a) Proletarian Bonapartism

The regime’s supporters applauded each contradictory new turn as a “correct” and “necessary” measure to defend “socialism” in the USSR. Some opponents, despairing at the hideous travesty of “Leninism” presented by the regime, claimed that the gains of the revolution had been destroyed, and that Russia could no longer be regarded as a workers’ state in any sense.

Trotsky responded in an article, ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism’,1935: “As the bureaucracy becomes more independent, as more and more power is concentrated into the hands of a single person, the more does bureaucratic centrism turn into Bonapartism [named after the French military dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte]”. (Full text)

He also explained how Bonapartism “was and remains the government of the bourgeoisie during periods of crises… Bonapartism always implies political veering between classes; but under Bonapartism in all its historical transmigrations there is preserved one and the same social base: bourgeois [capitalist] property … It is absolutely correct that the self-rule of the Soviet bureaucracy was built upon the soil of veering between the class forces both internal and international. Insofar as the bureaucratic veering has been crowned by the… regime of Stalin, it is possible to speak of Soviet Bonapartism. But while the Bonapartism of Bonapartes [like von Papen in Germany] is on the basis of a bourgeois regime, the Bonapartism of Soviet bureaucracy has under it the soil of a Soviet regime.” (The Class Nature of the Soviet State,1933) (Full text)

In other words, this was a ‘Bonapartism’ of a new kind, with a “proletarian” character arising from the fact that it is based not on “bourgeois property”, but on the state-owned and planned economy created by the October revolution, reflecting the historical interest of the working class.

Stalin’s faction, having crushed their opponents on the left – and soon (see below) those to their right – remained as supreme arbiters in the bureaucratized “Communist” Party. Stalin, once the scheming henchman of the bureaucracy, now became its master – the top bureaucrat, dispensing privileges and positions to his hangers-on.

Trotsky sums up: “Stalin guards the conquests of the October Revolution not only against the feudal-bourgeois counter-revolution, but also against the claims of the toilers, their impatience and dissatisfaction; he crushes the Left wing which expresses the ordered historical and progressive tendencies of the unprivileged working masses; he creates a new aristocracy, by means of an extreme differentiation in wages, privileges, ranks, etc…. Leaning for support on the topmost layers of the new social hierarchy against the lowest – sometimes vice versa – Stalin has attained the complete concentration of power in his own hands. What else should this regime be called, if not Soviet Bonapartism?” (Trotsky, ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism’,1935)

b) A ‘Degenerated workers’ state’

In the ‘Transitional Programme’, written by Trotsky in 1938 for the Founding Congress of a new ‘Fourth International’, Trotsky described the Soviet Union as “a degenerated workers’ state”, still resting on the state ownership of the means of production, but with a state apparatus that had undergone “a complete degeneration … transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class”.

Some on the left, so revolted by the growing inequalities in the USSR, decided to give it an alternative characterisation – that it had become ‘state capitalist’. But Trotsky always rejected this description.

He wrote in ‘Revolution Betrayed’ (Chapter 9) that “we often seek salvation from unfamiliar phenomena in familiar terms. An attempt has been made to conceal the enigma of the Soviet regime by calling it ‘state capitalism’. This term has the advantage that nobody knows exactly what it means”.
He went on to explain that the term ‘state capitalism’ could be applicable “when a bourgeois state takes direct charge of the means of transport or of industrial enterprises”. But something qualitatively different had happened in Soviet Russia, “the expropriation of the class of capitalists” – the means of production had been taken into state ownership, and the state held a monopoly over foreign trade.

As the Irish Marxist, Peter Hadden, explained in ‘The Struggle for Socialism Today’, “The bureaucracy did not become a class. It did not own the industries which it managed. …. Its relationship to the economy was more akin to that of the heads of nationalised industries in the west to the industries they manage. These people are privileged, they are as removed from their workforces as the capitalists, but they are not capitalists. The capitalist class is defined by what it owns, not by what it consumes. The Soviet bureaucracy consumed a large slice of the surplus wealth produced by the working class. But this is not unique. Every bureaucracy rewards itself for its commanding position by creaming off a larger share of wealth for itself. Unlike the capitalists, the Stalinist rulers did not have ownership of the surplus, and could not have unless they undid the other gains of 1917 and privatised the economy”.

Trotsky made clear that it was wrong to describe the Soviet bureaucracy as a class of ‘state capitalists’. It was a parasitic caste, not a capitalist class: “The biggest apartments, the juiciest steaks and even Rolls-Royces are not enough to transform the bureaucracy into an independent ruling class.” (‘The class nature of the Soviet State’,1933).