USSR- not a capitalist state

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Gap THE point of my article (SO 101; criticised by Glynis Powell, Letters, SO 104) was to use the material in Simis book to illustrate just how much the USSR has in common with class societies.

In terms of basic civil rights, freedom to organise, freedom of information and discussion, and the general level of repression, we would have to conclude that the Stalinist states are worse than all but fascistic capitalist regimes - and especially so from the working class point of view.

Even the least totalitarian of the Stalinist regimes (which to a serious extent Poland still is now) cannot tolerate any working class independence, in politics, trade unionism, or any other sort of social initiative.

For that reason a workers revolution is essential in all of these states.

This will be common ground. But these considerations do not answer the question of how we should characterise these regimes.

The choices are limited. Either they can be characterised in t.. ms of one of the two main classes in capitalist society, or the bureaucracies are a new and unforeseen ruling ciass.

Societies in which the decisive means of production are nationalised, and which originated in a powerful anticapitalist revolution can only be designated capitalist on the basis of abstractions such as Glynis Powell employs to show that in terms of oppression the USSR has much in common with all societies as far back as ancient Greece and Rome.

IT CAN be seen from the first part of this article [last week] that genetic enpineerino has manv advantages over older biochemical techniques in the production of medically and commercially useful by-products; the production human enzymes and hormones in excess hv micro nroanisms is IN AL the case in point. But it is also possible for genetic engineering to have disadvantages.

Cloning is now being developed in mammals and this, coupled with the recent boom in test-tube babies makes possible for the first time the cloning of human children. Recent press "Workers experience the same alienation and lack of control as in the West"? Yes. Trotsky thought so, as my quotations established. But capitalism is a historic system, with its own specific features - essentially the market as decisive regulator of the economy (in various stages of development, up to the present stage of monopoly capitalism). It cannot be characterised by the things it has in common, as an exploitative and oppressive system, with other class societies.

Or are the Stalinist states an entirely new type of class society, whose laws of motion are as yet unknown? If that is the necessary conclusion from the facts of the last 60 years, then it places in question the validity of the idea, central to the Marxist programme, that the crucial contradiction of capitalism - the contradiction between the social character of production and the private ownership of the means of production - can only be resolved by the working class.

That is no small conclusion to reach. I believe it to be unnecessary.

A better explanation is that developed by Trotsky and in the last 40 years from Trotsky's theories. The Stalinist states are degenerated (USSR) and deformed (the others) workers' states. That means that their nationalised economies (onto which the bureaucracy is gratted) originated in the 1917 Revolution, or by way of the interaction of other revolutions with the degenerated USSR.

The nationalised property arises from the workers' Stalin - did he represent a new class, or an usurping bureaucracy? revolution, expressing the historic link between the working class and post-capitalist collectivism: but it is not 'working class or progressive' per se, but potentially so, depending on the working class taking political power and reorganising the economy warped or shaped by the bureaucrats.

We are against imperialism destroying that potential; we are against imperialism strengthening itself by regaining territory; the working class, not the imperialists, must settle accounts with the bureaucracy. That is what 'defence of the USSR against imperialism' means for us.

For technical reasons we call the workers' revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy 'political' (i.e. a suppl ementary revolution on the basis of existing collectivised property). But it will inevitably have massive social tasks of reorganising the economy and the state.

This way of looking at it has the advantage of placing the Stalinist regimes in the historic perspective of the world working class revolution.

Trotsky certainly : Stalinist regimes as possible only for a short time, as Glynis Powell says. He • has been proved wrong about that, and it does have implications for the theory, but I can't see that it necessarily follows that the basic assessment - or rather, developments of it - must fall down.

It is true that the dominant characteristic of the post Trotsky 'Trotskyists' for 30 years has been theoretical confusion, and centrally on Stalinism. A whole range of different theories (explicit or implicit) are to be found under the workers state' tag. Whole layers of the "Trotskyist' movement have at different times adopted positive attitudes to one or another ruling bureaucracy (Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam, Cuba...), in line with the method of the right-communists of the '30s (Brandler, Lovestone, etc.) and their latter-day heir Isaac Deutsoner rather than the posit held by Trotsky after 1935.

Nevertheless I think it is possible to argue a consistently working class anti-Stalinist line on the basis of Trotsky's actual positions. It is important to demonstrate this at a time when many who call themselves Trotskyist are manifestly breaking with Trotsky's politics while retaining the tags and labels.

And in terms of the tasks of the working class in the Stalinist states, the state-capitalist or 'new class' positions add nothing to the Trotskyist programme of 'political revolution' - not a comma, nor a full OHN OMAtiONY, London THE IDEA of having a CLPs campaign against the witchhunt did come from Socialist Organiser supporters in Hackney North, but we were not the first to move it officially in the party, as your article last week suggests.

ANDREW HORNUNG, Hackney. Feas s.0, We invite readers to send us their letters, up to a usual maximum length of 400 words.

Send to Socialist Organiser, c/o 28. Middle Lane. London N8.

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