The Campist Drift and the Theory We Need

Toward a Better Theory against Bureaucracy and for the Transition to Socialism

TL;DR

The SWP and Counterfire are echoing the Morning Star on Ukraine not because they are cynical but because they are theoretically bankrupt. The Fourth International’s framework, developed by Mandel, Frank, and Grant, correctly identified the Soviet bureaucracy as a parasitic caste defending nationalised property against capitalist restoration: not a workers’ state, not state capitalism, but a transitional society frozen between the two. That framework was largely vindicated by 1989–91. What was not vindicated was Grant’s mechanical extension of it: the assumption that any nationalisation by non-proletarian forces creates a formation worth defending. Burma is not Cuba. A general’s decree is not a revolution.

This editorial proposes a correction: the theory of Conditional Transitional Society. Nationalisation creates something workers have a stake in defending only where proletarian revolution or equivalent mass mobilisation was involved. The bureaucracy, meanwhile, proved far more durable and destructive than anyone predicted: it atomised the working class so thoroughly that when the USSR finally collapsed, workers watched the restoration passively rather than seizing the moment for political revolution.

The stakes are not academic. Without this theoretical clarity, organisations that nominally reject Stalinism keep arriving at Stalinist conclusions: ‘anti-imperialism’ that means apologising for Russian imperialism; ‘peace’ that means Ukrainian surrender; ‘unity’ that subordinates revolutionary politics to forces that have betrayed every struggle they touched. The campist drift is the price of theoretical vacancy. The Conditional Transitional Society framework is the tool to resist it.

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Toward a Theory of Conditional Transitional Society

When Counterfire and the Socialist Workers Party find themselves echoing the Morning Star’s positions on Ukraine, on NATO, on the virtues of ‘multipolarity’, this is not mere tactical opportunism. It reflects a theoretical vacuum that has never been filled. The SWP’s ‘state capitalism’ framework, which predicted the Soviet collapse would be a mere sideways shuffle from one capitalism to another, could not explain why the transition was so violent, why living standards collapsed so catastrophically, why workers had something to lose and lost it. Counterfire’s popular-frontism, which requires allies wherever they can be found, has no principled basis for distinguishing between united fronts against imperialism and capitulation to campist politics. Both organisations have drifted, in practice if not in theory, toward positions indistinguishable from the Communist Party of Britain’s.

This drift matters because it represents the replication of patterns that led to catastrophe in the twentieth century. Without theoretical clarity about what the Stalinist bureaucracy actually was, why it defended nationalised property for six decades before helping to dismantle it, and what made its politics dangerous to the workers’ movement, the contemporary left cannot recognise when it is repeating those politics under new names. ‘Anti-imperialism’ that means support for Russian imperialism. ‘Peace’ movements that demand Ukrainian surrender. ‘Unity’ that subordinates revolutionary politics to alliance with forces that have historically betrayed every struggle they touched.

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The theoretical framework developed by the Fourth International, properly corrected in light of the 1989–91 collapse, provides the tools to resist this drift. Ernest Mandel and Pierre Frank described the Stalinist state as a ‘transitional society’: a formation that had left the station of capitalism but was blocked on the tracks by a bureaucratic landslide, unable to reach socialism until political revolution cleared the way. This editorial proposes a refinement of their framework. We call it the theory of Conditional Transitional Society: the recognition that nationalisation by non-proletarian forces creates a genuine transitional society only under specific conditions, and that the mechanical equation of any nationalisation with such a society led to analytical and strategic errors that must now be corrected.

The Fourth International’s Framework

Before addressing what must be corrected, we must clarify the general theoretical framework that Mandel, Frank, and the Fourth International developed from Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union. This framework contained several core insights that subsequent history has largely vindicated.

The Material Basis of Bureaucracy

The Fourth International located the ultimate source of bureaucratic power in material scarcity. Trotsky’s formulation was characteristically vivid: when there are not enough goods in the shops, buyers must queue; when the queue grows long, a policeman must maintain order; and whoever distributes scarce goods inevitably takes the first share. The bureaucracy arose not from ideological deviation or organisational error but from the objective conditions of building socialism in a backward, isolated, war-ravaged country. This materialist explanation avoided both the moralism that blamed ‘bad leaders’ and the idealism that attributed Stalinism to ‘Leninist organisational principles’.

Mandel developed this analysis further, identifying what he called ‘Department III’: the hypertrophy of unproductive consumption in the command economy. Resources were diverted into parasitic administrative functions, police apparatuses, checkers checking checkers, bureaucratic bloat. Mandel estimated that a third of all paid hours in the USSR produced nothing of value because of this structural waste. The insight matters because it explains why the planned economy stagnated: not because planning is inherently inferior to markets, but because bureaucratic planning without democratic feedback generates systemic inefficiency.

The Transitional Society

Mandel and Frank consistently described the Soviet Union as a ‘post-capitalist society, frozen in a transition stage between capitalism and socialism’. This terminology served several purposes. It rejected both ‘state capitalism’ and ‘new class’ theories by insisting that if the state were already capitalist, there would be nothing left to ‘restore’ during 1989–91. It captured the hybrid, contradictory nature of a formation defined by conflict between the logic of the plan and the surviving influence of the law of value. And it emphasised that the society was incapable of self-regulation or spontaneous self-reproduction: it had to resolve eventually toward either socialism or a return to capitalism.

The transitional society was frozen at its intermediate stage by two factors: the delay of the world revolution and the power of a privileged, parasitic bureaucracy. Mandel described this as a ‘basic historic category’ that maintained its significance for the entire epoch of world revolution. The fate of such societies was not preordained by automatic economic processes but would be decided by the struggle of living social forces on both national and international scales.

The Bureaucracy as Caste

Frank and Mandel insisted, against theorists of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ and ‘state capitalism’, that the Soviet bureaucracy constituted a caste rather than a class. The distinction is not semantic. A ruling class owns the means of production and reproduces itself through property relations; it can bequeath its position to its children through inheritance. The Soviet bureaucracy owned nothing. Its power derived from its function within the state apparatus, not from ownership. Individual bureaucrats could not pass their positions to their heirs through property deeds; they could only secure advantages, education, connections, access, that improved their children’s chances within the apparatus itself.

This functional dependence had profound implications. The bureaucracy was, in effect, a corrupt watchman hired to guard a house. For six decades it fought off burglars, the forces of capitalist restoration, not from loyalty to the owner, the working class, but because the house was its source of warmth and shelter. The bureaucracy’s privileges depended on the continued existence of nationalised property; it therefore defended that property, however incompetently and self-servingly, against both imperialist pressure and internal pro-capitalist forces. Only when the roof began to collapse, when the command economy entered terminal crisis, did the watchman help the burglars dismantle the building, hoping to walk away with a few bricks for his own private garden.

The Three-Cornered Struggle

The Fourth International’s analysis rejected any reduction of Soviet politics to a binary conflict. The struggle was three-cornered: bureaucracy, working class, and pro-capitalist forces. The bureaucracy manoeuvred between the other two, sometimes repressing workers’ demands to maintain its monopoly of power, sometimes blocking pro-capitalist tendencies to preserve its functional base. This triangular dynamic explained the regime’s apparent contradictions: its simultaneous hostility to workers’ democracy and to capitalist restoration, its defence of nationalised property alongside its systematic betrayal of international revolution.

Mandel argued that for a whole historical period, roughly 1929 to 1988, the bureaucracy acted against its long-term historical tendency by preventing capitalist restoration. It did so not from progressive impulses but to protect its own power, which rested on the state-owned economy. The move toward restoration came only in a condition of ‘senile despair’, when the command economy’s collapse threatened to sweep the bureaucracy away entirely. Grasping for the bricks became rational only when the house was already falling.

The Prediction of Binary Resolution

Trotsky predicted that the bureaucratic regime could not stabilise indefinitely; it would resolve either through political revolution, workers overthrowing the bureaucracy while preserving nationalised property, or through capitalist restoration. Frank and Mandel maintained this prognosis throughout the post-war decades, even as the regime’s unexpected durability forced them to revise their timescales. No stable ‘bureaucratic mode of production’ emerged. The Soviet bloc collapsed into capitalism; China transformed into a capitalist economy under continued party rule. The intermediate variant that critics proposed, a permanent bureaucratic state, never materialised. On this fundamental question, the Fourth International was vindicated.

Grant’s Extension: Proletarian Bonapartism

Ted Grant’s specific theoretical contribution, developed from the late 1940s onward, extended the Fourth International’s framework to explain a phenomenon Trotsky had not lived to witness: the establishment of states resting on nationalised property by forces other than the industrial proletariat¹. The Chinese Revolution of 1949, led by a peasant army under Stalinist command, presented a challenge that the orthodox framework struggled to accommodate. Grant’s theory of Proletarian Bonapartism offered an explanation.

Grant drew on the classical Marxist concept of Bonapartism, where the state apparatus gains relative autonomy by manoeuvring between classes that have reached historical impasse. In the colonial and semi-colonial world, the local bourgeoisie was frequently incapable of completing the democratic revolution or developing the productive forces. The industrial proletariat was often too small or too lacking in revolutionary leadership to seize power directly. This dual incapacity created space for what Grant called the ‘military-bureaucratic caste’ to act as a third force.

Influenced by the existence and apparent success of the Soviet model, these castes, often led by military officers or radical intellectuals, expropriated the capitalist class to consolidate their own power and modernise their nations. By nationalising the commanding heights of the economy and establishing planned production, they became the sole directing stratum, elevating their own privileges while accomplishing tasks that neither bourgeoisie nor proletariat had proved capable of achieving. The resulting states were ‘deformed workers’ states’: possessing the economic foundations of proletarian rule without any of its democratic content.

Grant’s framework allowed the tradition to recognise genuine historical achievements, the abolition of landlordism and capitalism, the development of productive forces, the provision of education and healthcare, without prettifying the regimes that accomplished them. These were ‘caricatures’ of workers’ rule, but caricatures that nonetheless represented historical advances over the colonial capitalism they replaced.

What the Framework Got Wrong

The framework systematically underestimated the durability of bureaucratic formations. Trotsky expected resolution within years; Mandel and Grant repeatedly revised their timescales as decades passed. The Soviet bureaucracy persisted for seven decades. The Chinese Communist Party has now ruled for seventy-five years. These transitional societies proved capable of reproducing themselves across generations, not merely as temporary equilibria but as stable, if contradiction-ridden, formations.

More fundamentally, the framework underestimated how thoroughly bureaucratic rule could reconstitute the working class itself. Mandel acknowledged this failure in his later years, conceding that revolutionary Marxists had ‘seriously underestimated the disastrous long-term effects of Stalinism and bureaucratic dictatorship on the average level of consciousness’ of Soviet workers. The assumption that the proletariat retained revolutionary potential, merely suppressed but ready to express itself when conditions permitted, proved false. Decades of atomisation, terror, and paternalism had destroyed the organisational traditions, political culture, and collective capacities that make self-emancipation possible.

This explains why workers did not move to political revolution in 1989. The Fourth International had expected that when the bureaucratic apparatus fractured, suppressed working-class energies would surge forward to establish genuine soviet democracy. Instead, workers watched passively as the bureaucracy converted itself into a bourgeoisie. The revolutionary subject the theory presupposed had been destroyed by the very regime whose crisis was supposed to liberate it.

Grant’s specific framework tended to equate regimes that differed qualitatively. Burma and Cuba both nationalised their economies, but the social origins and degree of mass involvement were radically different. The Cuban Revolution involved genuine mass mobilisation and broke with capitalism under pressure from below and from Washington. The Burmese military’s nationalisations were carried out by a caste with no relationship to working-class struggle whatsoever. Lumping these together under ‘Proletarian Bonapartism’ obscured more than it illuminated.

This is where the concept of Conditional Transitional Society becomes necessary. Mandel and Frank were right that the Soviet Union and similar formations were transitional societies, trains that had left the station of capitalism but were blocked from reaching socialism. But Grant’s extension of this framework to any nationalisation by non-proletarian forces was too mechanical. The question that must be asked is: under what conditions has the train actually left the first station? Burma’s military junta nationalising industry is not a train that has left capitalism; it is a different train on a different track entirely.

The Bureaucratic Threat Reassessed

Classical Marxism systematically underestimated bureaucracy. Marx treated it as a parasitic growth on the state that would wither alongside the state itself. Engels’s famous formulation that the administration of things would replace the government of persons assumed bureaucratic functions were merely technical, lacking independent social weight. Lenin initially shared this optimism. State and Revolution anticipated that any literate worker could perform administrative tasks, that officials would be paid workers’ wages and subject to instant recall.

The Soviet experience refuted this optimism catastrophically. Bureaucracy proved capable of destroying workers’ democracy within years of its establishment, transforming soviets from organs of proletarian power into rubber stamps for party dictatorship. It persisted for seven decades despite internal contradictions that theorists repeatedly predicted would produce rapid collapse. It atomised the working class so thoroughly that when the system finally did collapse, workers proved incapable of independent action, unable to impose their own solution to the crisis. It carried out capitalist restoration from above, transforming itself from a parasitic caste into a propertied bourgeoisie while the class it had ruled watched passively. And it contaminated the international workers’ movement through parties that combined mass working-class membership with apparatus loyalty to the Kremlin, systematically betraying revolutionary opportunities from China in 1927 through Spain in 1936–37 to France and Italy in 1944–47.

The lesson is not that bureaucracy can be abolished by correct organisational formulas but that it must be fought continuously. The tendency toward bureaucratisation is inherent in any large-scale organisation; it can be resisted but never finally defeated within class society. Only the complete transformation of social relations, the actual withering of the state through the development of socialist production, can eliminate the material basis for bureaucratic privilege. Until then, the struggle against bureaucracy is permanent.

Organisational Conclusions

The Soviet catastrophe demands that revolutionaries take the bureaucratic danger more seriously than our predecessors did. Workers’ democracy is not a luxury to be implemented after the revolution but a survival requirement for the revolution itself. The Bolsheviks’ early restrictions on soviet democracy, the ban on factions, the suppression of other socialist parties: these measures, however justified by civil war conditions, created the organisational infrastructure that Stalinism later exploited. Once democratic norms are suspended ‘temporarily’, restoring them becomes extraordinarily difficult.

Revolutionary organisations must institutionalise anti-bureaucratic practices from the beginning. Term limits for leadership positions. Rotation of responsibilities. Financial transparency. The right of tendency and faction. Public debate on contested questions. These are not fetishes but prophylactics against the bureaucratic degeneration that destroyed the Bolshevik party.

The relationship between party and class must be reconceptualised. The Leninist model of the vanguard party assumed a clear distinction between the advanced minority, the party, and the backward majority, the class. This distinction has validity but also dangers. It can justify substitutionism: the party acting ‘for’ the class, then the apparatus acting ‘for’ the party, then the leader acting ‘for’ the apparatus. The result is the dictatorship not of the proletariat but over the proletariat.

The corrective is not to abandon vanguard organisation but to embed it within structures of direct democracy. Soviets, factory committees, neighbourhood assemblies: these organs of mass participation must not be subordinated to party direction but must exercise genuine sovereignty. The party operates within them, seeks to lead them, but does not command them. This is the lesson Rosa Luxemburg drew from the Russian experience, and events vindicated her warnings.

Toward a Theory of Conditional Transitional Society

What, then, must be maintained from the Fourth International’s framework? The materialist explanation of bureaucracy rooted in scarcity rather than ideological deviation. The characterisation of the bureaucracy as a caste whose power derives from function rather than ownership. The three-cornered analysis of struggle between bureaucracy, working class, and pro-capitalist forces. Mandel and Frank’s concept of the transitional society, frozen between capitalism and socialism. The distinction between social content and political form. The perspective of political revolution to establish workers’ democracy while preserving the gains of the overturn of capitalism. And the recognition that a planned economy requires workers’ democracy ‘as the human body requires oxygen’.

What must be maintained from Grant’s extension? The recognition that in conditions of class stalemate, state apparatuses can gain relative autonomy and accomplish historical tasks. The distinction between proletarian and bourgeois Bonapartism based on the property relations each defends. The insistence that workers retain a material stake in nationalised property and the overturn of capitalism, however bureaucratically administered, and that these gains must be defended unconditionally against capitalist restoration.

What must be corrected through the theory of Conditional Transitional Society? The mechanical equation of any nationalisation with a transitional society, regardless of whether proletarian revolution or mass working-class agency was involved. The theory specifies the conditions under which nationalisation by non-proletarian forces actually creates a formation that workers have an interest in defending: initial proletarian upheaval or equivalent mass mobilisation, not mere elite decrees. Burma’s generals nationalising industry do not create a transitional society; Cuba’s masses expropriating American capital under revolutionary pressure do.

The theory also incorporates corrections that flow from the 1989–91 experience. It recognises that bureaucratic rule can destroy the working-class capacities that genuine socialist transition requires; the revolutionary subject cannot simply be presumed to exist. It acknowledges that the bureaucracy can become the agent of capitalist restoration, not merely its opponent. And it insists that when analysing contemporary formations, the question of proletarian agency must be central: not ‘has capitalism been nationalised?’ but ‘has the working class, through its own action or equivalent mass mobilisation, created a formation it has an interest in defending and developing toward socialism?’

Against the Campist Drift

This theoretical framework matters because it provides the tools to resist the campist drift that has captured significant sections of the British left. When Counterfire and the SWP echo Morning Star positions, when ‘anti-imperialism’ collapses into support for Russian imperialism, when ‘peace’ means Ukrainian surrender, these are not merely tactical errors. They are the contemporary expression of the political logic that led Stalinist parties to betray revolutionary opportunities throughout the twentieth century.

The CPB’s politics flow from a theoretical framework that identified the Soviet bureaucracy as the leadership of the world revolution rather than its gravedigger. That framework was always wrong, but its wrongness became undeniable in 1989–91. The tragedy is that organisations which rejected the CPB’s framework have drifted toward its conclusions because they lack an alternative theory adequate to the contemporary moment.

The theory of Conditional Transitional Society provides that alternative. It maintains unconditional defence of the gains of any genuine overturn of capitalism, the nationalised property, the planned economy, the expropriation of the capitalists, while specifying the conditions under which such gains actually exist. It calls for political revolution against bureaucratic castes that block the transition to socialism, not accommodation to their politics. And it insists that the working class, not any self-appointed bureaucratic leadership, is the only force capable of completing the socialist transformation of society.

The struggle against bureaucracy is permanent because the material basis for bureaucratic privilege persists as long as scarcity remains. The struggle against campism is urgent because its political logic is being rehabilitated in real time by forces that should know better. This editorial is offered as a contribution to both struggles. The debate continues.

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1. Grant’s tendency has been outside the Fourth International for most of its life, but politically was formed in it and as part of it. While Grant made a distinct political contribution, the fact that his tendency was in the FI at the point of its reunification means that today it still shares many of the foundations of the 1963 reunification document, Dynamics of World Revolution Today. With key events, like the Cuban and Algerian revolutions, and in the development of autonomous organisations for work among youth, women and black people, his tendency was, in many ways, the closest of the international Trotskyist currents to the FI. So strong was the resemblance that Grant himself was accused of “Mandelism,” a phrase coined by Nahuel Moreno in the early 1980s. During the 2019 split in the CWI, both sides were accused of Mandelism.