TL;DR
The SWP and Counterfire echo the Morning Star on Ukraine, NATO and “multipolarity” not out of cynicism but because they have no theory adequate to the job. The Fourth International’s framework identified the Soviet bureaucracy as a parasitic caste defending nationalised property against capitalist restoration. That made the USSR neither a healthy workers’ state nor state capitalism, but a transitional society frozen between the two, and 1989–91 largely bore the framework out.
What did not survive was the idea that any nationalisation by non-proletarian forces creates something workers must defend. The Fourth International never held that. Its 1951 resolution attached conditions to its conclusion, and those conditions were later dropped.
This editorial restates them as the theory of Conditional Transitional Society. A nationalising regime is a transitional society only where:
a class pressure, from imperialism, from the masses, or both, defeated a project of capitalist restabilisation;
that pressure forced an apparatus that was not itself a class to expropriate the capitalists;
the apparatus had to lean on the working class to do it.
Burma is not Cuba. A general’s decree is not a revolution.
The drift
When Counterfire and the Socialist Workers Party echo the Morning Star on Ukraine, on NATO, on the virtues of “multipolarity”, this is not tactical opportunism alone. It reflects a theoretical vacuum that has never been filled.
The SWP’s state-capitalism theory predicted that the Soviet collapse would be a sideways shuffle from one capitalism to another. It 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 needs allies wherever they can be found, has no principled way to tell a united front against imperialism from capitulation to campism. Both have drifted, in practice if not in theory, towards the positions of the Communist Party of Britain.
“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.
What the Fourth International got right
The material basis of bureaucracy. The Fourth International located the source of bureaucratic power in scarcity. Trotsky’s image was the queue: when there are not enough goods, a policeman is needed to keep order, and whoever distributes scarce goods takes the first share. The bureaucracy arose from the conditions of building socialism in a backward, isolated, war-ravaged country, not from ideological deviation or a Leninist organisational flaw. Mandel developed the point with his concept of the hypertrophy of unproductive administrative and police functions, to explain why bureaucratic planning without democratic feedback stagnated.
The transitional society. Mandel and Frank described the USSR as a post-capitalist society frozen between capitalism and socialism. The description ruled out “state capitalism”, since in that case there would have been nothing to restore in 1989–91. It ruled out the “new class” too. It captured the conflict between the logic of the plan and the surviving influence of the law of value. And it insisted that such a society could not reproduce itself indefinitely: it had to resolve one way or the other, through the struggle of living social forces.
The bureaucracy as caste. The bureaucracy owned nothing. Its power came from its place in the state apparatus, not from property, and it could not bequeath its position by deed. It was a corrupt watchman guarding a house that was not his, fighting off burglars for six decades because the house was his warmth and shelter. Only when the roof began to fall did he help the burglars strip it, hoping to carry off some bricks for himself.
The three-cornered struggle. Soviet politics was a contest between bureaucracy, working class and pro-capitalist forces. The bureaucracy manoeuvred between the other two, repressing workers’ demands to keep its monopoly, and blocking restoration to keep its base.
Binary resolution. Trotsky expected the regime to end either in political revolution or in capitalist restoration. No stable “bureaucratic mode of production” emerged. The Soviet bloc returned to capitalism, and China became a capitalist economy under continued party rule. On the fundamental question, the framework was right.
How the new workers’ states were made
Trotsky did not live to see states resting on nationalised property created by forces other than the working class. The post-war tradition had to explain three sets of cases:
Eastern Europe, where the Soviet bureaucracy did it from above;
Yugoslavia and China, where Communist parties with armies of their own did it after long wars;
Cuba, where a petty-bourgeois revolutionary movement did it under mass pressure.
The first serious attempt was the Fourth International’s Third World Congress in 1951. Its resolution on Eastern Europe made the new states deformed workers’ states by their economic base. It said plainly that they had arisen from the military-bureaucratic action of the Soviet bureaucracy, not from the masses. Then it set limits. Mass action had proved not to be indispensable in analogous exceptional conditions, in a climate like that of the Cold War. Even then the bureaucracy had mobilised the masses bureaucratically, because it was not an autonomous social force, a class, and had to lean partly on the proletariat to fight the bourgeoisie.
Mandel kept to that bounded view. In Critique de l’eurocommunisme (1978) he wrote that a bureaucracy whose privileges rest on a post-capitalist mode of production can occasionally, and within narrow limits, extend its power by extending that mode of production. It had done so in eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia in 1939–40, and across its Eastern European glacis in 1947–49. It acted each time by military-bureaucratic means under strict control, without leading any genuine mass revolution, and after agreeing with imperialism on the division of spheres of influence. He expected no repetition in Europe or Asia. The exception confirmed the rule: the bureaucracy’s foreign policy was counter-revolutionary.
Ted Grant’s theory of Proletarian Bonapartism took the conclusion and dropped the conditions. Grant made a real contribution. In the colonial world the bourgeoisie could not complete the democratic revolution, and the proletariat was too weak or too badly led to take power. A military-bureaucratic caste could then gain autonomy between the classes, and, with the Soviet model to copy, expropriate capital and plan. But he made a state’s class character depend on the property it defends whatever the method of its establishment. With that, the label “deformed workers’ state”, Pablo’s coinage adopted by the 1951 Congress, could be applied to any regime that nationalised. Burma and Cuba ended up in one category. A general’s decree was put on a par with a revolution.
What the framework got wrong
It underestimated the durability of bureaucratic formations. Trotsky expected a resolution within years, and Mandel and Grant revised their timescales decade after decade. The Soviet bureaucracy lasted seven decades. The Chinese Communist Party has ruled for seventy-five years.
More fundamentally, it underestimated how thoroughly bureaucratic rule could reshape the working class itself. Mandel conceded late in life that revolutionary Marxists had seriously underestimated Stalinism’s long-term damage to the consciousness of Soviet workers. Decades of atomisation, terror and paternalism had destroyed the organisational traditions and collective capacities that self-emancipation needs. That is why the workers did not move to political revolution in 1989–91, and watched instead as the bureaucracy turned itself into a bourgeoisie.
And, through Grant’s extension, it lost the conditions it had started with.
Conditional Transitional Society
The theory of Conditional Transitional Society is not a new invention bolted onto the tradition. It restores the conditions the tradition stated in 1951 and then forgot, and it states them with the actors named. That matters, because the alternative formulation, that “the objective dynamics” of the revolution forced the bureaucracy forward, explains nothing. A process does not act. Classes, parties and states do, under circumstances they did not choose.
A nationalising regime ruled by an apparatus that the working class does not control is a transitional society, something workers have a stake in defending against restoration, when it passes through four steps.
1. A project of capitalist restabilisation. The ruling party set out to put capitalism back on its feet, not to abolish it. Examples:
the people’s democracies of 1944–47;
Mao’s “New Democracy” and its “bloc of four classes”;
the democratic programme of Cuba’s July 26 Movement.
Moscow wanted capitalism in the buffer zone, to protect the USSR through peaceful coexistence. The local Communist parties did not seek to become a ruling elite.
2. A class pressure that defeated it. The pressure might be imperialist, from the masses, or both:
Eastern Europe: the Marshall Plan and the Cold War turned the remaining bourgeois parties into a bridgehead for rollback. Imperialism played a double part here, as Mandel stressed in 1978. It had already accepted the region as a Soviet sphere, so it did not intervene. Within that sphere, its pressure made a capitalist buffer a danger to Moscow rather than a safeguard.
China: the American advance to the Yalu and the blockade.
Yugoslavia: partisan war, factory occupations, and a coalition that fell apart within months.
Cuba: Washington’s hostility and a mass movement together.
A government of this kind, sitting on a bourgeois state, cannot stay still. Livio Maitan put the general point well in 1977, writing about the Italian Communist Party’s own programme of restabilisation: antagonistic classes, unlike chess players, cannot accept a stalemate. The only question is which class breaks it.
Finland and Austria rolled back. So did Italy and France in May 1947, when the same Stalinist strategy of coalition ended with the Communists put out of government. The intentions were identical in East and West. The class relation was not: a surviving bourgeoisie backed by the United States in one case, a bourgeoisie destroyed by the war, with the Red Army present, in the other.
3. An apparatus forced against its own programme, leaning on the workers. The leadership did not choose expropriation. It was pushed into it, and to carry it out it had to mobilise the working class, however bureaucratically, through committees, militias and campaigns against the capitalists. A bureaucracy that is not a class has to borrow the social weight of one. This step is what separates an overturn from a decree.
4. Expropriation on the model of the existing workers’ state. The bourgeoisie was destroyed as a class, and the economy reorganised on the one non-capitalist model in existence, inside a bloc that depended on it. A peasant army can destroy an old state, but the peasantry cannot supply a state form of its own. The leadership of a peasant war, with the workers absent, could only build on the Soviet model or hand the country back to capital.
The result is deformed from birth, because the working class never held power in it. Political revolution remains the task: to put the producers in control of the property they have a stake in. But the stake is real, and it must be defended unconditionally against restoration.
Burma and Syria fail the test.
No restabilising coalition was defeated. Ne Win’s nationalisations in 1962 were not forced on him against his programme. They were the programme.
Nobody was leaned on. The army mobilised no class.
Nothing was destroyed as a class. No bourgeoisie was abolished as a class, as distinct from the merchant layers the regime pushed out. No non-capitalist bloc stood behind the result.
Syria is the same. The Ba’ath’s nationalisations were an instrument of its rule, not a retreat forced on it.
That is why such regimes could reverse course by decree. When Burma’s generals decided in 1988 that markets served them better, nothing stood in the way. A ghost ship can be turned round at will, because no class put it to sea.
The test also answers a harder objection. Theorists of bureaucratic collectivism, now and then, read the Cold War as rivalry between two ruling classes, with the Kremlin’s expropriations as one class defending its domain. But a ruling class that had to be forced into existence against its own programme, by the defeat of the capitalist restoration it was trying to carry out, is a strange sort of class. Stalinism did not grow out of strata inside these societies. It spread outward from the USSR, through parties that wanted coexistence with capital until coexistence became impossible. And when workers in these states rose in 1953 and 1956, they did so to take control of the nationalised property, not to hand it back.
It also absorbs the corrections of 1989–91.
The subject. Bureaucratic rule can destroy the capacities that a socialist transition needs, so the revolutionary subject cannot be presumed.
The bureaucracy’s role. It can become the agent of restoration, not only its obstacle.
The question to ask. In judging any regime today, ask not “has industry been nationalised?” but these: what project did the regime begin with, what class pressure defeated it, and on whom did it have to lean?
Against the campist drift
The theory matters because it supplies what the campist drift that has captured significant sections of the British left lacks: a principled way to say what deserves defence and why.
It defends. It keeps unconditional defence of the gains of any real overturn of capitalism.
It discriminates. It refuses to extend that defence to every regime that nationalises and quarrels with Washington. A junta’s state enterprises offer workers nothing to fight for.
It keeps the goal. It calls for political revolution against the castes that block the way to socialism, not accommodation to them, and it insists that only the working class can complete the socialist transformation.
The Communist Party of Britain’s politics come from a framework that treated the Soviet bureaucracy as the leadership of the world revolution rather than its gravedigger. That framework was always wrong, and 1989–91 made its wrongness undeniable. The tragedy is that organisations that rejected the CPB’s framework have drifted towards its conclusions, because they have nothing adequate to put in its place. That is what lies behind it when Counterfire and the SWP echo Morning Star positions.
The bureaucratic threat reassessed
Classical Marxism underestimated bureaucracy. Marx treated it as a parasitic growth on the state that would wither with the state itself. Engels’s formula, that the administration of things would replace the government of persons, assumed bureaucratic functions were merely technical. Lenin’s State and Revolution expected any literate worker to be able to administer, on a worker’s wage and subject to recall.
The Soviet experience refuted this optimism catastrophically. Bureaucracy turned the soviets into rubber stamps within years. It lasted seven decades despite contradictions that were repeatedly expected to bring it down. It atomised the working class so thoroughly that, when the system collapsed, the workers could not impose a solution of their own. It carried out the restoration of capitalism itself. And through parties that combined mass working-class membership with loyalty to the Kremlin, it contaminated the international workers’ movement, betraying revolutionary opportunities from China in 1927 through Spain in 1936–37 to France and Italy in 1944–47.
Organisational conclusions
The Soviet catastrophe demands that revolutionaries take the bureaucratic danger more seriously than their predecessors did. Workers’ democracy is not a luxury for after the revolution. It is a condition of the revolution’s survival.
The Bolsheviks’ early restrictions on soviet democracy, the ban on factions and the suppression of other socialist parties built the organisational infrastructure that Stalinism later used, however justified those restrictions were by civil war. Once democratic norms are suspended “temporarily”, restoring them is extraordinarily hard.
Revolutionary organisations should build anti-bureaucratic practice in from the start, as prophylactics against the degeneration that destroyed the Bolshevik party:
term limits;
rotation of responsibilities;
financial transparency;
the right of tendency and faction;
public debate on contested questions.
The vanguard party should operate inside organs of mass democracy (soviets, factory committees, neighbourhood assemblies) and seek to lead them, not command them. That was Rosa Luxemburg’s lesson from the Russian experience, and events bore her out.
The struggle against bureaucracy is permanent, because its material basis lasts as long as scarcity does. The struggle against campism is urgent, because its logic is being rehabilitated in real time by forces that should know better. The debate continues.
Related reading on Red Mole: Mapping the Conservative Left · With Washington and Moscow (series) · The Socialist Workers Party Without Workers · The Reckoning That Wasn’t · How Ted Grant Mistook Bureaucratic Capitalism for Socialist Transition · Livio Maitan on the PCI’s economic programme
Footnote: Grant’s tendency was outside the Fourth International for most of its life, but it was formed in it and as part of it. Its distinct political contribution notwithstanding, it was in the FI at the point of the 1963 reunification and still shares much of that document, Dynamics of World Revolution Today. On key events such as the Cuban and Algerian revolutions, and on autonomous organisation among youth, women and Black people, it was in many ways the closest of the international Trotskyist currents to the FI. So close that Grant was himself 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.
You are right to write "classical Marxism systematically underestimated bureaucracy," but your own scheme underestimates the importance of the intelligentsia. I think it is impossible to understand what happened in 1989-1991 without taking into account the role of the intelligentsia.