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  1. Message Part One
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  3. Hey man, thanks for your patience. This is a big write up. So big in fact that I have exceeded the maximum character limit and must send this in multiple parts, lol. I’ve been discussing this at length with comrades. I wrote up a lengthy list of questions and criticisms which both you brought up and which I came across as I was re-reading the material I had sent you. I’m going to try to divide this up into digestible sections, but I apologize in advance if it’s a bit messy, lol.
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  5. Also, I recognize that I’m not really citing much material throughout this response… It was really long as it is and I didn’t feel that adding block quotes would help with the explanation. If you need me to cite an idea or claim I can dig up some evidence for you, but everything within this response if as I understand it to be, having aggregated the information from my cadre studies and discussions with comrades.
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  7. So, I’m going to start with the bare bones and work to your questions, that way I hopefully don’t miss a critical explanation in the process. I don’t really know your knowledge all that well so excuse me if I’m addressing information you’re already aware of.
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  9. A Summary Explanation of Bonapartism, Proletarian Bonapartism and Against the Theory of State Capital, with Some Context for the Events of Russia in 1987-91 and the Last 30 Years of the China:
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  11. Ted Grant wrote Against the Theory of State Capitalism in 1949, when the Stalinist Bureaucracy had completely established itself within Russia, at the expense of the workers’ democracy that existed under Lenin and Trotsky from 1917-1922ish. When we say “workers’ democracy” or “healthy workers’ state” we mean the conception of the proletarian state as outlined by Lenin in State and Revolution: The right of any representative to be automatically recalled, no standing army but the people armed, no representative to be paid more than the workers he/she represents, and the eventual but soon ability of everyone to be a representative. It is important to understand that a “worker’s democracy” is not technically socialism. For Marxists, workers’ democracy is the first step, to building socialism. Keep in mind that socialism is a world system that, for a Marxist, exists by definition on a higher plane of production and distribution than capitalism. So, true socialism can exist only worldwide, and only when all countries have become workers’ democracies. This is not to say that any one workers’ democracy would not be better than any capitalist state. On the contrary, Russia was a healthy worker’s state in 1917 and we supported that completely, but if we are talking about Marxist socialism, we are not talking about any one country having a workers’ democracy, but the entire globe, while understanding that each revolution will happen in its own time, with its own logic, and establish its own worker’s democracy. This process of revolution would be dialectical, with each workers' democracy trading with each other and cutting across national boundaries, which would create a higher plane of existence gradually, but quickly. If we are going to be serious about our words, this still would not create true socialism until the system is completely worldwide.
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  13. So from 1917-1922 Russia did not have socialism, but it did have a workers’ democracy. In 1949 Russia no longer had any semblance of a workers’ democracy: Lenin and Trotsky were dead, the purges had cleaned out the rest of the communist party, the mode of planning was from the top down, not the bottom up, and workers' did not have control over their own workplaces; It was a pure bureaucratic dictatorship. Yet, it still had a nationalized, planned economy. This planned economy had to be run by a state. Ted Grant is asking the question, as is the man he’s responding to, Tony Cliff: what is the class nature of this state? He answers this question by arguing that because it still has a nationalized planned economy, and because it emerged from a workers’ revolution, the class nature of the state must be proletarian, it must be a workers’ state. HOWEVER, this does not mean that the state is democratic. Are any of Lenin’s principles in working order? No! So, using the Marxist, dialectic analysis of history, Ted Grant compares this moment in time to the Bonapartist regimes that existed in the history of various capitalist states. His point is, although the class nature of the state is different, the totalitarian ability of this state to have a life of its own, to exist over and above the class that it represents (the working class) makes it a new type of Bonapartist state; Proletarian Bonapartism.
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  15. So, the classical Bonapartist state ruled in the name of the capitalist class but expropriated them politically, while the Proletarian Bonapartist state also rules in the name of the working class and has also expropriated them politically, giving it a certain life of its own. It is important to understand that Trotsky made this same analysis, and that Tony Cliff was going against Trotsky's argument. Ted Grant is defending Trotsky.
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  17. In 1949, Ted Grant wrote this fighting for the overthrow, not of the planned economy, but of the Proletarian Bonapartist state in Russia. When he, and Trotsky, talk about a ‘second revolution’ they are talking about a workers’ revolution, that would overthrow the bureaucracy. In doing so, they would re-establish a workers’ democracy, one that exists with the nationalized, planned economy gained in the October Revolution. Remember, though, a workers’ democracy is not automatically socialism, but is what will lead to socialism. Ted Grant is arguing for the creation of workers’ democracy, as a result of a second workers’ revolution, that will soon enough, spread to other countries and lead to worldwide socialism (AKA true socialism).
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  19. Ted Grant and Trotsky were fighting for this. They believed this would happen, and they were actively engaged in the struggle to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy. For them, this was their key prediction. HOWEVER, both of them understood that, if a second workers’ revolution were to never happen, the bureaucracy would, eventually, take the country right back to capitalism (which is what happened).
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  21. Now, back to Russia in 1987-1991 (I will get to China in a moment). This WAS NOT A REVOLUTION. If anything, it was a counter revolution, because it re-established capitalism in a country in which capitalism had been overthrown. This is NOT what Ted Grant was predicting would happen. What happened in 1987-1991 was that the Russian Bureaucracy, purely to enrich itself, decided to privatize the remaining gains of the Russian Revolution: the planned economy. Thus, all of the Russian bureaucrats became the now famous Russian Oligarchs. This is the completion of the Stalinist counter-revolution that began in the 1920s. This is certainly not comparable to the Bourgeois revolutions of the 1770s, 90s, and early 1800s.
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  23. What this restoration showed us was the utter limits of the Stalinist Bureaucracy to advance anything forward. The Stalinist Bureaucracy didn’t have the same progressive character as the Napoleonic Bureaucracy, in that it didn't advance its socioeconomic system forward, but hindered its growth and in the end took it backwards. Proletarian Bonapartism is not progressive, and is not a historical necessity in the same way as classical Bonapartism was “a viable child of history,” as Ted Grant puts it. While capitalism needed a period of Bonapartism to develop, socialism does not, and Proletarian Bonapartism cut across the historically NECESSARY period of workers’ democracy in Russia.
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  25. As for some of the matter-of-fact language that Ted Grant uses towards the end of his essay, he was merely rooting for a second revolution that would re-establish workers’ democracy and overthrow the Stalinist Bureaucracy, but this didn’t happen. The inevitability Ted Grant was speaking of was on the basis of the economic factors, which despite having degenerated, was still a nationalized, planned economy. It is because of this fact that both he and Trotsky optimistically predicted that a second workers’ revolution would occur, but neither precluded the possibility that the economic factor might be changed considerably enough so by the bureaucracies of those countries, before this revolutions could occur, that the economic factor could then be considered capitalist, and in such a case a counter-revolutionary movement towards capitalism would likely win out.
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  27. Message Part Two
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  29. Is China a Capitalist Country?
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  31. Now onto China. Keep in mind that we are talking about a country that got to watch as the Russian Bureaucracy destroyed itself. The Russian Communist Party was destroyed in the midst of all of this privatization. The Chinese Communist Party watched this, and was smart enough to realize that it didn’t not want the same fate. Thus, they have managed their transition to capitalism in far slower, smarter ways than Russia ever did. For China, the transition back to capitalism has been a 20-30 year process, while in Russia it was 4 years. Thus, in China the Communist Party is still in control, though they are not ‘communist’ in any stretch of the imagination. The Chinese Communist Party has over 100 billionaires within its ranks, the market is in full control of the economy, over 50 countries are indebted to China (meaning it’s also imperialist) and despite the state still playing a large role, the economic mode of production is on the basis of private property. If this isn’t capitalism than what is? We must always bring things back to basics and remember the mode of production is a critical piece of information in historical materialist examination of a society (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels has a good section on this).
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  33. When we talk about Russia and China today, we are talking about two capitalist, and imperialist countries. This means that for them to transition to building socialism, they must first establish a healthy workers’ democracy, the entire system will, once again, need to be overthrown. Russia and China have been thrown back to square one, and both the economy and the state will have to be overthrown, once again.
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  35. As for how China became capitalist, as I’ve said it has taken a miraculously longer period of time for that process to occur, as China drew some lessons from the USSR. We would argue that a ‘cold transition’ to capitalism has occurred in China. You can read more here:
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  37. https://www.marxist.com/china-long-march-capitalism021006.htm. - Part One
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  39. https://www.marxist.com/china-long-march-capitalism041006.htm - Part Two
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  41. https://www.marxist.com/china-long-march-capitalism131006.htm - Part Three
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  43. This pamphlet really sums up the whole process nicely by explaining how this process occurred in Russia and then explains how China took a copycat approach, but iterated successfully on Russia’s failures to maintain a degree of party control over the state through the process. I think if we discuss differences of opinion or questions you might have with this pamphlet it might help to focus our conversation and keep my replies much shorter, lol.
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  45. Deformed vs Degenerated Workers’ State and the Question of Syria & Burma
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  47. Ted Grant’s theory in Against State Capitalism expands on Trotsky’s theory on Bonapartism through the process of defending Trotsky’s theory and criticizing Tony Cliff’s theory of state capitalism. The IMT accepts Ted Grant’s theory, which makes a distinction between a deformed worker’s state and a degenerated worker’s state, the latter being a term which Ted Grant coined. A degenerated workers’ state is different in that it is a workers’ state which has, quite literally, degenerated from a healthy worker’s state into what you might call a deformed worker’s state (though it is NOT a deformed workers’ state, it just bears many of the same characteristics; it is a degenerated workers’ state). We would argue that the only degenerated workers’ state to ever exist would be the USSR, because the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1922 was the only healthy worker’s state to ever exist (on the principles of Leninism-Trotskyism). A deformed workers’ state is what every other nation which has operated under a planned, nationalized economy has been, as none of them ever operated according to the principles of Lenin-Trotsky; Marxism was never truly in action in these other states.
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  49. It is because these countries have operated under planned nationalized economies and were established through workers’ revolution, that, through dialectical Marxist analysis, we can conclude these countries were, at one point, Proletariat Bonapartist; the political power of the proletariat was expropriated from day one. Unlike the Soviet Union, however, we would categorize them as deformed workers’ states because they never had a healthy workers’ democracy to begin with. I’m not currently familiar enough with the economics and politics of either Syria or Burma presently to comment on what we’d consider them today. I would need to research that and perform a Marxist analysis first.
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  51. Now you might say that it is unscientific of us to lump a bunch of states together under one term, but this makes scientific sense when we consider the law off combined and uneven development: Once one country has a workers’ state, that changes the trajectory of every other revolution. In the same manner in which Britain was the first country to develop capitalism, that changes the conditions for every other country to develop its own capitalism, the Russian revolution changes the ways in which every other country developed their own revolutions. When the Syrian and Burmese revolutions occurred, Russia was already a degenerated workers’ state. We would argue that the economies and politics of the Syria and Burmese states reflected the degenerated workers’ state of Russia.
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  53. Concerning Trotsky’s Conclusions on the Bureaucracy’s Independence
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  55. My comrades and I are not entirely sure what you mean when you say “the bureaucracy cannot take an independent path of its own”. We’re not sure where Trotsky said this or if he ever did, but our guess is that you’re referring to his idea that the bureaucracy’s existence was tied to the nationalized, planned economy, which is certainly was. But, the bureaucracy did have a great deal of independence and influence over the working class. Remember that per Marx-Lenin-Trotsky’s Bonapartism and Ted Grant’s Proletarian Bonapartism, the dictatorship/bureaucracy has expropriated the political power of the class which it represents and takes on a life of its own, appearing to rise above the class it represent as though it were a new class itself (it is NOT a new class, this was merely said to illustrate its position in class struggle).
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  57. Thanks For Reading!
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  59. I hope that clears everything up, lol. I threw a lot at you. Once again, if you need any evidence of the claims I've made, such as Trotsky's position on a given theory or subject, just let me know and I'll find the block quote for you.
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