[Following the entry of Vietnamese forces into Kampuchea and the overthrow of the murderous Pol Pot regime there in January 1979, and the Peking regime's invasion of Vietnam the following month, differences arose within the Fourth International. A public debate was carried out over what political stance to take regarding the events in Indochina and over various theoretical questions raised in the discussion.
[The main documents in this debate are the following: "Behind Differences on Military Conflicts in Southeast Asia," by Ernest Mandel (see Intercontinental Press, April 9, 1979, p. 335); the majority and minority resolutions presented to the November 1979 World Congress of the Fourth International (see Intercontinental Press, June 4, 1979); and "War and Revolution in Indochina —What Policy for Revolutionists?" a reply to Ernest Mandel by Steve Clark, Fred Feldman, Gus Horowitz, and Mary-Alice Waters (see Intercontinental Press, July 16, 1979).
[The following article by Ernest Mandel is a continuation of that discussion. It originally appeared, along with the Clark, Feldman, Horowitz, and Waters article, in a special Summer 1980 issue of the French-language fortnightly Inprecor.]
1. The state is an instrument for defending and reproducing the power of a ruling class. This is the essence of the Marxist theory of the state, as opposed to all bourgeois or revisionist theories influenced by the bourgeois ones. This theory implies a "hardcore" composed of at least the following elements: There can be no state without society being divided into social classes having conflicting material interests. Every state serves the interests of a given ruling class which must exist—i.e., there can be no feudal state without the existence of a feudal ruling class, no bourgeois state without the existence of a bourgeoisie. The existence of the state reflects the fact that the ruling class cannot tolerate that certain social functions should be exercised by all members of society, to begin with by members of the classes which do not rule. And the existence of the state manifests that there are social activities which the ruling class does not exercize automatically because it owns the means of production, but which it has to control if it wants to maintain and reproduce its class rule.
In other words, the existence of the state manifests the autonomous existence of the social superstructure, which the ruling class dominates in function of its control over the social surplus product and through many mechanisms, some of which are rather complex.
Whoever challenges the universal validity of this "hard core" of the Marxist theory of the state as "schematic," in reality challenges the very essence of that theory. To believe that you can have, under whatever circumstances, a state without a physically existing ruling class, a bourgeois state without a bourgeois class, or even worse, the same state apparatus simultaneously or successively serving the interests of the bourgeois class and the working class, is exactly like believing that you can have a capitalist mode of production without wage labor and without the production of surplus value. This is not a more flexible application of Marxism. It is a revision of Marxism.
For that reason we cannot accept comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters's statement according to which our contention that you couldn't have a bourgeois state in Kampuchea without the existence of a bourgeois class, or even the slightest remnants of such a class, in the total absence of private property and even of money, is in any way "schematic."' It is a normal and traditional application of the Marxist theory of the state. By calling that application "schematic," the comrades in question begin to revise that theory.
2. Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz- Waters compound that beginning of revisionism by writing:
This Marxist concept of the state is used in a twofold sense. It has a narrow meaning: the apparatus of coercion—armies, police, jails. And it has a broader meaning: the general socioeconomic system that the coercive apparatus upholds. [p. 724.]
This is wrong in both ways. The "narrow" meaning of the state as only a coercive apparatus is an uncalled-for oversimplification of Engels's statement: in the last analysis, the state is a body of armed men. It is precisely so only "in the last analysis." Normally, the state is a separate apparatus which is much more than just coercive. It involves administration, a currency and customs system, lawmaking, ideology, education, all necessary functions for a reproduction of class rule and production relations, which cannot be reproduced by coercion alone.
As for the "broader" meaning attributed to the state by comrades Clark-Feldman- Horowitz-Waters, this is an inadmissible concession to bourgeois and revisionist theories of the state. Marxists do not identify the state with "the general socioeconomic system," i.e., with society as such. The state is precisely a special apparatus, separate and apart from "the general socioeconomic system." This apparatus appropriates unto itself, in the interests of the ruling class, specific functions which, in a classless society, are not professional privileges of any particular group of people.
The said comrades have made this additional step on the road of revising the Marxist theory of the state because the wrong positions they have adopted on the class nature of the Kampuchean state under the Khmer Rouge regime force them to generalize embryonically revisionist positions previously adopted on China and Vietnam (and wavering positions on Yugoslavia too). They cannot accept anymore the classical position of Marx and Engels that state power and production relations, that social superstructure and social infrastructure (basis), are two different spheres of social reality, linked together by class rule, but not characterized by absolute homogeneity and even less by total identity.
A feudal (or semifeudal) state is a state which serves the interests of the (semi)feudal nobility. It is not a state which can only exist when you have nothing but feudal relations of production. A bourgeois state is a state which serves the interests of the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not a state which can only exist if you have "pure" and "total" capitalist relations of production. Likewise, a workers state (even under its most bureaucratized form) is a state which is an instrument of maintaining and reproducing those production relations of the transition period between capitalism and socialism (collective property of the means of production, planned economy, state monopoly of foreign trade, etc.) which correspond to the historical interests of the working class. It is not a state which can only exist when private property is suppressed 100 percent, or even less when all kinds of additional political and social conditions are being fulfilled. By changing this traditional and basic Marxist approach, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters open up a whole Pandora's box of revisions of historical materialism.
In passing, they start to question one hundred and thirty years of Marxist tradition which poses the need of the conquest of state power by the proletariat as an autonomous task, apart from and prior to that of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. This tradition goes from the Communist Manifesto over Marx and Engels's polemics with Bakunin and the anarchists to the debates between revisionists and Marxists in the time of the Second International and between communists and social democrats during the rise of the Third International.
3. Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz- Waters are obsessed lest one should consider "predetermined," "inevitable," "foregone," the outcome of a "transition period" between the destruction of the bourgeois state and the "emergence of new socioeconomic relations" (p. 724). But there is an obvious confusion here. We certainly agree with them not to have any "political confidence" in any of the CPs (whether they are Stalinist or of Stalinist origins) which have begun to challenge capitalist property relations without a mass proletarian revolution. More generally, we should not give a blank check of revolutionary virtue to anybody (including Bolsheviks and Trotskyists) as long as a victorious social revolution hasn't actually occurred under their leadership. But in what way can the outcome of open or incipient civil war modify our judgment abut the class nature of the forces (and the states) involved?
The Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 was defeated by counterrevolution after six months of existence. There was nothing "inevitable" about the outcome of that civil war. There was certainly no overall "emergence of new socioeconomic relations." Nevertheless, nobody can seriously argue that therefore the Hungarian Soviet Republic was not a workers state, the Hungarian Red Army not a workers army. Likewise, the Soviet Red Army could well have been defeated in the civil war in 1918 or 1919. Would that have changed the class nature of the Red Army as a workers army, of the Soviet state apparatus as a workers state?
In the opposite sense, a total victory of the Spanish workers against the fascists in July-August 1936, or a victorious crushing of Pinochet's coup by a workers insurrection in 1973 in Chile, would in no way have modified our judgment of the Spanish state under the Popular Front or of the Chilean state under the Unidad Popular as bourgeois states. For these victories would have been obtained not thanks to but in spite of the function of the existing state apparatus. And that remains the only basic criterion: the interests of what class does the state apparatus serve?
What was the role of the Kampuchean state apparatus (and the Vietnamese for that matter) after 1975? To consolidate and reproduce the rule of the bourgeoisie? To maintain a framework for the laws of motion of capitalism to function? Obviously not. But if the state has not that function but the opposite one, then it is not a bourgeois state, it is not an instrument of bourgeois class rule, irrespective of the final outcome of the national (and international) class struggle, which we consider by no means as struggle, wnien we consider by no means as a "foregone conclusion."
In passing, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters have to shift their argument, jumping back and forth, in order to keep some semblance of links to the Marxist tradition:
As long as capitalist property relations predominate, the class nature of the state remains capitalist. Insofar as the new government apparatus... makes inroads [!) into economic power of the bourgeoisie-it should be designated a workers and farmers government. If that workers and farmers government mobilizes the masses and expropriates capitalist property, a new workers state will come into being. If not, the workers and farmers government will be toppled and the capitalist state apparatus reconstructed. [p. 724, our emphasis.]
As long as capitalist property relations predominate, the class nature of the state remains capitalist. Everybody agrees. Question: Did capitalist property relations predominate under Pol Pot in Kampuchea? Who can seriously argue along these lines? Question: Did the Pol Pot regime only "make inroads" into the economic power of the bourgeoisie? Answer: It utterly destroyed that power. The capitalist class was totally expropriated. But if that expropriation occurs, even without mass mobilizations, do you then still have a bourgeois state, with the bourgeoisie having disappeared as a ruling class? Yes, contend our said comrades, because then capitalism will in the end reappear. By a rather clumsy sleight-of-hand, the end of the paragraph actually asserts the opposite of the beginning. You now have a bourgeois state not only without the predomination but even without the existence of bourgeois property relations, simply because capitalist property relations could subsequently reappear.
When comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters assert that under Pol Pot "primitive accumulation was nonetheless proceeding," they clearly confuse the accumulation of consumer goods as use-values with the accumulation of capital. There is not the slightest proof-and the comrades in question cannot give a single example of "primitive accumulation of capital" having occurred under the Khmer Rouge regime inside the bureaucracy, not to speak of primitive accumulation on the scale going on in Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union, Poland or Yugoslavia—all countries which we nevertheless consider bureaucratized workers states. So the whole argumentation is just without foundation. What these comrades defend is the revisionist thesis that you can have a bourgeois state not only without the predominance of capitalist property relations, but without the existence of private property, of a bourgeois class, or even of money. This is nonsense from a Marxist point of view.
4. Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters believe that the situation in Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1949 justifies their concept that you can have transitional situations in which the class nature of the state is unrelated to the question of which social class actually rules, of whose social class interests the state actually defends, and even of what social classes physically exist. They are quite mistaken. The experience of Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1949 strikingly confirms the correctness of the classical Marxist theory of the state —and the way in which we applied it to the case of Kampuchea.
To repeat it again: The state is an instrument of class rule. It is not necessarily always an efficient or successful defender of the interests of the ruling class; otherwise victorious social revolutions would be impossible. You can have stable bourgeois states. You can have extremely unstable bourgeois states. You can have bourgeois state apparatuses decomposed to the point where a small push can overthrow them (that was obviously the situation in Russia at the eve of the October revolution). What makes them bourgeois in each case is not their degree of stability or the outcome of the class struggles in which they are involved. It is the fact that their concrete funetion remains that of serving the class interests of the bourgeoisie and that they have to be overthrown (smashed) however weak they have become before another ruling class can be said to have taken power.
In traditional revolutionary Marxist language, we call the situation in which the state of the old ruling class in a given country is in rapid decay and the first elements of the state of a new ruling class are emerging a situation of dual power. History has taught us that there are at least three variants of situations of dual power, and there might be more (incidentally, it is a typical example of "schematism" to deny such possibilities, i.e. to jump from the universal relevance of the Marxist theory of the state to some additional set of universal preconditions for the emergence of a workers state, excluding in advance concrete variants produced by the living historical process).
The classical situation of dual power is of course the one in which a bourgeois state apparatus in full decay is challenged by soviets (workers councils), which centralize into an emerging alternative authority on a national scale.
There exists a variant of dual power which has occurred in all those cases where civil war-or at least its decisive phase-has preceded and not followed the overthrow of the bourgeois state as it did in Russia. In those cases, dual power can take the form of the bourgeoisie and its state still ruling in one part of the given country, while the emerging workers state has already full control over another part of the territory of that same country.
The main difference between that situation and the classical situation of dual power based on a nationwide network of soviets is that we do not have only an alternative emerging national authority and the nucleus of an alternative army (Red Guards, workers militias etc.), while the decaying state apparatus of the old ruling classes still survives. We now have already a fully developed alternative state apparatus on part of the national territory (army, administration at local and regional level, different currencies, even enforcement of different laws, etc.) while on the same territory the state apparatus of the old ruling class has been completely destroyed. In other words: while there is still dual power at the level of the country as a whole, there is no more dual power in portions of the national territory where bourgeois rule has disappeared.
We would contend that this second variant of dual power existed in China at least starting with 1945 if not earlier, in Yugoslavia since 1944, in Vietnam at least since 1951 if not since 1945-46.
Finally, the developments in Eastern Europe, starting with 1944, undoubtedly present us with a third variant of a dual power situation. In each of these countries, there survived a state apparatus of the old ruling classes in different degrees of disintegration or weakening (we say different degrees, for the Royal Romanian Army, to limit ourselves to that example, still counted 300,000 soldiers and officers in 1944-45, which isn't exactly a low figure). But these state apparatuses were challenged in a growing way by the much more powerful occupation force of a degenerated workers state which represented social interests historically incompatible with those of the old ruling classes of these countries. From a certain moment on, it tried-with the help of the local Stalinist parties and with different degrees of limited mass mobilizations—to wrest control over the whole country (in the first place its armed forces, its police and its economy) from the said old ruling class.
It could not do so without destroying the old state apparatus. King Michael of Romania or President Benes of Czechoslovakia could not administer a collectivized planned economy-any more than the Soviet bureaucracy and its local representatives could in the long run successfully guarantee its power and privileges in these countries with their economy remaining capitalist and integrated in the international capitalist economy. While the decaying old state apparatus (or decisive remnants of it) still survived-or, in the cases of Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, the bourgeoisie tried to build up new bourgeois state apparatuses-the Soviet occupation forces and their local tools were at the same time starting to create state apparatuses of another social nature, in the image of that of the Soviet bureaucracy. During that whole period, a dual power situation subsisted in these countries be it a dual power situation of a thors put that nigure at ou milton.
special type. It would be solved by the question of which state apparatus (the power of what social class) would be eliminated by the challenging one.
In Kampuchea after 1975, we had nothing of a situation similar to that of Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1949. The state apparatus of the old ruling classes was completely smashed by the Khmer Rouge. One could say that a situation of dual power existed in Kampuchea (dual power of the second variant) between 1973 and 1975, when large parts of the national territory were already controlled by the Khmer Rouge, and large mass mobilizations were leading to a real social revolution there (incidentally, much larger mass mobilizations than in countries like Romania, Bulgaria, or Hungary in 1944-1949), while the bourgeois semicolonial state apparatus of Lon Nol still survived in the large cities and some parts of the countryside. But it is a grave error not to distinguish between a dual power situation in which the old bourgeois state apparatus still survives, be it in a state of advanced decay, and a situation in which that old apparatus has been utterly smashed. This is one of the many errors implied in comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters's position on the class nature of the Kampuchean state under Pol Pot.
5. The said comrades contend that, having changed our position on the moment when the "people's democracies" have become bureaucratized workers states, we now situate this qualitative change in 1946-47. They are mistaken. We believe that there is no general pattern, that each country has to be examined separately, and the "concrete analysis of a concrete situation" must always be based on the key criterion: when did the bourgeoisie lose state power? When was the bourgeois state apparatus completely destroyed? That moment is different from country to country, and the difference covers a span of at least four years.
In the first place, far from starting from the assumption that the outcome was "a foregone conclusion" (p. 723), we hold now, as we did during the discussion in the late 1940s (we were among the very few comrades to have defended that obvious fact, which comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz- Waters seem not to notice even now, more than thirty years after it occurred), that the bourgeoisie did successfully defend (or restore) its state power in at least two if not three countries where the above-sketched dual power situation had emerged in 1944- 45: in Finland, in Austria and in West Berlin. In confirmation with the logic of the analysis, the Soviet occupation forces had to withdraw from these countries (or in West Berlin had to stop their attempts to inte grate that city into that part of Europe dominated by the Soviet bureaucracy). In all these cases, the consolidation or reconstruction of a bourgeois state apparatus was pretty definite in 1948-49 (although the formal withdrawal of the Soviet troops from
Eastern Austria only occurred in 1955).
In the second place, in Yugoslavia, where a genuine popular mass socialist revolution occurred, involving millions of people (be it under bureaucratic control), the remnants of the bourgeois state apparatus were pretty well eliminated at the end of 1945 and a workers state came into existence at that moment."
In the third place, in Czechoslovkia, the moment of the actual smashing of the remnants of the bourgeois state can be pinpointed even more precisely: it is February- March 1948.
In the fourth place, in Eastern Germany, you had the smashing of the previous state apparatus from the moment of the Soviet occupation. But no alternative centralized state apparatus was set up because the Soviet bureaucracy had not yet opted for the definite division of Germany and was still toying with the idea of a united German (bourgeois) state, in exchange for huge economic reparations extracted from the Ruhr. Here, the bureaucratized workers state came into existence with the creation of the German Democratic Republic in 1949.
In the remaining countries (Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) the concrete determination of the moment of qualitative change is a bit more difficult. It might stretch from 1947 to 1948 depending upon the country which we examine. But the criterion remains in each case the same: when did the bourgeoisie lose the remnants of state power it still obviously had in 1945 and 1946, and not when was private property completely abolished (in Poland and Yugoslavia it is far from being completely abolished to this very day.
Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters are worried lest one identify the qualitative change in the social nature of the state with the idea of "who controls the armed forces." We fully share that preoccupation. As we said above, the concept of "state apparatus" is much wider than just army and police. It involves the judiciary, law, currency, customs system, administration, prevailing ideology, transmission of that ruling ideology through education and the mass media, etc. For sure, in a social revolution, all these
apparatuses do not change simultaneously. But for those directly concerned by the concrete historical process, the change is pretty clear. Many Romanian or Czech bourgeois still believed they had some power in 1946. None believed it after the spring of 1948. All Chinese capitalists knew they were in power in 1947 (except in those territories controlled by the PLA). No Chinese capitalist believed he was in power in 1950, whatever portion of private property still survived.
By overreacting against a simplistic version of state power of the bourgeoisie, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters involve themselves in an unsolvable contradiction. Speaking about Eastern Europe they state (on p. 721) that the establishment of a workers state involves three "stages": the smashing of the bourgeois state apparatus; the establishment of a workers or workers and farmers) government; and the expropriation of the decisive sectors of the economy.
But when dealing with Kampuchea, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters make a complete somersault. They admit that the bourgeois Lon Nol state apparatus was completely smashed (p. 705). They admit that there was expropriation of the old ruling classes (p. 723). But because there were no mass mobilizations, in spite of the smashing of the bourgeois state and in spite of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie (including its physical annihilation)... a bourgeois state survived in Kampuchea.
6. Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters refer to the Pol Pot regime as "counterrevolutionary." But they leave the definition of that "counterrevolution" deliberately vague and not by accident. For like all their other definitions of the Pol Pot regime, it faces them with a series of contradictions in funetion of their wrong analysis of the class nature of the Kampuchean state after 1975.
Did Pol Pot initiate a social counterrevolution? But that would imply that a victorious social revolution had already occurred previously, i.e. that a workers state already existed, something said comrades strenuously deny.
Did the Khmer Rouge perhaps stop, through a successful bourgeois counterrevolution, an ongoing social revolution which had not yet finally triumphed, after the pattern of Germany 1919, Spain 1936-37, or Portugal 1975? But that presupposes, (a) huge revolutionary mass mobilizations, which said comrades equally strenuously deny having taken place in Kampuchea, and (b) a defense of private property by Pol Pot (that was after all the social content of social-democratic and Stalinist counterrevolutionary policies in the above named cases). But far from defending private property, Pol Pot abolished it radically. Did the Khmer Rouge perhaps initiate a political counterrevolution comparable to that which the Stalinist bureaucracy realized in the USSR? This more credible version of Pol Pot's "counterrevolution" however also implies that previously a workers state had already been created or was in the process of being created. For you can't have a bureaucratic political counterrevolution, i.e. a counterrevolution which expropriates politically the proletariat ... inside a bourgeois state.
Without answering in any way the arguments which we have already advanced against that analogy in our article against which they polemicize, comrades Clark- Feldman-Horowitz-Waters again repeat: "What occurred in Kampuchea was indeed very similar to the type of situation foreseen by Trotsky in 1932 in an article titled Peasant War in China and the Proletariat'" (p. 720). The trouble with that analogy, as we pointed out before, is that Trotsky based the possibility of the violent clash between a peasant army and the Chinese proletariat on the need of the peasant army to defend private property:
Regardless of their origin in each instance.... the conflicts between armed peasants and workers were rooted in one and the same social soil: the difference between the class position and training of the workers and of the peasants. The worker approaches questions from the socialist standpoint; the peasant's viewpoint is petty bourgeois. The worker strives to socialize the property that is taken away from the exploiter; the peasant seeks to divide it up. [Leon Trotsky on China, (New York: Monad Press, 1976), p. 524. Our emphasis.]
... in the peasant movement itself are very powerful proprietary and reactionary tendencies, and at a certain stage it can become hostile to the workers and sustain that hostility already equipped with arms. [Ibid., p. 528. Our emphasis.]
But in Kampuchea, far from defending private property, Pol Pot's army abolished it in the most radical manner possible. So the "peasant" character of that army does not correspond at all to the social definition Trotsky correctly gave of the material and historical interests of the peasantry as opposed to those of the proletariat.
7. According to comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters the Kampuchean workers and peasants had no stakes whatsoever in the social transformations which occurred under Pol Pot. "The policies implemented by the Pol Pot regime, to the contrary, constituted a brutal economic, social, and political retrogression for the Kampuchean workers and peasants" (p. 717). All the policies of the Pol Pot regime? A statement with far-reaching implications! Under Pol Pot, some form of civil war was still conducted by the counterrevolutionary Khmer Serei, with the support of the Thai government and the CIA, against the Pompenh regime. If Pol Pot was "retrogression" for the workers and peasants, should they have been indifferent to the outcome of that civil war? Should they even have given critical support to the Khmer Serei? What about the expropriation of the imperialist plantations? Was that a "retrogression"? What about the expropriation of all industry and wholesale trade (expropriation of wholesale trade which, in the case of South Vietnam, has suddenly become the "decisive" criterion for the emergence of a workers state)? Had the workers no stake in that either? Should they be indifferent to the restoration of private property? What about the abolition of landlordship and land rent in the north of the country? Had the workers and
peasants no stakes in that either? Should they be indifferent to its abolition? Was that also a retrogression? By concentrating all attention on the barbaric part of the policies of Pol Pot (but, we repeat, no more barbaric than Stalin's!) and sweeping under the carpet all these progressive measures of social revolution which obviously occurred in Kampuchea, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters shift the definition of a workers state away from the basic criteria which the Trotskyist movement has used up to now, and get in dangerous vicinity of "state capitalist" or Shachtmanite positions, denying the historically progressive nature of the overthrow of capitalist property relations which obviously occurred in Kampuchea.
8. Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters hotly deny that they think a new workers state has "popped up" in Kampuchea under the Vietnamese occupation (p. 725). But by trying to remain consistent with their schematic "preconditions" for the appearance of a workers state in Kampuchea, they have now tied themselves into knots which it will take them a long time to unravel.
One of the preconditions for the emergence of a workers state, if we understand them correctly, is establishing a workers government or a workers and farmers government. That is, a government independent of the old ruling classes, which mobilizes the power of the workers and their allies to implement progressive social measures that more and more challenge the economic prerogatives of capital. [p. 721.]
But that condition is impossible to achieve in Kampuchea today, for the "economic prerogatives of capital" have already been totally abolished by the Pol Pot regime. We leave aside the fact—which we predicted —that there is not the slightest sign of "mass mobilizations" in Kampuchea under the regime of Vietnamese occupation, be it only because of the miserable famine conditions reigning in that unfortunate country, which the new regime in no ways has alleviated.
Paradoxically, for said comrades' schema to be applicable in Kampuchea, the Heng Samrin regime would first have to restore private property, and then find itself forced "by exceptional circumstances of imperialist aggression" to suppress it again through "mass mobilizations." We wonder whether comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters push their schematism to the point where they would actually foresee such a scenario. And if not, how could "a workers and farmers government stage" (with mass mobilizations) ever come into existence... when private property has already been eliminated from the start?
In the meantime, it remains a fact that the state apparatus of the Khmer Rouge has been completely smashed by the Vietnamese invasion and a new state apparatus created by an occupation army of 250,000 men. Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz- Waters believe that this poses difficulty to our analysis. It doesn't in any way. Once the concept of possible wars between bureaucratized workers states is understood fully, it is not difficult to understand that a victorious invasion of a workers state by the bureaucracy of another workers state could completely smash the existing workers state apparatus to replace it by another bureaucratized workers state apparatus. In analogy (but it is just an analogy), a bourgeois state can be smashed by an invading army and be replaced by another bourgeois state (in most cases a colonial or semicolonial one; but in West Germany, even a new imperialist one).
But the difficulty really arises for the said comrades. They argue that Vietnam is a bureaucratized workers state. We agree. They argue that the Pol Pot state apparatus has been completely smashed by the Vietnamese army. We again agree. They cannot deny that the Heng Samrin regime is trying to build up (very slowly, and with great difficulties) a new state apparatus supporting itself nearly exclusively upon the Vietnamese army. Question: Can the army of a workers state rebuild from scratch a bourgeois state? Additional question: What has become of the analogy with Eastern Europe? Final question: If the new state apparatus, supporting itself on collective property and a huge army of a foreign workers state, is finally recognized as a workers state, without mass mobilizations having occurred "simultaneously" with the expropriations, for what mysterious reason was the Pol Pot state then no workers state?
9. Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters sneer at our references to the traumatic shocks which the Kampuchean CP leaders suffered in the two decades between 1954 and 1973 and which, according to us, go a far way in explaining their extreme nationalism and distrust of the Soviet, Vietnamese, and probably also Chinese CP leaders. "Not conflicting class interests, but traumatic shocks' and 'infernal logic' are the stuff of comrade Mandel's 'more credible' explanation" (p. 705).
Our good comrades forget that the "traumatic shocks" we are referring to are neither of a psychological nor of a purely ideological nature. They were caused by political differences around central issues of the Kampuchean revolution. Since when are such political issues divorced from the class struggle?
In their haste to score debating points about our alleged underestimation of the class struggle, they suffer another loss of memory: the concrete contents of the political differences leading to those famous "traumatic shocks." Let us refresh that memory a bit:
A. The sell-out of the Kampuchean antiimperialist resistance movement (or one could say of the Kampuchean revolution) by Moscow and Peking at the Geneva conference of 1954.
B. The shameful collaboration of the Soviet bureaucracy with the Lon Nol regime, when it was killing thousands of workers, peasants and communists starting with 1970.
C. The isolation of the Khmer Rouge when they tried to take Pnompenh, and to overthrow not only Lon Nol but also Sihanouk.
Now what was and what should have been our position as revolutionary Marxists towards these political differences? Weren't the Khmer Rouge, supposedly moved by "hatred of the socialist revolution in Vietnam" (p. 719), right on these three key issues of the Kampuchean revolution? Or do comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters believe that the interests of the Kampuchean revolution had to be subordinated to some "higher" goal, dictated either from Hanoi or Moscow? If they don't think so, as we know they don't, how can they then explain the class nature of these political conflicts? How come despicable petty-bourgeois Paristrained intellectuals, preparing to administer a bourgeois state, took up more correct anti-imperialist and anticapitalist positions than the representatives of workers states, be it bureaucratized ones? How is it that revolutionary Marxists would have had to give them critical support against the leaders of these workers states? Isn't there something wrong there?
10. Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz- Waters make a great deal of Pol Pot's counterrevolutionary alliance with the Khmer Serei and the Thai regime after his downfall. They write:
Doesn't Pol Pot's subsequent evolution throw even graver doubts onto the contention of those who believe that Kampuchea had definitively crossed the threshold of a workers state? [p. 719.]
No, it doesn't. It isn't something new either. When the Tito regime thought itself immediately threatened by a Soviet invasion in autumn 1950, it made a spectacular reversal of international orientation, moving from positions which were clearly to the left of Moscow's, to requests of arms from the imperialists and to supporting imperialism's war in Korea. When the Nagy regime in Hungary was on the point of being toppled by the invading Soviet army, it made lastminute desperate appeals to Western governments, and broke with the Warsaw Pact. After the invasion of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, not a few leaders of the Dubeek wing of the bureaucracy removed from power and forced to emigrate openly broke with Marxism and the defense of collective property and took probourgeois positions, the most prominent example being Ota Sik, the chief of economic policy under Dubcek. Did these various examples prove Stalin's, Khrushchev's, and Brezhnev's allegations that Tito, Nagy, and Dubcek had been from the beginning on a course of allying themselves with imperialism and of restoring capitalism in their respective countries? Did these acts in retrospect justify the blockade, military pressures, and even invasion used by the Kremlin? In no way whatsoever.
They only proved that in all these cases, Moscow's opponents were unprincipled bureaucrats, trained in the Stalin school of "socialism in one country," i.e. ready to make any maneuver, to ally themselves with anybody, to cynically sacrifice the interests of world revolution and of the international proletariat for the purpose of defending their own power and privileges. But it was power and privileges based upon collective and not upon private property, emanating from a postcapitalist and not from a capitalist economy and society. Whatever counterrevolutionary maneuvers they undertake when they are afraid of losing power or when they lose power can in no way change the Marxist criteria to judge the nature of the society and the state when they were running it. By these Marxist criteria, Yugoslavia in 1950, Czechoslovakia under Dubcek, Hungary under Nagy, were workers states in spite of above-mentioned counterrevolutionary maneuvers. By the same criterion, Kampuchea under Pol Pot was a bureaucratized workers state too.
11. When did China become a workers state? When was the social revolution victorious in China, i.e. when did state power pass from the bourgeois class (allied to the landlords) to the working class allied to the peasantry? Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters draw attention to a resolution of the International Executive Committee (IEC) of 1952, which states that China was not yet a workers state at that time (p. 724). They also draw attention to my polemies, as reporter on the Chinese question at that IEC, with the French comrade Favre-Bleibtreu, who stated that China had become a workers state in 1949 and that the question of the class character of the state "can be answered only as a function of a single decisive criterion: which class holds the essential elements of coercion?"
We believe today as we did at that moment that that "single decisive criterion" is too narrow. We used at that time as we do today a broader criterion: "what social class holds power," political power, state power being a larger notion than just controlling the police and the army. We used at that time as we do today the concept of "dual power" to characterize a situation in which two antagonistic social classes hold elements of state power on the territory of a is quoted by single country. All that Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters themselves (p. 724), without saying whether they agree or disagree with these criteria. But we also believe today—as we did from 1954 on—that by applying the correct criteria, the date on which China became a workers state has to be fixed at 1949-50. It would be hard to demonstrate for anybody "that the destruction of the state power of the Chinese bourgeoisie" had not been completed at that time, political power, state power being of course distinct from the survival of private property. The only part of Chinese territory on which the Chinese bourgeoisie still exercised state power after that date was Taiwan.
We were not alone with that opinion, nor only in a post festum bloc with comrade Favre-Bleibtreu. The Fourth World Congress of the Fourth International (FI) adopted "Theses on the Rise and Decline of Stalinism" in 1954 —which the comrades of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), sympathizing with the then existing International Committee of the Fl, do not recognize as documents for the whole movement, but which certainly expressed the opinion of the majority of the movement-in which the same opinion is expressed. And at the Reunification Congress of the FI of 1963 (Seventh World Congress), which comrades Clark- Feldman-Horowitz-Waters certainly do recognize as authoritative for the whole movement, we find in the basic document adopted, "Dynamics of World Revolution Today," the following passage:
The evolution of the workers' states as a whole, since the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, and especially after Stalin's death in 1953, has therefore steadily removed the causes that fostered political passivity among the masses and their vanguard. [Dynamics of World Revolution Today. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), p. 43. Our emphasis.]
As we don't believe that comrades Clark- Feldman-Horowitz-Waters have been converted to the Menshevik two-stage theory of revolution, the formula: the "victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949" can therefore only mean the victory of a socialist revolution. And as there can be no victory of the socialist revolution without the conquest of power by the proletariat, i.e. without the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we have to conclude that at least in 1963 there was no firm position that China became a workers state only in 1953-54....
12. Motivated by the desire to defend the position that the People's Republic of China was not a workers state since its creation in 1949-50, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters give a content to Mao's "new democracy" policy which strangely conforms to the official Maoist version of it, and not to what they call "real Chinese history" (p. 723). This forces them, and not us, to "rewrite" that history. Here is what they say:
In reality the 'new democracy' policy had a definite political purpose. It was designed to assure the imperialists and native capitalists of Mao's interest in reaching an accomodation with them. This very real attempt to come to terms with the capitalist class is why confidence in Mao was not justified
Only when Mao's offers to imperialism were rebuffed did his regime, under the pressure of the workers and the peasants, move against the last preserves of capitalism. [p. 725.]
The shifts in the reasoning, in the use of words, in the cover-up of real radical changes, is striking. It shows the weakest side of said comrades' case.
In the first place, they try to hide the fact that the "new democracy" policy was formulated in 1940, while we are talking about what happened in China in the period of intense and generalized civil war, i.e. 1946-50. Nobody intends to give Mao any credit or any confidence for what he wrote and applied during his uneasy "pact-truce-andwar" with the Kuomintang in 1937-46. One could say that comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters's analysis by and large corresponds to what happened in China during that period (although even for that period it is too sweeping).
But does it correspond to what happened starting with 1946? Unleashing a generalized civil war is a peculiar way of "reaching an accomodation," to say the least. And the Korean War (which started in 1950 and not in 1952-53) was an even stranger way to "come to terms" with imperialism. What comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters deny is that a qualitative change occurred in the political situation in China starting with the generalized civil war. What they further deny is that the outcome of that civil war-the defeat of the capitalists and landlords, the victory of the People's Liberation Army, the proclamation of the People's Republic of China-in turn marked a qualitative change in the nature of the state, i.e. the passing of political power from one class to another. How they can deny both these changes, in the light of real Chinese history, not to speak of the Marxist theory of the state, is a mystery to us. But that is what lies at the bottom of their view of recent Chinese history."
Did Mao continue to look for "accomodation" with imperialism (and even with sectors of the Chinese capitalist class) after 1949-50? Of course he did. So did Stalin ... without this implying that the USSR was not a workers state. But there is accomodation and accomodation. There are "terms" and "terms." The French and Spanish People's Front, Thorez and Togliatti's policies in France and Italy after 1941, the Indonesian CP's policies which led to the disaster of 1965, the Chilean Unidad Popular, were all policies of "accomodation" and "coming to terms" with imperialism and capitalism, within the framework of the bourgeois state and without attacking the basic structures of bourgeois class power. Mao's policies (like those of Tito before him and Ho Chi Minh after him) were policies of "accomodation" and "coming to terms" with imperialism while trying to destroy the bourgeois state and building up an independent army and a state independent from and hostile to the bourgeoisie. A "minor" difference, undoubtedly.
The question is not abstract but very concrete and very "political." There were coalition negotiations between the Chinese CP and the Kuomintang. On what issues did they break down? On two key issues. Mao was unwilling to dissolve the PLA and the separate state apparatus he had set up in the liberated territories. Chiang Kai-shek —with a keener class instinct, we must say, than these comrades-was adamant that no coalition government was possible without a dissolution (i.e. to quote Thorez, without "a single state, a single army, a single police" i.e. a bourgeois one). Chiang Kai-shek was resolute to crush the huge spontaneous peasant uprising against the landlords which was sweeping throughout Northern China starting with 1946. Mao, after some hesitation, changed his line in order to go along with these uprisings. (Strangely enough, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters who insist so much on "mass pressure" upon the bureaucrats, see the limited presures of the limited mobilizations of 1952-53—unleashed by the party leadership itself-without taking notice of the huge, spontaneous uprisings of 1946-47, which involved tens of millions of people and were among the largest of twentieth century history.)® These two issues led to a generalized civil war instead of a coalition government. This was in complete contradiction with Mao's previous and current theories. But it was a giant change in the objective situation. No, say comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters, this quite conformed with Mao's theories. There was no basic change in the situation. In other words: generalized civil war equals generalized class collaboration; destruction of bourgeois state power equals consolidation of bourgeois state power. Aren't "dialecties" stretched here to the point where they become vulgar sophistry?
What has the question of "confidence" in Mao to do with that? We note the changes and the dates of the changes. What "could" happen afterwards is another question altogether. Could capitalism have been restored in China after 1950? Of course it could. It could even be restored today. The change in the situation lies in the fact that, in order to restore it, a destruction of the state apparatus set up in 1949-50 would have been and remains necessary. Do the policies of the bureaucracy objectively undermine the conquests of the Chinese revolution? Of course they do, today as in 1949. But at the same time, these conquests were very real and very visible in 1949. A new state had come into existence which, according to the Marxist theory of the state and the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution, could only be called a workers state.
Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters confuse the issue by suddenly introducing the term of moving "against the last preserves of capitalism." This is not, and never has been, a criterion for determining the existence or absence of a workers state. As a matter of fact, "the last preserves of capitalism" have not been eliminated from Poland, the German Democratic Republic, and Yugoslavia to this very day. They had not been eliminated from the USSR until the late twenties, the early thirties. Yet nobody in our movement denies that in these four cases we are confronting workers states. Why would the same definition be wrong for the People's Republic of China, before the "last preserves of capitalism" had been eliminated? To jump from the "decisive sectors of the economy" to the "last preserves" is making the judgment of what class really exercises power practically impossible in most if not in all countries of the world.
We are firmly convinced that the dictatorship of the proletariat will not and should not eliminate "the last preserves of capitalism" from the moment of its establishment. Comrade Trotsky was of the same opinion. He wrote in 1934:
Once the Soviet government [in the USA] would be firmly in possession of the decisive heights of the economy (the banks, the fundamental branches of industry, transportation), farmers, small industrialists and merchants would have all the time necessary to think the situation over and take a decision. The rest would depend upon the successes obtained by nationalized industry ["Le Socialisme en Amerique," Oeuvres, vol. 4, p. 200. Our own translation].
Should we now revise that judgment? Finally it ill suits comrades Clark-Feldman- Horowitz-Waters to make frivolous comments on an important theoretical issue:
Really? Mao's "new democracy" line was just a rationalization to avoid recognizing that he had really been carrying out the socialist revolution? To avoid succumbing to the temptations of Trotskyism? [p. 724.]
We are not dealing with the "new democracy" line in general. We were dealing with the specific Maoist definition of the People's Republic of China, proclaimed in October 1949, as a state of the so-called new democracy, part bourgeois and part workingclass. For us, such a state has never existed, cannot exist and will never exist.
In China, Mao established a workers state in spite of his theory of "new democracy." But the fact that he clung to this theory had disastrous consequences, in the first place for the Indonesian CP, who imitated his theory instead of imitating his practice. For that reason, bourgeois counterrevolution and not socialist revolution triumphed in Indonesia. The costs of that theory amounted to between half a million and a million communists, workers, peasants, youth, and intellectuals being massacred in Indonesia alone. There is no reason to crack cheap jokes on the issue.
Yes, the refusal to codify in theory what he had done in practice was a major political crime of Mao, certainly a much larger crime than to postpone the expropriation of the last Shanghai capitalists for a couple of years. (Most of the Shanghai capitalists fled from the mainland in 1949-50. They had voted with their feet on the question of the class nature of the People's Republic of China. That vote was quite in conformity with their class interests and with our definition of their class nature). Yes, for a bureaucrat of Stalinist origin like Mao to admit that Trotsky and the Left Opposition had been correct on the basic strategic issue for underdeveloped countries the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat allied to the poor peasantry as the only way to solve the agrarian and the national question-proved to be more difficult than to overthrow capitalism in China. One can draw conclusions from that on the nature of the Maoist bureaucracy. But it is impermissible to draw conclusions therefrom as to the class nature of the People's Republic of China-conclusions, furthermore, which would in practice imply that Mao had been right, and that the biggest peasant revolution in history could be successful... without the establishing of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
13. In order to remain fully consistent with their beginning revisionism of what determines the social nature of a state, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters have now to defend that revisionism towards the past. Without batting an eyelid they write:
Stressing the workers' exercise of power through the soviets, they [Lenin and Trotsky] often [!] referred to the workers state as existing from the time the Bolshevik-led soviets took power in 1917, even prior to the economic transformations.
With the rise of Stalinism, however, the political conquests of the Russian workers and poor peasants were reversed in key areas....
This put the spotlight on the importance of transforming property relations in the establishment of working-class rule. It was in this framework that Trotsky began [!] reviewing the transformation process in the Soviet Union, stressing the key economic measures that were accomplished only in 1918. [p. 721.]
There then follows a quotation from a polemical article written by Trotsky in 1933. A single quotation, opposed to all programmatic statements of the Bolsheviks, of the first congresses of the Comintern, of the International Left Opposition, and of the Fourth International itself, which all define the soviet power established by the October revolution as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Is that a serious way of dealing with Trotsky's heritage, not to speak about that of Lenin?
Trotsky wrote several basic and detailed analyses of the Russian revolution, and of the October revolution in particular. Just to mention the most important ones: his monumental History of the Russian Revolution; his Copenhagen speech; his thesis "Workers State, Thermidor and Bonapartism"; his book The Revolution Betrayed; the passages on the USSR in the Transitional Program; the passages on the USSR in In Defense of Marxism; his article "Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution." In none of these basic texts five of which, incidentally, were written after the article of 1933 quoted by said comrades-is there any revision of the classical position that the October revolution established the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia. The idea that you had a bourgeois state in Russia until the massive nationalizations of summer-autumn 1918 appears ludicrous in the light of that evidence.
The Revolution Betrayed is the most detailed and painstaking analysis of the USSR and of Stalinism written by Trotsky. Again, it is written after the 1933 article, at a moment when "the rise of Stalinism" and the fact that the political conquests of the Russian workers and poor peasants had been "reversed in key areas" was certainly understood by Trotsky. Yet we do not find there a single mention of the Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters theory that the dictatorship of the proletariat really started only in 1918, and that Russia remained a bourgeois state till late 1918. Instead, we find a quotation from the official program of the Bolshevik party of 1918, a quotation reprinted with full approval:
"The October revolution in Russia has realized the dictatorship of the proletariat. ..." (Pathfinder Press, 1972, p. 58.)
Need one add any more comments?
14. The idea that there was no workers state in China after 1949-50 and no workers state in Russia between October 1917 and autumn 1918 leads to the strangest theoretical implications in the light of the momentous events which occurred at these moments.
In Russia, the Red Army was created before the massive nationalization measures of summer-autumn 1918. Question: Can you have a bourgeois state with a workers army? Further question: Was the Red Army a workers army from its inception? Additional question: Did the bourgeoisie rise up in arms against its own state? Final question: What role did the central state apparatus play in the civil war in 1918? What class side was it on? Was it "wavering"? Was it hesitant? Besides the army, foreign policy and constitutional law are among the main characteristics of a state. Was it a bourgeois state which concluded the Brest-Litovsk peace, which made the impassionate internationalist appeals to the international working class, or which boldly nominated the Scottish workers leader McLean consul of Soviet Russia in Glascow? Was the Soviet constitution of summer 1918, promulgated before the "key economic measures of 1918," the constitution of a bourgeois state? Don't you see what ridicule you are heaping upon yourselves by trying to be "consistent" revisionists in the question of the moment of birth of workers states and the criteria used therefore?
Even clearer is the case of China. The Korean War broke out in autumn 1950, not in 1952-53. Yet comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters will have us believe that this was a war between a Chinese bourgeois state and world imperialism. Perhaps it was "only" an anti-imperialist conflict, a "war of national liberation"? Perhaps it was not pitching two distinct social orders and two antagonistic class camps one against the other? Who can seriously defend such a thesis in the light of the historical evidence? How can we, without falling into the trap of the Menshevik two-stage revolution theory, affirm that the People's Liberation Army which defeated U.S. (and international) imperialism in Korea was the army ... of a bourgeois state (a state of the "new democracy" perhaps)?
15. We don't mention the Menshevik twostage theory of revolution by accident. The logical implications of comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters's concept of what determines a workers state in a backward country are hammer blows against the theory of the permanent revolution.
This theory is summarized by Trotsky himself in the following formula:
With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat....
[The Permanent Revolution, Pathfinder Press, 1969, p. 276. Our emphasis.]
Now when was the agrarian question, as the main task of the national-democratic revolution, solved in Russia? When was the decree of partition of the land proclaimed? In late 1918? Or immediately during the October revolution? But if a bourgeois state is capable of emancipating the peasantry, if it is not the dictatorship of the proletariat which achieves that basic task, what remains of the theory of permanent revolution? Answering in advance comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters, in his polemic with Radek, Trotsky precises in The Permanent Revolution:
... the true democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, that is, the one which actually destroyed the regime of autocracy and serfdom and snatched the land from the feudalists, was accomplished not before October but only after October; it was accomplished, to use Marx's words, in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasant war-and then, a few months later, began growing into a socialist dictatorship. [Ibid., pp. 230-231.]
In other words, the dictatorship of the proletariat, far from coming into being only when "last preserves of capitalism" have been eliminated, is the precondition for the solution of the agrarian question, and grows over into an expropriation of the capitalists (which can be carried through in different stages). Otherwise, it would be identical with a proletarian revolution in an imperialist country, i.e. the whole specificity of uneven and combined development in relatively backward countries, which underpins it, would be lost.
The theory of the permanent revolution therefore does not presuppose a simultaneous solution of national-democratic and socialist tasks of the revolution. What it does presuppose is the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat as precondition for the solution of the national-democratic tasks, accompanied by a beginning—but by no means a complete solution of socialist tasks. Pushing back the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat until after the solution of the national-democratic tasks is over, even until all the socialist tasks have been solved, comrades Clark- Feldman-Horowitz-Waters leave the theory of the permanent revolution suspended in mid-air. If the liberation of the peasants can be solved without the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, one wonders how the proletariat, as a small minority of the population could, under these circumstances, obtain or even maintain an alliance with even a significant part of the peasantry to establish its dictatorship.
16. Impelled by the desire of achieving "consistent incipient revisionism" (the inverted commas do of course not refer to a quotation), comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters have now come up with an amazing theory which generalizes a new "transition period" of "workers and farmers governments" between the smashing of the bourgeois state and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
That this is a new theory—i.e. a revision of the traditional theory of the Communist International and the Fourth International on the matter-cannot be doubted. It is sufficient to read the relevant chapter of the Transitional Program which says:
This formula, "workers' and farmers' government," first appeared in the agitation of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and was definitely accepted after the October revolution. In the final instance it represented nothing more than the popular designation for the already established dictatorship of the proletariat. [Leon Trotsky: The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, Pathfinder Press, 1977, p. 133. Our emphasis.]
The chapter further develops the pedagogical value of such an agitational slogan used by revolutionary Marxists, while the opportunist working class parties, still enjoying support by the majority of the workers, refuse to break their class collaboration with the bourgeoisie. And then it concludes:
Is the creation of such a government by the traditional workers' organizations possible? Past experience shows, as has already been stated, that this is, to say the least, highly improbable. However, one cannot categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that, under the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc.), the petty-bourgeois parties, including the Stalinists, may go further than they themselves wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie. In any case, one thing is not to be doubted: even if this highly improbable variant somewhere, at some time, becomes a reality and the workers' and farmers' government in the above-mentioned sense is established in fact, it would represent merely a short episode on the road to the actual dictatorship of the proletariat. [Ibid, p. 135.]
Our program therefore states clearly:
A. Normally, the workers and farmers government, inasmuch as it realizes an antibourgeois and anticapitalist program, is synonymous with the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e. cannot fulfill that program without destroying state power of the bourgeoisie and having the working class conquer political power).
B. Exceptionally, traditional class collaborationist workers organizations could establish such a workers and farmers government without previously smashing the bourgeois state. But this is highly improbable.
C. Even in that case, this would only be "a short episode" before the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is nothing but a summary of what the Fourth Congress of the Communist International itself stated on the matter, in its Resolution on Tactics, section XI "The workers government," which —like all the programmatic documents of the first four congresses of the Communist International —are also part of our program. Leaving aside the cases of the "liberal (bourgeois) labor governments" and of social-democratic governments which stay within the normal boundaries of bourgeois society, we find in that resolution three final variants of "workers" (or "workers and farmers") governments: two mainly based upon the reformists, which start to break with capitalism but do not yet overthrow bourgeois state power; and the last one essentially based upon the communists, which is explicitly identified with the dictatorship of the proletriat. ("Theses, Manifestes, et Résolutions des Quatre Premiers Congrès de l'IC," Librairie du Travail, Paris, 1934, pp. 158-9)
Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters have now reversed all this. According to them,
A. Workers and farmers governments are never identical with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
B. Workers and farmers governments staying within the boundaries of the bourgeois state, instead of being "exceptional" and "highly improbable," become the general rule.
C. Instead of being limited to the case where traditionally class collaborationist parties constitute this variant of a "workers and farmers government," the combination of such a government with a surviving bourgeois state now is extended to all those cases where revolutionary parties, including the Bolsheviks themselves, are leading the revolution.
D. Instead of a "short episode," this combination of a "workers and peasants government" with a bourgeois state and without dual power (for some obscure reason, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters do not want to introduce that concept in any way into the analysis of what went on in all socialist revolutions, except the Russian one) now can last for years (three, four, or even five years in Eastern Europe, Vietnam, and China).
Such a sweeping revision of our traditional programmatic position on that question is motivated essentially by the need to "generalize" new experiences arising after World War II. But the only "new experience" which justifies a slight modification of Trotsky's formulations is the case of Cuba. There we were confronted with a leadership which was neither revolutionary Marxist nor based upon the traditional workers organizations. It achieved, under conditions of huge mass mobilizations, a break with the bourgeoisie and with imperialism (incidentally conditioned by a split in its own ranks), which led to the establishment of a workers state late 1960. One could say that the "workers and farmers government" lasted for about a year, and that, from the point of view of the nature of the state, you had during that period a situation of dual power: rising organs of workers power (among them, in the first place, the armed militia); rapidly decomposing remnants of the bourgeois state (essentially in the realm of the central administration, law, and the educationideology system).
In the cases of China and Yugoslavia, one could apply the notion of "workers and farmers governments" to very short periods when a "traditional workers party" was in power but had not yet completely destroyed the bourgeois state. This would cover around six months in the case of Yugoslavia (in 1945) and between six months and a year in the case of China (1949-1950). In each of these cases however, Trotsky's prediction came out as correct: these were only "short episodes" on the road of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Again, in order to remain consistent with the Marxist theory of the state, one could say that during these "short episodes" there was a situation of dual power in which the remnants of bourgeois state power were rapidly being decomposed and smashed and the elements of the dictatorship of the proletariat (of workers power, be it under an extremely bureaucratized form) rapidly put into place.
Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters deny that this was our approach to the Cuban question (p. 726). But the very quote they reprint from the Sixth World Congress document on Cuba clearly states the opposite. It points out that, beginning with spring-summer 1959 elements of workers power (militia and people's tribunal had been created; that the capitalist state however had not yet been completely broken; and that it was completely destroyed by October 1960. If you want to call that "transition period" of around one year a "workers and farmers government" under conditions of dual power, we have no objection. But what has this to do with a workers and farmers government operating under a bourgeois state without dual power, without the rise of elements of workers power from the beginning of the "transition"?
One could argue that this whole discussion is a bit byzantine. Aren't we talking about the same process, even by using different terms? Such a comment would not take into account the dangerous political implications of the new generalized theoretical stand by said comrades. For if the smashing of the bourgeois state apparatus and the destruction of the capitalists (their being "wiped out" as these comrades express themselves in relation with Kampuchea on p. 719) is not a sufficient condition for the emergence of a workers state, we come dangerously near to the Maoist, subjectivist revision of Marxism for which some supplementary element, outside of the basic criteria of class power and class existence, replace these as "decisive." In the case of comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters, this "decisive" criterion is mass mobilizations (even if bureaucratically controlled ones). But this faces them with a grave problem precisely where they think their case is the strongest, i.e. in those countries where sweeping nationalizations of big capital did take place under the leadership of pettybourgeois nationalists (p. 716).
Let us take the classical examples of Nasserite Egypt or Algeria under Ben Bella. What was the basic difference of these cases with Eastern Europe (except Yugoslavia of course) 1946-1949? The scope of the nationalizations? Certainly not. The absence of mass mobilizations? But the mass mobilizations in these two cases were much larger and not more limited than those of Eastern Europe. In fact, on several occasions, we witnessed in Cairo, mass demonstrations of several million workers and peasants, the largest in the twentieth century up to the Iranian revolution, and possibly equal to those ones.
The difference between Egypt and Algeria on the one hand, and Eastern Europe on the other hand, lies somewhere else. It can easily be stated in terms of the classical Marxist theory of the state. The power of the bourgeoisie as a class was not broken. There was no basic change in law making acquisition of private property of the means of production illegal. There was no suppression of the major part of private property which is private property of the land and of commercial shops (rural and urban), and not of industry or banking, in such backward countries. The bourgeoisie as a class had therefore not disappeared (only its top layers of monopolists had lost their property; and even they had received important compensation for the nationalized property in many cases). Therefore, petty-bourgeois officers in power would tend to use their positions to accumulate private capital (through corruption, theft, high salaries, high offices occupied in the nationalized sector etc.) on a large scale. Therefore, it was only a question of time till large-scale private capitalist entrepreneurs would reemerge again, first in agriculture (where they had really never been suppressed, only reduced) and in construction, after that even in industry. All this proves, without any circular reasoning, that the state had remained a bourgeois state, that a bourgeois class remained in existence as a ruling class (even if its composition had changed), that the bourgeois state apparatus had never been smashed, and that those elements of dual power which had undoubtedly emerged embryonically in the case of Algeria, were
progressively neutralized and eliminated by that bourgeois state.
All the criteria for judging the different course of events in Eastern Europe on the one hand, and Egypt and Algeria on the other hand, are therefore the classical criteria of class rule, of existence of and rule by the capitalist class, of the bourgeois nature of the state in function of its defending and reproducing private property of the means of production and accumulation of capital as social institutions (which is quite distinct from maintaining private property in every single enterprise). If one abandons be it only in the case of Kampuchea, not to speak of Eastern Europe and even other countries -these basic materialist criteria for some weird new schema, one will only create the greatest confusion among revolutionists the world over in judging the course of events -including revolutionary events-in other semi-colonial and relatively backward countries.
Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters try to make some capital out of the fact that the United Secretariat majority called for the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Kampuchea in January 1979, at the same time as Peking and as the imperialists did (p. 708). This argument is worthless. We do not take our political positions just by saying the opposite of what the imperialists say. We adopt our positions in function of the overall interests of the world proletariat and of world revolution, on the basis of objective criteria of analysis. The positions adopted by imperialism are certainly an element of that analysis. But they are not the only one. In several occasions they are not even the main one.
In 1956, imperialism started a ferocious campaign in favor of withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. In Paris, there was a large right-wing street demonstration of tens of thousands of people, led by practically all bourgeois politicians marching under that slogan. This didn't prevent the overwhelming majority of Trotskyists both those organized in the Fourth International and those acting under the banner of the International Committee of the Fourth International-to defend the same slogan.
When the invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred in August 1968, the same coincidence occurred (and supporters of the invasion among CP leaderships tried to make some capital out of that coincidence, like abovesaid comrades do now). The imperialists and all bourgeois forces throughout the world called for a withdrawal of the Warsaw Pact armies from Czechoslovakia. Unanimously, the FI did the same.
Let us add that both in the cases of Hungary and of Czechoslovakia, the imperialist campaign for withdrawal of troops was much larger, much more vociferous and much more unanimous than is the imperialist campaign in favor of withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Kampuchea.
There is an ironic side to this question. One of the arguments raised by the SWP leadership to justify in 1953-54 its public break with the majority elected leadership of the Fourth International was the alleged hostility of Pablo, then the secretary of the International Secretariat of the FI, to raise the slogan of an immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops from the German Democratic Republic after the workers uprising of July 1953. We believe the SWP leadership's assessment of what the real positions of the IS of the FI had been on that occasion was wrong. We have explained several time that we were in favor of such a withdrawal. But one has to admit that given the military situation in Central Europe and the cold-war situation at that moment the possibility that such a withdrawal would have been followed nearly immediately by an occupation of the GDR by West German bourgeois troops and by a return to capitalist property relations was certainly as large as the danger of an occupation of Kampuchea by the capitalist Thai army, or a return to capitalist property relations in Kampuchea in case of withdrawal by the Vietnamese.
18. The question of whether or not at certain moments it is possible for the international working class to take positions which seem similar to those of some imperialists—we say seem similar, for in all the above-mentioned cases, obviously, the dynamic of our demand for a withdrawal of troops of bureaucratized workers states from the territory of other workers states was part of an overall position tending to weaken imperialism and strengthen world revolution, part of an overall program and strategic line combining our struggle for permanent revolution in the colonies and semi-colonies, for socialist revolutions in the imperialist countries, for political revolutions in the bureaucratized workers states —is part of a larger question. Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters state: " in each case where a military conflict does erupt, it is necessary to look for a fundamental explanation in concrete circumstances of the class struggle....." (p. 714). Formulated in that absolute and one-sided way, the definition is wrong. It raises and revises again general problems of Marxist theory.
The class struggle is a key contradiction of the capitalist mode of production. But it is not the only contradiction. Capitalist competition, interimperialist competition, is another of these basic contradictions. It cannot be reduced to the class struggle between capital and labor. Indeed, comrades Clark- Feldman-Horowitz-Waters themselves feel there is a problem here when they write: "Ours is the age of imperialist war and workers revolution" (p. 715). But imperialist wars, by definition, are not wars between capital and labor. They are wars provoked by conflicts inside the capitalist class (or, if one wants to be more precise, by those explosive inner contradictions of the capitalist mode of production which lead to violent conflicts between different imperialist powers).
Furthermore, wars of conquest of semicolonial countries by imperialist countries (like the Sino-Japanese war), although they certainly concern the working class and the peasantry, generally take, at least in their first stage, the form of a military conflict between different fractions of the world bourgeoisie: a section of the imperialist bourgeoisie trying to crush a section of the semicolonial bourgeoisie (intertwined with elements of precapitalist ruling classes).
So if we want to generalize that analysis, we have to say that military conflicts grow
out of the inner contradictions of the existing mode of production, and express themselves as conflicts either between classes or between fractions (separate groups) of classes. Otherwise, you could not explain the wars of colonial conquest or the interimperialist wars of the twentieth century.
Now why would that formula, applicable to two world wars, be inapplicable to the world reality of today in which different bureaucratic castes rule over different workers states? We know that comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters shrink back from the concept that the bureaucracy is a parasitic outgrowth of the working class. We shall come back to the serious theoretical mistakes which flow from such a denial. But it would be hard to deny that the military conflict between the Hungarian revolution and the Soviet bureaucracy—to take the clearest example—was a conflict between the working class and the bureaucracy, defending its power and privileges, and not a direct expression of the class struggle between Capital and Labor.
World capitalism certainly feared a workers councils republic in Hungary. In spite of all its demagogic shouting against the Soviet invasion, it was certainly not unhappy that the workers councils were crushed. But this does not mean that the military conflict was a conflict between imperialism and the working class. Moscow did not intervene in Hungry as a tool of imperialism, i.e. it did not restore private property and capitalism there. What we had there was a conflict between the working class and the bureaucratic layer, not between two different classes.
What is true for military interventions of the bureaucracy against political revolutions is even more true for interbureaucratic conflicts. Nobody denies that they are in some relation with the class struggle, in some relation with imperialism's counterrevolutionary endeavours on a world scale, etc. What we deny is that they are direct expressions of the class struggle. In these conflicts, the different bureaucratic castes defend their own material interests in the first place and not the interests of imperialism. Peking is neither a tool nor a stooge of Washington. Its main purpose is to defend and increase its own power and privileges. Its maneuvers with imperialism are a function of that main purpose. If one presents things otherwise, if one assumes that peaceful coexistence and, in a more general way, "sought-after alliances with imperialism" are not means to that goal of the bureaucracy's policies, but the basic ultimate goal of these policies itself, then one would break with historical materialism. For one then assumes that not material interests but some other mysterious factor is the basic explanation of the political activity of social forces, classes, sub-factions of classes or castes alike.
19. On the question of the possibilities of wars between bureaucratized workers states, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz- Waters are in full retreat. In their initial contributions to the Indochina discussion, they practically ruled out such wars, except "border incidents."
Now they accept the possibility of such wars, be they limited ones. They write:
In summary: the bureaucratic castes act out of material self-interest and self-preservation. They can be forced to go to war to defend the workers state, from which they derive their privileges, against threats from imperialism. They can decide to go to war to put down a serious threat of developing political revolution. In order to advance their sought-after alliances with imperialism, they may even go to war to try to prevent the spread of socialist revolution.
On the other hand, the working class in the workers states is a formidable check on the ability of the castes to simply act as they like in the world arena. [p. 714.]
We fully agree with that assessment. But it is incomplete on at least two accounts —and therefore inconsistent. Of the three variants of wars conducted by bureaucratized workers states, the first one concerns a war against bourgeois states. This is nothing new to be discussed. But why reduce the possibilities of wars conducted by "bureaucratic castes" only to two cases, each one directed against an unfolding revolution (either a political or a socialist one)? If one accepts the formula: "the bureaucratic castes act out of material self-interest and self-preservation" in its substance, then there is no reason to assume that "bureaucratic castes" could never go to war against other bureaucratized workers states, even when there is no political revolution unfolding there but when the policies of that other workers state seriously threaten the defense of their own "power and privileges" as they understand it.
The argument of the working class of the said state being a formidable check on the abilities of the castes "to simply act as they like on the world arena" is real but relative. After all, we say the same thing for the imperialist bourgeoisie too. U.S., British, French, West German imperialists have not been able "to simply act as they like in the world arena" in recent years either, notably against the rising Iranian revolution, for that very reason. For sure, the bourgeoisie, as a class, has a greater autonomy of action on the world arena than bureaucratic castes as castes. But this does not mean that the bureaucracy has no autonomy of action whatsoever, and that every violent action it undertakes on the international scale is in the last analysis either in the interest of the working class or in the interest of the capitalists. After all, the Soviet proletariat could not prevent the military invasion of Czechoslovakia.
In fact, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters come very near to admitting this possibility of this third type of wars between workers states when they write:
Given the existence of separate and distinct bureaucratic castes in each of the workers states (except Cuba), there is a material basis for divergent interests and, flowing from that, differences of policy and opinion. These divergences, even if they have nothing in common with a threat of political revolution, are nevertheless a constant challenge to each of the bureaucratic castes....
Any bureaucratic caste affected by such developments would naturally like to put a stop to them.
But it cannot always do so. Military action is a last resort and is itself fraught with dangers. [pp. 713-714.]
Again, we entirely agree. But doesn't this whole reasoning imply at least the possibility of such type of "military action"? And that is what the debate is all about. To try to cover one's tracks by stating that the bureaucracy cannot always go to war is a rather infantile debating trick. Did we ever say the opposite? In the same category of knocking down strawmen set up by themselves is comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters's "argument" (p. 713) that the Kremlin did not go to war against Romania which challenges its authority on some issues. Obviously. Who predicted such a war? We have painstakingly made the difference between interimperialist wars, which are rooted in the economic laws of motion of capitalism, and interbureaucratic wars, which are not rooted in the economic laws of motion of the society in transition between capitalism and socialism. We have certainly insisted on the fact that these wars are and remain the exception and not the rule. But the very fact that they are possible, that they have, in fact, already occurred, makes it necessary to take a principled stand towards them.
In order to avoid the adoption of such a principled stand, said comrades spot a "fatal flaw" in our argument:
He spotlights the tension between the bureaucratic castes, rather than the class struggle, which underlies this tension. He omits completely specific developments in the class struggle that can force the castes to resort to such extreme measures. [p. 713.]
It is already a bit strange to present the conflict between Hungarian and Czechoslovak workers and the Soviet bureaucracy as a "specific development in the class struggle." Were these workers rising against the capitalist class? Has the bureaucracy become a class? It is even stranger-and again infantile-to confuse the issue by suddenly introducing the word "omits completely" into the polemics. Where and when did we omit "completely" references to imperialism, world revolution, the working class, and the class struggle in our analysis of the invasion of Kampuchea by the Vietnamese army, of the invasion of Vietnam by the Chinese army, of the risk of an invasion of China by the Soviet armies? Wasn't our whole opposition against such invasions based upon the consideration that they harm the class struggle in the neighboring capitalist countries and on a world scale? That imperialism profits from them and that world revolution is the loser? Is such an analysis "completely omitting specific developments in the class struggle"?
What the real difference is about is nicely summarized by comrades Clark-Feldman- Horowitz-Waters themselves in the following paragraph:
The underlying initiatives for these wars did not come from the castes. The castes were not acting as independent historical agents. They were responding to pressures and initiatives from the two major contending class forces the imperialists and the world working class. [p. 713.]
From the fact that the bureaucracy is not a class but a hardened parasitic social layer (a caste)—a fact on which we all agree-one can draw the conclusion that it has less autonomy on the international scene than both imperialism and the world working class. But said comrades extend this undeniable truth to the unwarranted, mechanistic and schematic conclusion that it has no autonomy whatsoever. That conclusion is wrong It has been proved wrong by history, again and again. It will be proved wrong in the future. It disarms our movement. Instead of being an answer to the anticommunist propaganda of the bourgeoisie, it is so inadequate and so unrelated to reality that it in fact strengthens that reactionary ideological offensive.
Let us take some examples. When the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia and Hungary, it was certainly acting against the interests of the world working class, on that we all agree. Was it acting under the pressure or initiative of imperialism? But what was the goal of that military intervention? To stabilize the rule of the bureaucracy in these countries. Do comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters abandon our commonly shared thesis that imperialism's goal is to restore capitalism in Czechoslovakia and Hungary? So how can one explain that military intervention in terms of "pressures and initiatives from the two major contending class forces"? Wasn't that intervention mainly determined by the bureaucracy's wish to consolidate its power and privileges, i.e. wasn't it acting as an "independent historical agent"? Did the "initiative" come from Washington or Bonn, or did it come from the Kremlin?
When the Chinese armies invaded Vietnam, what was their goal? To restore capitalism in Vietnam? That's the goal of imperialism, isn't it? But wasn't Peking's goal to force Hanoi to align itself with Peking, or, what amounts to the same, to ultimately install in Hanoi a bureaucratic faction subservient to Peking (incidentally in the same way as Hanoi did in Kampuchea) while maintaining a workers state in Vietnam? And if tomorrow Soviet armies would invade China, would they restore capitalism there (certainly one of the main goals of "pressures and initiatives" of world imperial. ism)? Or would they install (if they were successful) a bureaucratic faction in power subservient to them, while maintaining a workers state? How can one then deny that in all these cases the bureaucratic castes "act out of material self-interest and selfpreservation" and not just "responding to pressures and initiatives from ... imperialists and the world working class"?
To refer to a previous historical precedent: when the Soviet bureaucracy committed the crime of deporting literally millions of people from Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II, was it "responding to pressures and initiatives from ... imperialists and the world working class"? Or was it acting in a brutal and barbaric way to consolidate and increase its own power and privileges? If you try to argue the opposite, if you try to "convince" the Polish workers and peasants that really Washington and not the Kremlin was responsible for these crimes, or if you try to "convince" the German workers that Stalin and Ulbricht acted "under the initiative of world imperialism" in these cases, people will just laugh in your face. Nobody will believe the fairy-tale, because it just isn't true (as it isn't true that Stalin deported millions of Soviet peasants "under the initiative of world imperialism"). If you do not have the political and theoretical courage to argue that these are crimes of the bureaucracy, people-including tens of millions of workers —will have no alternative but to believe what imperialism wants them to believe: to wit that they are the products of socialism (of socialist revolutions). To say that they are crimes of imperialism is just barking at the moon.
Of course, we know that the very emergence of these bureaucratic castes is in the last analysis a product of the survival of the international imperialist system (of the isolation of the first victorious socialist revolutions). We also know that the crimes and barbarism of decaying capitalism are incommensurably larger on a world scale, than those committed by the bureaucracies. But to jump from these obvious truths to the untenable conclusion that the bureaucracy's crimes are really imperialism's crimes, or that the bureaucracy committed them "under the pressure of the imperialists" is to lose all credibility in the eyes of the world proletariat-as the Stalinists throughout the world are finding out every day more and more. It would lead the workers movement into the blind ally of a crude "two camp" theory and practice. Only imperialism will gain from such an inability to counterpose to its ideological offensive a coherent and credible answer. And such an answer must incorporate the facts of life, confirmed by fifty years of world history: while not being a new ruling class, the bureaucratic caste has some autonomy on the world scene as a "historic agent." Some important events which occurred in that period cannot be explained just by "pressure" or "initiative" from the working class and imperialism, but by the bureaucracy trying to consolidate and extend its power and privileges. The crimes it committed must be laid at its door, lest they be attributed to socialism or to the labor movement as such.
20. An important question of principle is raised by the possibility of wars between bureaucratized workers states. What should be our attitude towards them? Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters try to dodge that issue by saying that you have to analyse each one of them in the light of the concrete conditions of the class struggle, at each particular moment. In other words: they try to dissolve a general problem into a conjunctural one, a problem of principle into a problem of tactics. We believe they are wrong there, and do a serious disservice to our movement and the cause of socialism in general.
Again, in order to be able to dodge the issue, they introduce all kinds of diversions. The problem we raised has nothing to do with the question of the right and duty of workers states to support ongoing revolutions. It has nothing to do with pacifism. It has nothing to do with being "neutral" in a war between workers states either, if such a war does break out. We certainly were not "neutral" in any case. We were for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the GDR in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and from Czechoslovakia in 1968. We were for the withdrawal of the Vietnamese troops from Kampuchea. We were for the withdrawal of Chinese troops from Vietnam. We would be for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from China if they invade that country. We are for the right of self-defense of any attacked workers state, because we do not believe that any such attack serves the cause of world socialism. The question of who is the aggressor, which is meaningless in the case of interimperialist wars, stops being meaningless in the case of a war between workers states, because of our principled opposition to it.
We prefer the formula "withdrawal" to the formula "victory" of one side. Such a military victory could imply a military defeat of the other side, and that defeat raises the possibility of imperialism profiting from the situation to overthrow the workers state in the country whose bureaucratic caste has committed aggression against another workers state. We are for the defense of all workers states, and therefore against the military weakening of any of them.
The formula "withdrawal" is also preferable, because it leaves open the many variants of rising political revolution against the bureaucratic castes intertwined with these military conflicts. We were in favor of a withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Kampuchea. But we certainly were likewise in favor of the Kampuchean workers and peasants overthrowing the despotic Pol Pot regime through a political revolution at the same moment and accepting Vietnamese weapons and aid to do so. In fact, our basic criticism of the Vietnamese leadership is precisely that they substituted a full-scale military invasion and occupation for a policy of arming the Kampuchean masses and helping them to overthrow Pol Pot.
Our principled opposition to wars between workers states is based upon two basic arguments. First, no bureaucratic caste is histor-
ically more progressive than another, even if it might, at a given conjuncture, defend a progressive cause against another caste. None is able to qualitatively change the conditions of oppression of a given working class in a given bureaucratized workers state-not to speak of favoring the unfolding of world revolution, through such invasions. Second, no workers state based upon genuine proletarian democracy could ever impose through military invasion and occupation a genuine political revolution in a bureaucratized workers state. (Of course giving aid and comfort, including military aid, to an uprising of the majority of the workers of such a state against the ruling bureaucracy would be entirely justified. But that has nothing to do with a war between two workers states, nor with military invasion and occupation. It is a clear case of helping an unfolding revolution.)
Anybody who wants to argue otherwise should think carefully through all the implications of the argument. They are rather shattering.
A broader historical argument has also to be brought into play. Since its inception, the socialist movement has made of the fact that capitalism breeds war one of the main arguments of its general case against that social system. History has confirmed the correctness of that case. More than 100 million dead in wars unleashed by capitalism, in the twentieth century alone, support the indictment. From that indictment, socialists have always drawn the conclusion: the only way to avoid wars, to assure peace to mankind, is to abolish capitalism. Under socialism, there will be no war.
Today, that argument, which was accepted by a large part of the world proletariat for decades, has been seriously undermined not by imperialist propaganda but by the criminal military adventures of Moscow in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, of Hanoi in Kampuchea, of Peking in Vietnam. They have created tremendous confusion among the masses, the world over. Imperialist propaganda just feeds that confusion by insinuating: No, war is not rooted in capitalism or class society. It has "deeper" causes. There will be wars under socialism as there have been wars under capitalism.
Our answer is categorically no. Whatever wars cannot be laid directly at the door of imperialism in the last decades are caused by the privileged and parasitic bureaucracies which have usurped power in the workers states. They are not only not rooted in the postcapitalist societies. They are alien to them. When these bureaucracies are overthrown by victorious political revolutions, when there is genuine workers council power, soviet power, in these states, they will undoubtedly have to keep armies and other instruments for self-defense against imperialist aggression. But there will be no wars between such workers states. The working class directly exercising power in many countries and many nationalities will be able to develop forms of international cooperation, solidarity, and peaceful solution of sectorial and national differences of interests and policies which might arise among them even if imperialism survives in part of the world.
What are the alternatives to that answer, which is the only one consistent with the Marxist tradition and the interests of the struggle for world revolution and world socialism? You could argue that direct workers power is impossible as long as imperialism survives—i.e. that the victory of the political revolution, at least in the main workers states before the overthrow of world capitalism, is a utopia, and that therefore wars between workers states will continue to be a possibility as long as capitalism survives elsewhere. You could argue that "under certain circumstances" genuine workers states would be justified in launching wars against other ones (bureaucratized ones). Or you could argue that material contradictions between nation-states, which will survive even under "socialism," have a war dynamic irrespective of the social nature of these states. Actually, the British CP has already started to argue along these lines.
Is it necessary to draw out the disastrous implications of each of these alternatives for the struggle for world socialism? But how can you clearly make a case for the opposite position-there will be no wars between genuine workers states tomorrow—if you don't take a principled position against any war unleashed by a bureaucratized workers state against another one today?
To comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz- Waters, our position that wars between bureaucratized workers states are possible and that we should oppose them in principle seem to lead to great pessimism:
If Peking has an inherent drive "to establish its zone of influence over all the Asian workers states," if Hanoi "wanted an Indochinese federation under its own bureaucratic hegemony," if there is an organic need to make war for reasons like these, what then is really so different from capitalist wars? A different motivating cause, but similar results. What's the big difference in the final analysis?
If comrade Mandel's vision of the future is accurate, then the prospects for humanity are not so bright as the Fourth International had expected up until now. [p. 715.]
An amazing statement, leading to an even more amazing conclusion:
The workers can and will prevent the bureaucratic castes from making war as they would like, just as they must eventually wipe capitalism from the face of the earth. Yes, the rise of the world revolution will cause the bureaucratic castes to try to lash out; but wars between workers states will become less likely with each new victory in the class struggle on a world scale, because the working class, which is the ruling class in the workers states, will become stronger. [p. 716.]
We do not agree with that reasoning at all. To put it bluntly: it is an expression of reformist illusions. The Second International thought the strengthening of the working class would be able to avoid wars, even if capitalism survives. The Third International after Lenin thought the strengthening of the working class would be able to prevent imperialist wars of aggression against the USSR, even if imperialism survives. Revolutionary Marxists answered in both cases that, in the long run, wars would be unavoidable if capitalism wasn't overthrown by socialist revolution, at least in its main bulwarks. In the long run, "pressure" by the working class even if it is "tremendous" —isn't enough to avoid war. The social forces driving to war have to be eliminated.
By analogy, one would have to conclude: if we believe that wars between bureaucratic castes are possible (leaving aside the new diversion by comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters about "organic needs," which attributes to us exactly the opposite of what we said, then the "prospects for humanity are not so bright," provided the bureaucratic castes continue to stay in power for a long historic period. We would share that conclusion. Another half century, if not centuries of totalitarian bureaucratic dictatorship over one-third, one-half or all of mankind, are not a bright prospect for humanity at all, leaving aside the question of whether there would or would not be wars. Do comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters perhaps disagree and find that a "bright" perspective?
But contrary to these comrades, we are not and never have been tempted (not to say convinced) by the idea of "centuries of bureaucratic rule" over workers states. So we do not base our "optimism" on the question of possible or impossible wars between bureaucratic castes just upon the "pressure" or the "increased strength" of the working class in these states. We base it upon the concrete perspective of victorious political revolutions, i.e. on the unavoidable overthrow of the bureaucratic castes. Likewise, we base our "optimism" on the question of avoiding a nuclear world war (not exactly a "bright prospect" for humanity either) not on any line of "growing pressure" or "increased strength" of the international working class, but on the perspective of socialist revolutions overthrowing the imperialist bourgeoisie in its main bulwarks. In other words: we only believe in "bright prospects" for humanity because we believe in world revolution, which today has to be seen as a combined process of permanent revolution in the semicolonies, socialist revolution in the imperialist countries, and political revolutions in the bureaucratized workers states. If these revolutions do not occur or are defeated, then the future of humanity will not be "bright" at all, to say the least. It will be the triumph of barbarism.
Isn't it the historical goal of the Fourth International to organize and lead the international working class to overthrow the rule of imperialism, capitalism, and the totalitarian bureaucratic dictatorship in the bureaucratized workers states? Isn't there an organic unity between the rise of socialist revolution and the rise of political revolution? Why has the political revolution suddenly disappeared from comrades Clark-Feldman- Horowitz-Waters's polemics on the "implications" of the possibility of wars between bureaucratic castes? And doesn't the possibility of establishing a world federation of socialist republics-the only realistic framework to assure that there will be no more wars of any kind-hinge upon the victory of political revolution too? Could these comrades seriously envisage the restoration of the unity of the world proletariat and its allies, while the bureaucratic castes still remain in power? Do they believe the possibilities of victory of political revolution are dim? So what's so pessimistic about acknowledging the facts of life, to wit that the danger of limited and exceptional wars between bureaucratic castes will only be eliminated with the victory of political revolution in the bureaucratized workers states?
21. One of the main if not the main theoretical difference underlying the ongoing debate is the difference on the class nature of the bureaucratic castes which rule in the bureaucratized workers states. It is a complex question, raising again key issues of Marxism, of historical materialism.
There have been many different bureaucracies throughout history: e.g. the bureaucracies of ancient slave-owner states, in the first place of the Roman Empire; the bureaucracies of empires based upon the Asian mode of production, of which the Chinese mandarin caste is the prototype; the feudal bureaucracies in the rising monarchies of the Middle Ages; the semifeudal bureaucracies of Absolutism; the bureaucracies of bourgeois states; the Soviet bureaucracy and other bureaucratic castes similar to it in China and elsewhere. Obviously, all these bureaucracies have a different class nature. What we are concerned here with is the class nature of the bureaucratic castes exercising totalitarian rule over bureaucratized workers states.
We all agree that the Soviet bureaucracy—in the rest of this point we shall just refer to the Soviet bureaucracy, but it is understood that the same analysis applies to all the hardened privileged bureaucratic layers in workers states which have to be overthrown by political revolutions and have the same fundamental social characteristics as the Soviet bureaucracy—is not a new ruling class but a caste. However, using that specific concept does not solve the problem of defining the bureaucracy's class nature. In a certain sense, several of the above-mentioned bureaucracies were also castes, but they have all a specific-and different —class nature. Again we are touching upon a basic element of Marxist theory. From a Marxist point of view, as along as we do not live in a classless society, there cannot be large social layers (encompassing several millions of individuals in the concrete case with which we are concerned which do not belong to a specific social class.
Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters quote Trotsky who states that the Soviet bureaucracy is petty bourgeois in its composition and spirit (p. 720). The concept "petty bourgeois," however, throughout Marxist literature, is used in a two-fold sense. It can mean describing these political forces (or social layers) among wage-labor which are wavering between capital and labor because of their higher incomes, because of their functioning as ideological transmission belts of bourgeois influence (and corruption) inside the working class. It then stands for all the proponents of class collaboration and class conciliation. In that sense, Trotsky's formula is certainly correct and unambiguous. One could speak of pettybourgeois layers (or to use a term which sounds awkward in English but less awkward in other languages "petty-bourgeoisified layers") inside the working class, ie. wage-earners which have a petty-bourgeois ideology and political orientation in function of the material privileges which they enjoy, which they want to keep, and which makes them rise above their class. The analogy with the labor bureaucracy inside the capitalist countries is then obvious and selfexplanatory.
But the term petty bourgeoisie can also be used in a much more precise and scientific way: as a specific social class, separate and apart from both wage-labor and capital. As every social class, it is characterized by its specific place in the process of production and by its specific relations to the means of production. In that sense, the petty bourgeoisie as a class is the sum total of all those private owners of means of production and exchange who can produce (or exchange) without having to sell their own labor-power, but who do not exploit wage-labor, or do so only marginally and exceptionally. They can be producers of use-values (subsistance farmers). They can be engaged in petty commodity production (small and middle farmers, tradesmen, handicraftsmen, and owners of other small independent professional businesses).
With the rise of the so-called new middle classes, the term petty bourgeoisie taken as a class has been somewhat extended. But basically, the criteria for characterizing it remain the same. That class now includes all those higher managerial personnel and state functionaries who, through their place in the process of production and the state, have a material interest in the survival of private property, while not being direct exploiters of wage-labor in the real sense of the word. Their income is so much higher than that of a worker that they can accumulate modest amounts of capital, over and above the salaries they earn, without being able to go into capitalist business on their own account, i.e. without becoming buyers and exploiters of labor-power, except on an exceptional or marginal basis.
For sure, the precise contours of the petty bourgeoisie as a class are more blurred and less defined than those of both the capitalist class and the working class. Petty commodity production (and high salaries) can give rise to primitive accumulation of capital. Under favorable circumstances, the upper layers of the petty bourgeoisie are drawn into the capitalist class, i.e. become owners of capital and direct exploiters of wage-labor. At the other end of the scale-in much higher numbers-the lower layers of the petty bourgeoisie are being ruined (pauperized) as independent producers or proletarianized, i.e. in every case the differential between their income and the average price of labor-power becomes so reduced that accumulation of even a little capital becomes impossible. They then tend to be absorbed into the working class.
But whatever may be these parallel processes of erosion at both the top and the bottom of the petty bourgeoisie, it is a definite and specific social class, separate and apart as a class from both wage-labor and capital.
Now when we say that the Soviet bureaucracy is "petty bourgeois," we can interpret this is in a dual way. We can either say that it is a petty-bourgeois layer of the working class, in the sense explained above. Or we can say that it is part of the petty bourgeoisie as a class, separate and apart from both the working class and the capitalist class. To make an obvious analogy: when Daniel De- Leon-with the strong approval of Lenin —called the trade-union bureaucracy "the labor lieutenants of Capital," he meant that it was an agency of the bourgeoisie inside the working class. He never meant that it was part of the capitalist class, i.e. composed of owners of capital directly engaged in the exploitation of wage-labor. (We will readily admit that some top union bureaucrats integrated in the Mafia having "gone legit" can fall into that last category. But for the tradeunion bureaucracy as a social layer, this is an absolutely exceptional and marginal case, which doesn't apply to 99 percent of the trade-union bureaucrats the world over.)
It is our contention that Trotsky always referred to the "petty-bourgeois nature" of the Soviet bureaucracy in the first and not. in the second sense of the word. And we contend that by making the statement that there are no links whatsoever between the bureaucratic castes and the working class, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters have now shifted the meaning of the "pettybourgeois nature" of the Soviet bureaucracy towards the second sense, i.e. in the sense of it being part of the petty bourgeoisie as a class, separate and apart from the working class.
How else could one interpret formulas like:
The truth is that the Khmer Rouge army was in no way tied to the working class. It arose as peasant (that is, petty bourgeois) in origin and social composition and its leadership was Stalinist (also petty bourgeois) in ideology. Once in power it did not base itself on the revolutionary alliance of the workers and peasants, but moved to crush them. And it remained petty bourgeois, as the governing apparatus of a state that remained capitalist." [p. 720.]
And even more precise:
After April 1975 the bureaucracy got its "specific form of remuneration" from the surplus product of the peasants and the workers. This did not transform it into a part of the working class any more than the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union is working-class. It is, as Trotsky insisted, "petty bourgeois in its composition and spirit." [p. 720. Our emphasis.]
Rejecting the theory of a new class, Comrade Mandel is thus put in the position of ascribing a working-class nature to the Stalinists, of considering the Pol Pot bureaucracy to be a working-class bureaucracy, and the Khmer Rouge army (the "army of the bureaucracy") as a working-class army.
All of these positions point in the direction of revising some of the main theoretical conquests of the Trotskyist movement. [p. 721.]
Now the idea that the Soviet bureaucracy is not a petty-bourgeois layer of the working class but part of the petty bourgeoisie as a class separate and apart from the working class far from being a "theoretical conquest of the Trotskyist movement," opens up a second Pandora's box of revisions of Marxism, of historical materialism.
The Soviet Union is a workers state. At the same time, political power is in the hands of the bureaucracy, which, to quote Trotsky, exercises a totalitarian dictatorship. Can one class rule through the agency of another class exercising a totalitarian dietatorship?
One could object that this occurs, after all, under fascism or military dictatorships. But the analogy has a decisive flaw. One characteristic of the petty-bourgeois agents of dietatorial rule under capitalism is precisely the fact that, while of petty-bourgeois origin, they can and do use their positions in the state apparatus to amass huge fortunes, to engage in primitive accumulation of capital. In other words, they become absorbed into the ruling class precisely in function of their privileged power positions.
Batista started professional life as a lowpaid sergeant of a semicolonial army. He ended his career as a capitalist multimillionaire who, even according to U.S. standards, would be considered as belonging to the richest layer of the ruling class.
So there is no real contradiction here.
In the Soviet Union however, the stronger the dictatorship and the larger the privileges of the "petty-bourgeois" bureaucracy, the farther it gets removed from the working class as "ruling class." How can that fact be squared with the Marxist definition of a "non-ruling" class, that the members of that class exercise total political power and have, in addition, total control over the social surplus product?
If the Soviet bureaucracy is part of the petty bourgeoisie as a social class, then you would have to say that it has the same class nature as the petty bourgeoisie governing several capitalist states, starting with many semicolonial ones. But if a social revolution of a type similar to that of Vietnam occurs in these countries, one would then have to conclude that while class power is transferred from one class to another through such a revolution, members of a same class (neither the ruling class before the revolution nor the ruling class after the revolution!) would continue to exercise total political power, irrespective of the social revolution! A strange proposition, to say the least, from the point of view of historical materialism.
One of the basic tenets of Marxism is the assumption that the working class, and the working class alone, is historically interested in the abolition of private property and capable of achieving it. Now what is the position of the "petty-bourgeois bureaucracy" towards private property? Comrades Clark- Feldman-Horowitz-Waters try to solve the difficulty by quoting Trotsky saying that the bureaucracy "continues to preserve state property only to the extent that it fears the proletariat" (p. 719). But this sentence is torn out of context where it appears clearly as a link in the historical chain of explanation of where the Soviet bureaucracy comes from and what it is today. On the page of The Revolution Betrayed prior to the one which contains the paragraph quoted by said comrades we find the following words:
It [the bureaucracy] is compelled to defend state property as the source of its power and its income. In this aspect of its activity, it still remains a weapon of proletarian dictatorship." [Pathfinder Press, 1972, p. 249.]
Can the petty bourgeoisie as a class be "a weapon of proletarian dictatorship"?
So it is clear that the Soviet bureaucracy preserves state property not only out of fear of the proletariat but because state property is the basis of its power and privileges. Likewise, when Trotsky explained why the Soviet bureaucracy would have to move towards an abolition of capitalism in the Eastern Polish territories it occupied in September 1939, he did not refer to "fear of the proletariat" but to collective property being the basis of the bureaucracy's power and privileges:
It is more likely, however, that in the territories scheduled to become a part of the USSR, the Moscow government will carry through the expropriation of the large land-owners and statification of the means of production. This variant is most probable not because the bureaucracy remains true to the socialist program, but because it is neither desirous nor capable of sharing the power, and the privileges the latter entails, with the old ruling classes in the occupied territories." In Defense of Marxism, Pathfinder Press, 1973, p. 18.]
Neither desirous nor capable, says Trotsky. We are far from reducing everything to "fear of the proletariat." And is the petty bourgeoisie as a class incapable of "sharing power and the privileges the latter entails" with landowners and big capitalists? Isn't it doing just that under many forms of capitalist dictatorial regimes?
One could ask a broader question: At least on three occasions during the Second World War when Hitler attacked the USSR; at the end of World War II, when the Soviet armies occupied a large part of Eastern Europe; and at the moment of the Marshall Plan being launched and the parallel negotiations around the fate of Germany and the place of the USSR in world trade-the Soviet bureaucracy had a real possibility of going over to private property (not necessarily in the juridical but in any case in the economic sense of the word), on a large scale. Some minor sectors of the bureaucracy indeed opted in that sense (the Vlassov group among the officers caste, to quote the best-known example). But in its overwhelming majority, the Soviet bureaucracy did not. Why? Just for reasons of fear of the proletariat? Hadn't they reason to fear Hitler or Washington more than the atomized and politically passive Soviet proletariat at these precise moments of history? Isn't the only explanation compatible with historical materialism that, as a caste-as distinct from individuals or subsegments of the caste their material interests were tied to collective property?
But if that is the case, one is faced with an unavoidable analytical choice: Either one concludes that it is a caste still tied to the working class (i.e. a parasitic cancer of the working class). Or one has to conclude that another social class, the petty bourgeoisie, can produce a caste which, under certain historical circumstances, is intent upon defending not private but collective property, like the working class.
Trotsky expressed himself unambiguously on the links of the bureaucracy with the working class:
If the state does not die away, but grows more and more despotic, if the plenipotentiaries of the working class become bureaucratized, and the bureaucracy rises above the new society.... [The Revolution Betrayed, ibid., p. 55. Our emphasis.]
The conquest of power changes not only the relations of the proletariat to other classes, but also its own inner structure. The wielding of power becomes the specialty of a definite social group, which is the more impatient to solve its own "social problem," the higher its opinion of its own mission.
[Ibid., p. 102. Our emphasis.]
In its social structure, the proletariat is the least heterogeneous class of capitalist society. Nevertheless, the pressure of such "little strata" as the workers' aristocracy and the workers' bureaucracy is sufficient to give rise to opportunistic parties, which are converted by the course of things into one of the weapons of bourgeois domination..
Even if in the Soviet society "there are no classes," nevertheless this society is at least incomparably more heterogeneous and complicated than the proletariat of capitalist countries... [Ibid., pp. 267- 8.]
For sure, when we say that the Soviet bureaucracy is simultaneously a hardened caste and a cancerous growth upon the proletariat, the use of these alternative terms implies in and by itself different relations between that bureaucracy and the working class on the one hand, and the labor bureaucracy and the working class under capitalism on the other hand. Not only is the part of the social surplus product which the Soviet bureaucracy appropriates for itself incomparably larger than that which goes to the labor bureaucracy under capitalism. But the conditions of oppression of the proletariat introduced by the Soviet bureaucracy, the way in which it "freezes" its power and privileges by any means available, makes it incomparably more distant from the mass of the direct producers than the labor bureaucracy under capitalism. Nevertheless, all these distinctions being duly accounted for —and they fully justify the term "caste" or "hardened social layer"—it is still inescapable, from the point of view of historical materialism, to add: "hardened social layer" of the proletariat, which has not yet cut off all its ties with the working class.
Undoubtedly, the bureaucracy defends collective property while constantly undermining it. It constantly produces in its midst tendencies towards breaking up planning, tendencies towards primitive accumulation of capital, tendencies towards broadening the influence of the law of value, etc. But a balance sheet can be drawn after more than half a century of political expropriation of the Soviet proletariat. The totalitarian dictatorship of the bureaucracy, under the most variegated circumstances, has by and large conserved, strengthened and extended collective property, and not overthrown it. The reason can only be that, as a social layer, it is materially interested in doing so, whatever tendencies in the opposite direction it produced and continues to produce. The Butenko wing of the bureaucracy, to quote the Transitional Program, has historically proved to be a small minority, at least up to now. That is the lesson of history. So the conclusion is inescapable: either one believes that that behavior indicates that the caste is still a cancer upon the working class. Or one believes that another social class alongside the proletariat is interested in maintaining and extending collective property.
But if one rejects the first hypothesis and plunges for the second, then the characterization of the bureaucracy as part of the petty-bourgeois class just doesn't make sense. It goes against all historical evidence and Marxist tradition, which confirm that the petty bourgeoisie is socially tied to private and not to collective property. And then one has only one way out: the bureaucracy constitutes a new ruling class, tied to collective property like the working class, but at the same time ferociously oppressing and exploiting the working class. Comrades Clark- Feldman-Horowitz-Waters's refusal to accept that the bureaucratic caste is a cancerous growth upon the working class frees the road to that conclusion. For if a country is ruled for nearly five decades by a totalitarian dietatorship of people who, while defending collective property, "have nothing in common" with the working class, then the idea that they constitute a new ruling class becomes rather plausible.
After having largely opened the door to the theories of state capitalism by their positions on Kampuchea (you can still have capitalism, after a total abolition of private property of the means of production), they now open the window to the theories of bureaucratic collectivism (you can have a social layer which has "nothing in common" with the working class but maintains and extends collective property of the means of production). Such is the implacable dialecties of revising key elements of the Marxist theory of the state and of social classes.
The intentions of comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters are, of course, honorable. They reject with horror the idea that there is "an ounce of proletarian content in their [the Stalinists] counterrevolutionary orientation." They fear that thinking otherwise would mean making "a dangerous step in the direction of blurring the clear class line of demarcation between Stalinism and revolutionary Marxism" (p. 720). But this is of course a caricatural reduction of our views which they themselves quote in the very next paragraph.
We never said that the Stalinist bureaucracy is tied to the working class mainly through its continued reference to Marxism- Leninism (however distorted and falsified). We said that these references cannot be detached from the fact that the bureaucracy's privileges are still mainly acquired in the form of higher wages (in the sphere of distribution) and that it is still defending collective property of the means of production. For any supporter of historical materialism, ideology cannot be completely detached from material interests. No part of the capitalist class or of the petty bourgeoisie as a class can for decades educate youth, in a country in which it rules, in the spirit of defense of collective property, of opposition to private property, of hostility to capitalism as a system, of defense of socialism as a social system. The fact that that is the way in which youth are educated under the dictatorship of the Soviet bureaucracy-whatever may be the hypocritical, demagogical, lying, falsified, degrading, counterproductive forms of that education—is tied to the fact that the power and privileges of the bureaucracy do rest upon collective and not upon private property. The actual behavior of bureaucrats, and social reality of Soviet society, the oppression of workers, the monstrous growth of inequality in the sphere of distribution, introduce explosive contradictions both into the infrastructure and in the superstructure of that society, including of course into the ideology. But the social nature of that ruling ideology is neither capitalist nor petty bourgeois.
Furthermore, comrades Clark-Feldman- Horowitz-Waters forget a trifle. We all agree to call the Soviet state a bureaucratically degenerated workers state. The counterrevolutionary orientation, measures, and crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy however are not applied by some mysterious ethereal agencies. They are applied by agencies of that very state: the KGB, the judiciary, the army, the diplomacy, the factory managers, ete. Even the Stalinist party apparatus as such has long since been fused with the state apparatus. Yet we continue to call that state a workers state, in spite of all these counterrevolutionary crimes. What is then the difference between calling the state-which commits all these counterrevolutionary measures-a degenerated workers state, and calling the bureaucracy which imposes them a degenerated labor bureaucracy?
But the state remains a workers state not in function of these crimes but in spite of them, only because it still maintains the socioeconomic conquests of the October revolution, comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz- Waters will reply at the top of their voices. True. But exactly the same reasoning applies to the bureaucracy which, after all, "was" the state.® The bureaucracy remains a degenerated labor bureaucracy (a pettybourgeois cancerous growth upon the working class, and not part of any other class) not in function of its "counterrevolutionary orientation" or any of the crimes it committed and commits, but in spite of them. It remains so for the one and only reason that it has not yet transformed itself into a new ruling class, that it has not yet abolished collective property, while constantly undermining it. The parallel is complete. If it is not "a dangerous step in the direction of blurring the clear class line of demarcation between Stalinism and revolutionary" to continue calling a "degenerated workers state" a state which killed between ten and twenty million innocent people, introduced the harshest (anti)labor code known in the twentieth century, and has caused innumerable revolutions to be defeated throughout the world, why would the fact of calling the bureaucratic caste responsible for these crimes a degenerated labor bureaucracy indeed be such a "dangerous step"?
Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters give us the advice not to advise the Vietnamese leadership. Hardened and unrenamese pentant sinners as we are, we shall add another violation of the Eleventh Commandment to our previous sins. We advise them to stop and think, before they continue playing with theory, revising key elements of the Marxist theory of the state and of social classes. Marxist theory is characterized by an extreme degree of inner coherence, which they do not seem to be fully aware of. You loosen a few bricks in the foundations, you take out another couple of bricks in the walls, and before you have time to turn around, the whole house will come crashing down upon your heads.
September 15, 1979
Notes
1. All references to Steve Clark, Fred Feldman, Gus Horowitz, and Mary-Alice Waters: "War and Revolution in Indochina: What Policy for Revolutionists? A Reply to Ernest Mandel," in Intercontinental Press/Inprecor, vol. 17, no. 27, July 16, 1979. The reference to our "schematism" is on p. 724.
2. According to Derek J. Waller (The Government and Politics of Communist China, Anchor Books, 1971, p. 27), by 1945, the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army controlled territories with a population of 100 million. Other authors put that figure at 60 million.
3. Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters refer to the 1951 World Congress resolutions on Eastern Europe in support of their own formulations. They conveniently forget to mention that the resolution on Yugoslavia, adopted at that same World Congress, fixed the birth of the Yugoslav workers state at October 1945, with the breakup of the coalition government, which led to the legal consolidation in 1945-46 of the socioeconomic conquests of the Yugoslav revolution.
4. To give just one example: In Hungary, most observers fix the birth of the "people's democracy" only in 1948 with the repression against the social democrats. In 1947, there had still been parliamentary elections with a multiparty system and the CP not getting a majority. Large-scale nationalizations occurred in 1948. The bourgeois coalition ministers were ousted in 1947.
5. The best source on that upheaval remains Jack Belden's book China Shakes the World
6. See Marxism Today, August 1979, especially the leading article by Monty Johnstone: Conflicts between Socialist States.
7. Comrades Clark-Feldman-Horowitz-Waters obviously confuse the "specific form of remuneration" (i.e. salaries and advantages in the form of usevalues exclusively in the field of consumer goods) with its source. This is all the more embarrassing, as all opponents of the Trotskyist theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers state will answer them in unison: and what is the source of the "specific form of remuneration" of the Soviet bureaucracy? Some mysterious source different from the surplus product of the peasants and the workers? What is the difference in that respect between the Pol Pot and the Soviet bureaucracy?
8. "The means of production belong to the state. But the state, so to speak, 'belongs' to the bureaucracy." (Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, ibid., p. 249)