 clarity Frank provided illuminates the 2025 debates. More importantly, it points toward the theoretical rigor revolutionary organizations need as they confront contemporary crises and opportunities for working-class struggle.

The question isn’t whether bureaucracy will emerge in future revolutions. The question is whether revolutionary organizations, educated by history, can build the subjective and objective conditions necessary for the working class to hold state power, defend nationalized property, and establish genuine workers’ democracy.

Frank’s fourteen pages suggest this is possible but not automatic. It requires political organization. Theoretical clarity. Sustained struggle against bureaucratic degeneration—in the state and in revolutionary organizations themselves.

This is the work that remains for the contemporary Fourth International and the broader revolutionary left.

And when Chinese workers rise—not if, when—the organizations that understand Frank’s fourteen-page analysis will be better positioned to provide leadership. The ones still arguing about whether these states are progressive, still echoing state capitalism’s errors under new names, will be caught flat-footed. Again.

Frank would’ve enjoyed that irony.

Appendix: Ernest Mandel, “Trotsky’s Economic Ideas and the Soviet Union Today” (1990)

Postscript: Why Mandel’s 1990 Analysis Matters for Understanding Frank’s 1967 Predictions

Ernest Mandel wrote “Trotsky’s Economic Ideas and the Soviet Union Today” in August 1990, published in Rouge, newspaper of the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (Fourth International section). The timing matters. Mandel wasn’t writing historical analysis—he was analyzing a crisis in real time, fifteen months before the Soviet Union’s final collapse.

The article appeared as Gorbachev’s perestroika was unraveling and the bureaucracy was actively managing what would become capitalist restoration. Mandel could see the trajectory but not yet the endpoint. What he could see vindicated exactly what Pierre Frank had predicted in 1967: the bureaucracy, lacking an independent material base, would either be overthrown by political revolution or would facilitate capitalist restoration.

History chose the second path.

Three elements of Mandel’s 1990 analysis deserve emphasis for readers of this article:

First, Mandel demolishes the myth that Stalin implemented Trotsky’s economic program. This myth underpins much of the AWL’s theoretical position. If Stalin’s command economy represented the bureaucracy’s rational economic logic as a ruling class, then “bureaucratic collectivism” might make sense as a category. But Mandel shows the opposite.

The Left Opposition advocated voluntary collectivization, raising workers’ living standards, reducing bureaucratic expenses, and market mechanisms operating within the framework of socialized property. Planning, yes. But planning checked by market feedback, workers’ initiative, and democratic control.

Stalin’s actual program? Forced collectivization. Declining real wages. Catastrophic labor conditions. Monstrous bureaucratic expenses absorbing resources that should have developed productive forces. As Mandel writes: “Full-scale industrialization was accompanied by a lowering, not a raising of real wages, by a catastrophic deterioration, not an improvement of labor conditions.”

The bureaucracy didn’t implement a rational plan for developing a new mode of production. It improvised survival mechanisms for maintaining control while sabotaging the very property relations it claimed to defend.

“To identify the Opposition with these policies,” Mandel writes, “amounts therefore to a pure and simple lie.”

Second, Mandel provides the economic detail explaining why bureaucratic planning failed. Not because planning itself is impossible—the early Soviet successes from the 1930s through 1960s proved otherwise. The USSR transformed from a backward agricultural country into the second-largest industrial power on earth. No recessions. No crises of overproduction. Regular uninterrupted growth for decades.

But planning without workers’ democracy, without market feedback mechanisms, without quality control rooted in producers’ initiative, inevitably degenerates. Mandel quotes Trotsky’s 1932 analysis:

“If a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace – a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their interactions – such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy. But, in reality, the bureaucracy errs frightfully in its estimate of its spiritual resources.”

This explains the crisis of the 1980s that Frank’s 1967 analysis predicted. Declining growth rates from double digits to effectively zero. Generalized waste—Andropov estimated one-third of work hours wasted. Technological backwardness relative to advanced capitalist countries. Chronic shortages despite massive industrial capacity.

Not capitalist overproduction crisis. Planning crisis under bureaucratic mismanagement.

The distinction matters. A capitalist crisis produces unemployment and unused capacity alongside unsold commodities. The Soviet crisis? Labor shortages alongside unfilled consumer demand. The problem wasn’t “too much.” It was “too little”—specifically, the bureaucracy’s inability to efficiently allocate resources and respond to actual social needs.

Third, Mandel identifies three currents of economic policy in the collapsing USSR that mirror contemporary debates about remaining bureaucratized states.

Writing in August 1990, Mandel saw three distinct programs emerging:

Maintaining bureaucratic control with important economic reforms (Gorbachev’s perestroika—attempting to introduce market mechanisms while preserving bureaucratic political power)
Developing substantial private sector with primitive capital accumulation (the program that would triumph under Yeltsin—what Mandel calls “essentially anti-communist and anti-socialist”)
Neo-socialist defense of workers’ immediate interests with reduction of inequality (the program that never achieved political organization—what Mandel says “must increasingly borrow from the ideas of revolutionary Marxism” to succeed)

Mandel notes the second tendency “is essentially anti-communist and anti-socialist.” He couldn’t know in August 1990 that it would triumph catastrophically. But he understood the dynamics.

Without workers’ democracy defending socialized property, the bureaucracy would facilitate restoration. Life expectancy collapsed. Oligarchs emerged from the nomenklatura. Living standards plummeted. The working class lost material gains without gaining democracy.

That outcome—visible in Russia’s oligarchic capitalism, China’s state capitalism, Vietnam’s managed restoration, threatening Cuba—vindicates both Frank’s 1967 theoretical framework and Mandel’s 1990 concrete analysis.

Why This Matters for Contemporary Revolutionary Strategy

For readers grappling with how to understand China’s state capitalism, Vietnam’s capitalist restoration, Cuba’s slow privatization, Mandel’s 1990 article provides crucial analytical tools.

The bureaucracy cannot defend workers’ states because it has no independent material base. It exists parasitically on nationalized property but cannot develop that property form. When crisis hits, when bureaucratic methods become obstacles to economic development, the bureaucracy faces a choice: accept workers’ democracy or facilitate capitalist restoration.

Political revolution or capitalist restoration. Those remain the choices. The working class, deprived of independent organization by decades of bureaucratic rule, usually cannot carry out political revolution in time.

The tragedy Mandel analyzed in August 1990 has now repeated across multiple countries. Russia’s chaotic collapse. China’s managed transition to state capitalism. Vietnam’s embrace of market mechanisms. Cuba’s grudging concessions to private capital.

The question is whether revolutionary organizations have learned the lesson Frank articulated in 1967 and Mandel reinforced in 1990: defending nationalized property requires workers’ democracy. One without the other inevitably fails.

Mandel concludes his 1990 article by addressing neo-liberal opponents who accuse “neo-Bolsheviks” of wanting to “defend the bureaucratic system against capitalism.” His response deserves quoting in full:

“Like Trotsky, the true ‘neo-Bolsheviks’ fight on two fronts: Against the bureaucracy and against the rising middle bourgeoisie. That is consistent with the workers’ material interests. The supreme contradiction that the neo-liberals face is the following: How can the majority of citizens be prevented from defending their own interests while the sacred right of every individual is proclaimed? In the name of what principle? Could it be, in the best Stalinist tradition, that the people must be made to be happy in spite of and against itself by the use of force?”

That contradiction—how to impose capitalism on a working class that had gained real material benefits from socialized property—could only be resolved through the bureaucracy’s decomposition. When the bureaucracy could no longer rule, when workers were too disorganized to make political revolution, restoration became possible.

The Fourth International understood this. The AWL’s “bureaucratic collectivism,” treating the bureaucracy as a stable ruling class, could not explain why the bureaucracy collapsed so easily or why significant sections facilitated restoration. Socialismo o Barbarie’s abandonment of the “workers’ state” category, even if “degenerated,” lost the analytical framework explaining why restoration represented such a historic defeat for workers.

What follows is Mandel’s complete article, recently translated by Red Mole. Written as the Soviet Union was collapsing, it stands as both vindication of the Fourth International analysis and warning about what happens when workers cannot make political revolution to democratize their state.

The questions Mandel posed in 1990 remain urgent in 2026. How do revolutionaries support workers in remaining bureaucratized states? How do we build organizations capable of leading political revolution when the moment arrives? How do we prevent future revolutions from degenerating the same way?

Mandel’s analysis doesn’t answer these questions. But it clarifies them. And that clarity—grounded in historical materialism, tracking real processes, explaining actual outcomes—is more valuable than either the AWL’s moralism or the dilution of classical Trotskyist categories.

Trotsky’s Economic Ideas and the Soviet Union Today

Ernest Mandel
Originally published in Rouge, August 1990
Translation by Keith Mann

[The following article originally appeared under the title “L’alternative economique” in a special magazine issue of Rouge, the newspaper of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR), French section of the Fourth International. It was published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky.]

As the bureaucratic USSR sinks into chaos, the economic platform of Trotsky and the Left Opposition emerges as an indispensable guide to the relaunching of a socialist project. This explains why for the liberals the “neo-Bolsheviks” are today the main enemy.

The disgraceful slanders hurled by Stalin and the neo-Stalinists against Leon Trotsky are today unanimously rejected in the USSR. On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination the government daily Izvestia solemnly recognized that Lev Davidovich was a great and honest revolutionary, one of the principal founders and leaders of the Soviet state. Other newspapers have revealed that at two points during 1922 Lenin had proposed that Trotsky be vice president of the Council of People’s Commissars and his designated successor in case of sickness or death.

But this is not to say that this rehabilitation of the founder of our movement signals an approval of his political platform which was opposed to that of Stalin. On the contrary. The media and social science circles in the USSR are dominated today by neo-social democratic and neo-liberal tendencies hostile to Leninism, to Marxism, and to the October revolution. For these currents, Trotsky remains an ideological adversary, Trotskyism a political enemy.

What is at stake, however, is an undeniable historical figure and tradition in the Soviet Union. It is difficult to deny that Stalin considered them as his number one enemies. As Stalin is hated by the immense majority of the Soviet people, it is necessary that the current ideologues work to prevent this hatred from translating automatically into a certain sympathy concerning Trotsky. The solution which they have generally opted for is that of raising a new set of slanders, less inflammatory than those of the Stalinists and neo-Stalinists, but founded just as much on open historical falsifications.

It is an historical irony that Trotsky is reproached today not for having been a counterrevolutionary but for having been an ultraleft “revolutionary fanatic.” He is not reproached for having been an adversary of Lenin, but for having been, in 1917 and later, the damned soul and “inspirer” of Lenin. Trotsky, the “bloody” incarnation of the October revolution (a Jew and a “cosmopolitan” imbued with “European culture” to boot), is the prime target of the neo-fascists and the neo-Black Hundreds who are sometimes openly allied with the neo-Stalinists. According to all the “democratic” opponents of the October revolution, Trotsky, the “dogmatic utopian” of “the historical mission of the working class,” was the greatest leader of the “deviation” of Russian history from 1918 on.

An Opponent of the NEP?

Within this cacophony the debate around economic alternatives occupies a key place. Trotsky is said to have been an opponent of the NEP [New Economic Policy], the partisan of “superindustrialization,” a fierce enemy of the private peasant, and the father of the “command economy.” Stalin only applied Trotsky’s economic program. The anti-Trotskyists in the USSR today say that the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky was simply a struggle for power between two despots.

This interpretation of the debate which swept the USSR from 1923 through 1928 all the way to 1934 involves a confusion between two distinct points of departure by Trotsky and the Left Opposition (not counting the capitulationists after 1929): The long-term analytical approach on the one hand, and the political approach operating on the immediate and medium term on the other. This confusion is the fruit of a deliberate lie, of ignorance, or of a lack of understanding about these questions.

In opposing the Stalinist theory that socialism could be achieved in one country, Trotsky affirmed his belief that, considering the nature of imperialism, whether socialism or capitalism would end up victorious in the Soviet Union could only be approached on an international scale. It was impossible to establish a true classless society of the “freely associated producers” in Russia because this required a median level of labor productivity superior to that of the most advanced capitalist countries, but also in permanent conflict with the world capitalist market. The weight of this antagonism would end up by crushing the chances for socialism in the USSR by military or economic pressure if the revolution did not spread to the “advanced capitalist nations.” This analysis of long-term trends certainly also had short-term implications. It underscored the dangers of a lagging development of industry which risked promoting an alliance between private Russian agriculture and the world capitalist market, a rupture of the worker-peasant alliance. To fight the dangers of capitalist restoration, it stressed the necessity of limiting the private accumulation of capital and of raising the productivity of state industry which would permit the sale of products at a lower price. This necessitated a more rapid development of industry.

Therefore, contrary to the legend of Stalinist-Bukharinist origin, developed in the 1960s by Georg Lukacs, Trotsky did not draw adventurist-defeatist conclusions from this analysis, which history has now confirmed in a striking way precisely on the economic plane. It in no way reduced the middle-term destiny of the Soviet Union to the dilemma of either a revolutionary war and territorial expansion or an inevitable retreat towards capitalism. On the contrary, he advanced the idea of a steady consolidation of the gains of the socialist revolution while waiting for the ripening of the objective and subjective conditions for revolutionary victories in the advanced countries. In other words, he proposed that the USSR enter the road of beginning to build socialism in a realistic and prudent manner without fanfare or illusions.

This “Trotskyist” alternative was based on the dialectic of economic logic and on the dynamic of social forces. Trotsky’s analysis remains unmatched among twentieth century Marxists. The acceleration of the rhythm of industrialization must proceed through the steady transfer of the social surplus towards the productive socialized sector of the economy, that is to say, essentially at the expense of the middle bourgeoisie (kulaks and nepmen) and at the expense of the bureaucracy, by a radical reduction of unproductive expenditures.

A reinforcement of the social weight of the proletariat and the poor peasantry in society (as well as a fraction of the middle peasantry ready to participate) had to be realized through the raising of their standard of living and an improvement of their working conditions: the elimination of unemployment; the leading role of workers in factory management; the recruitment of the working peasantry to production cooperatives founded from the start on mechanized labor in order to guarantee to its members returns higher than they had known as individual producers.

These proposals were marked by an internal coherence that is still impressive today. The building of the first large tractor factory in 1923 would have assured the “voluntary participation of the poor peasants in the state farms.” It would have freed the towns from the danger of being blackmailed by reductions in deliveries from the rich peasants by preventing the concentration of the agricultural surplus in their hands. It would have allowed the continued raising of real wages that had proceeded until 1926-’27. It would have provided the USSR with a powerful arms industry in order to defend itself from an eventual military attack over a ten-year rather than a five-year period.

At the same time this road of economic policy proposed to the Comintern and to the Communist parties would permit them to take full advantage of revolutionary situations like those which occurred between 1923-1937 in Germany, Great Britain, Spain, and France.

Far from being “Trotskyism without Trotsky,” Stalinist economic policy from 1928 on was the antithesis of that advanced by the Opposition. Full-scale industrialization was accompanied by a lowering, not a raising of real wages, by a catastrophic deterioration, not an improvement of labor conditions. Administrative expenses were not reduced but colossally increased, absorbing the major part of what had been taken from worker consumption. This was the monstrous deadweight of the bureaucracy and its absolute power over society. If the rise in production could not be supported by the interests and consciousness of the producers, it must be realized by force and general control. In place of “soviets everywhere” the reality was police control and red tape everywhere.

The forced collectivization of agriculture was the antithesis of the voluntary participation advocated by the Opposition, consistent with Lenin’s “cooperative plan.” It led to desperate resistance by the peasants, notably the massive slaughter of livestock. It was accompanied by a systematic underdevelopment of investments in agriculture as much as in the service sector (stockpiling, transportation, distribution), and a fluctuating price policy. It was thus the source of misery in the countryside and poverty in the towns for decades.

Against the Command Economy

As soon as Stalin’s policies became clear, Trotsky, Rakovsky, and the Left Opposition denounced the forced collectivization of agriculture, the total suppression of the NEP, “superindustrialization,” the attacks against real wages and peasant incomes, and the deepening of social inequality. To identify the Opposition with these policies, to hold that they inspired them, amounts therefore to a pure and simple lie. To identify the thesis of Preobrazhensky-Trotsky, according to which in the long term an extension of private appropriation of the social surplus and market mechanisms would make capitalist restoration inevitable, with the short- and medium-term elimination of these mechanisms is a falsification of the economic orientation of Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Several quotations will suffice to demonstrate this.

The Opposition Speaks

Christian Rakovsky, V. Kossior, N. Muralov, and V. Kasparova wrote in the declaration of 1930:

The decree that abolished the NEP and the kulaks as a class is ... an economic absurdity ... No charter, no decree can abolish the contradictions that still operate in the economy and in everyday life ... Attempts to ignore this economic truth... have led to the use of violence, breaking with the party’s program, with the fundamental principles of Marxism and contempt for Lenin’s most basic warnings concerning collectivization, the middle peasantry, and the NEP.

On October 22, 1932, Trotsky continued in his article The Soviet Economy in Danger:

If a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace – a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their interactions – such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy. But, in reality, the bureaucracy errs frightfully in its estimate of its spiritual resources ... The innumerable living participants in the economy, state and private, collective and individual, must serve notice of their needs and of their relative strength not only through the statistical determinations of plan commissions but by the direct pressure of supply and demand. The plan is checked and, to a considerable degree, realized through the market. The regulation of the market itself must depend upon the tendencies that are brought out through its mechanism. The blueprints produced by the departments must demonstrate their economic efficiency through commercial calculation. The system of the transitional economy is unthinkable without the control of the ruble. This presupposes, in its turn, that the ruble is at par. Without a firm monetary unit, commercial accounting can only increase the chaos.

He followed up on this in The Revolution Betrayed:

While the growth of industry and the bringing of agriculture into the sphere of state planning vastly complicates the tasks of leadership, bringing to the front the problem of quality, bureaucratism destroys the creative initiative and the feeling of responsibility without which there is not, and cannot be, qualitative progress. The ulcers of bureaucratism are perhaps not so obvious in the big industries, but they are devouring, together with the cooperatives, the light- and food-producing industries, the collective farms, the small local industries – that is, all those branches of economy which stand nearest to the people ...
It is possible to build gigantic factories according to a ready-made Western pattern by bureaucratic command – although, to be sure, at triple the normal cost. But the farther you go, the more the economy runs into the problem of quality, which slips out of the hands of a bureaucracy like a shadow. The Soviet products are as though branded with the gray label of indifference. Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative – conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies, and flattery.

Three Orientations

There were three distinct currents of economic policy in the CPSU between 1928 and 1934, assuming the supporters of Bukharin remained so after 1933, which is not at all certain.

Stalin’s line was founded on the forced collectivization of agriculture and superindustrialization at the expense of the workers and peasants, and ultra-centralized and ultra-disproportionate planning (or rather semi-planning).

Bukharin’s line was based on the “peaceful coexistence” of the private and socialized economy, the former being charged with providing for the latter whose expansion would remain sharply limited.

The Opposition’s line foresaw a more rapid expansion of the socialized sector than Bukharin’s plan, but much less rapid and certainly more balanced than Stalin’s. It called for the reduction of unproductive expenses like those appropriated by the bureaucracy as well as the improvement of the lives of workers and working peasants.

These three currents clearly reflected the pressure of different social forces. But it must be remembered that, at least during the period from 1930-33, the differences between the concrete proposals of the Opposition and those of the Bukharinists were much less clear than with those of Stalin.

What characterized the economic program of the Opposition more than anything else was the unity and clarity of its economic positions on the one hand and its political and social positions on the other: soviet democracy, satisfaction of the material demands of the producers, the struggle against inequality and bureaucratic privileges.

In 1932, also in The Soviet Economy in Danger, Trotsky declared that:

The struggle between living interests, as the fundamental factor of planning, leads us into the domain of politics, which is concentrated economics. The instruments of the social groups of Soviet society are – should be: the Soviets, the trade unions, the cooperatives, and in first place the ruling party. Only through the interaction of these three elements, state planning, the market, and Soviet democracy, can the correct direction of the economy of the transitional epoch be attained.

This last sentence deserves to be underlined. And in The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky held that:

A restoration of the right of criticism and a genuine freedom of elections are necessary conditions for the further development of the country. This assumes a revival of freedom of Soviet parties, beginning with the party of Bolsheviks, and a resurrection of the trade unions. The bringing of the democracy into industry means a radical revision of plans in the interests of the toilers. Free discussion of economic problems will decrease the overhead expense of bureaucratic mistakes and zigzags. Expensive playthings – palaces of the Soviets, new theaters, show-off subways – will be crowded out in favor of workers’ dwellings. “Bourgeois norms of distribution” will be confined within the limits of strict necessity, and in step with the growth of social wealth, will give way to socialist equality.

These lines written fifty-five years ago retain a burning relevance in today’s USSR. Once again, we find three fundamentally different currents of economic policy:

The first is to maintain the bureaucratic control over the economy at the price of important economic reforms.

The second aims at developing important private sector with encouragement given to the primitive accumulation of capital.

The third is a neo-socialist defense of the immediate interests of the workers (full employment, increased buying power, social services) and the reduction of social injustices and inequalities.

The second tendency, in contradiction to that of Bukharin and his comrades who were honest communists, is essentially anti-communist and anti-socialist. The third is not Trotskyist. But it must increasingly borrow from the ideas of revolutionary Marxism, regardless of the vocabulary it chooses, in order for it to join hands with the real independent workers’ movement currently reviving in the USSR.

New Slanders

It is noteworthy that a pro-capitalist and liberal opponent of Bolshevism, Leonid Radzikhovski, writing in the September 9 issue of the Moscow News, accuses both neo-Stalinists like Nina Andreyevna and comrade Buzgalin, spokesman of the “Marxist Platform” in the CPSU, of being inspired by Trotsky’s ideas – putting them in the same bag in the best Stalinist tradition. “Neo-Bolsheviks” are thus all “neo-Trotskyists.”

However, the same Radzikhovski had to recognize that:

Thanks to his Marxist analysis, Trotsky discovered the principal evil in Soviet society: The struggle of a new aristocracy, of the bureaucracy against the popular masses who brought it to power ... Trotsky also developed in the 1930s a program for reorganizing the Soviet Union that involved democratization, self-management, openness, and even the market.

Exactly. But to accuse the new Soviet socialist left of wanting to “defend the bureaucratic system against capitalism” is a gross slander. Like Trotsky, the true “neo-Bolsheviks” fight on two fronts: Against the bureaucracy and against the rising middle bourgeoisie. That is consistent with the workers’ material interests.

The supreme contradiction that the neo-liberals face is the following: How can the majority of citizens be prevented from defending their own interests while the sacred right of every individual is proclaimed? In the name of what principle? Could it be, in the best Stalinist tradition, that the people must be made to be happy in spite of and against itself by the use of force?

First published in Rouge, August 1990. Translation by Keith Mann. Originally published in Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, No.84, April 1991.

Pierre Frank on Why the AWL’s Theory Cannot…