These two essays, constitute the theoretical foundation of the Fourth International’s analysis of the Soviet Union and, more broadly, the Marxist method for characterising degenerated and deformed workers’ states.
In The Class Nature of the Soviet State (1933), Trotsky confronted the increasingly urgent question posed by Stalinist rule: had the bureaucratic degeneration of the USSR already transformed it into a new form of class society? Against both ultra-left currents that declared the Soviet state already capitalist or “bureaucratic collectivist,” and the reformist and Stalinist apologists who saw in the bureaucracy a legitimate continuation of the workers’ state, Trotsky’s answer was unambiguous: despite the degeneration of the political superstructure under the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Soviet Union remained a workers’ state – albeit a deeply degenerated one – because its economic foundations, the nationalisation of the means of production and the abolition of private capitalist property, had not been overturned. The character of a state, Trotsky insisted, cannot be determined by the sociology of its ruling stratum alone but must be grounded in the property relations it defends.
In The Workers’ State and the Question of Thermidor and Bonapartism (1935), Trotsky extended and deepened this analysis through a penetrating historical analogy. Drawing on the experience of the French Revolution – specifically the Thermidorean reaction of 1794 and the subsequent rise of Bonapartism – he examined whether the Stalinist regime represented a Thermidor within the revolution, or had already transcended it into an outright Bonapartist deformation. The essay is a masterclass in the Marxist use of historical analogy: not the mechanical application of past experience to present conditions, but the identification of structural similarities and differences that illuminate the dynamics of a living political process.
Together, these works demonstrate why the question of the Soviet state was not a scholastic matter but one of acute practical consequence. Whether the USSR remained – however degenerated – a conquest of the October Revolution, or had been transformed into a new exploitative class society, determined the entire strategic and programmatic orientation of the revolutionary movement against Stalinism: political revolution to restore workers’ power over the state they had created in the 1917 Russian Revolution against the Stalinist bureaucratic caste, the gravedigger of the revolution.
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Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was born on November 7, 1879 in the village of Yanovka, which at the time was part of the Russian Empire and is now within the borders of Ukraine. Along with Vladimir Lenin, he was one of the leaders of the October Revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. Trotsky, who was head of the Red Army during the years immediately following the revolution, led the Soviet Union to victory in the Civil War from 1918-1921.