84. The last years of Trotsky’s life had been dedicated to preparing the Fourth International for the coming war. Of fundamental importance was his opposition to a number of tendencies that began to designate the Soviet bureaucracy as a new, exploiting class, defined variously as “state capitalism” or “bureaucratic collectivism.” Trotsky wrote In Defence of Marxism against a faction in the SWP led by James Burnham and Max Shachtman, who shared much with others such as Bruno Rizzi in Italy and the Urbahns group in Germany. The conflicting issues of perspective raised during Trotsky’s political and philosophical struggle against Burnham and Shachtman were to recur again and again within the Fourth International.

85. In The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936, Trotsky had stressed that the proper starting point for defining the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state was its origins in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the working class. While its subsequent isolation had allowed the unchecked growth of a bureaucracy, this layer rested upon the property forms created by the October Revolution, based upon collective planned production rather than private ownership and the market. Using the apparatus of the state, the bureaucracy appropriated the lion’s share of production. But its control of distribution did not extend to ownership of the productive forces. Its existence was parasitic on the body of the workers’ state, rather than integral to it. The task facing the Soviet workers was to overthrow the bureaucracy in a political revolution, so as to safeguard the economic foundations for the development towards socialism and prevent the restoration of capitalism. The still existing gains of the October Revolution had to be defended by the international working class against imperialist overthrow.

86. The theorists of state capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism repudiated Trotsky’s appraisal. Following the signing of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact on August 23, 1939, Burnham and Shachtman urged the SWP to drop its unconditional defence of the USSR against imperialist attack. Their position echoed that of a layer of pro-Democratic Party intellectuals, at a time when the Roosevelt administration was in favour of entry into the war against Germany.

87. The political retreat of this petty-bourgeois layer confirmed Trotsky’s insistence that its definition of the Soviet Union involved a political prognosis that threw into question the revolutionary character of the working class and the prospects for socialism on a world scale. The renewed drive to imperialist militarism demonstrated that the crisis of capitalism had reached extreme limits, and that a new system for the planned development of the productive forces was required. But according to the advocates of state capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism, the working class had proved incapable of accomplishing such a social transformation. Instead, its place had been taken by a bureaucratic elite, which would replace the decayed bourgeoisie as a new ruling class, not merely in the Soviet Union but on a world scale.

88. Behind Burnham’s redefinition of the Soviet Union as “bureaucratic collectivism” was the pessimistic conclusion that it represented a new form of society, not foreseen by Marxism, dominated and run by a managerial elite. This acceptance of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a permanent feature of society, rather than a temporary, cancerous excrescence on the workers’ state, flowed from a rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class and the nature of the imperialist epoch as the death agony of capitalism. The arguments advanced by Burnham and Shachtman were to foreshadow a long line of attacks on Marxism that emerged after World War II. While their conclusions varied, all of these revisionist groupings—whether in the form of various theories of “state capitalism” or Michel Pablo’s “centuries of deformed workers’ states”—regarded the Stalinist regimes as having historical validity and wrote off the working class as a revolutionary force.

89. After splitting with the SWP in 1940, Shachtman established the Workers Party, which took a “third camp” position during the war. Burnham quickly left the workers’ movement altogether, joining the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, and later became a leading advocate of the Cold War and a prominent Republican.

90. Another element of the 1939-40 struggle requires attention: its explicitly theoretical-philosophical dimension. Burnham, a professor of philosophy at New York University, declared himself an opponent of materialist dialectics. Like many others who opposed dialectical materialism from the standpoint of philosophical idealism (especially in its neo-Kantian form), Burnham dismissed the materialism defended by Marx and Engels as merely a product of outdated nineteenth century science and its excessive reverence for Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

As for dialectics, Burnham ridiculed Hegel as “the century-dead arch-muddler of human thought.”^[1] In his reply to Burnham, Trotsky provided a succinct characterization of both materialist dialectics and the professor’s theoretical method, explaining the relationship between Burnham’s pragmatic outlook and his political conclusions:

Vulgar thought operates with such concepts as capitalism, morals, freedom, workers’ state, etc. as fixed abstractions, presuming that capitalism is equal to capitalism; morals are equal to morals, etc. Dialectical thinking analyzes all things and phenomena in their continuous change, while determining in the material conditions of those changes that critical limit beyond which ‘A’ ceases to be ‘A’, a workers’ state ceases to be a workers’ state.

The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion. Dialectical thinking gives to concepts, by means of closer approximations, corrections, concretization, a richness of content and flexibility; I would even say a succulence which to a certain extent brings them close to living phenomena. Not capitalism in general, but a given capitalism at a given stage of development. Not a workers’ state in general, but a given workers’ state in a backward country in an imperialist encirclement, etc.

Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality. Hegel in his Logic established a series of laws: change of quantity into quality, development through contradictions, conflict of content and form, interruption of continuity, change of possibility into inevitability, etc., which are just as important for theoretical thought as is the simple syllogism for more elementary tasks.

Hegel wrote before Darwin and before Marx. Thanks to the powerful impulse given to thought by the French Revolution, Hegel anticipated the general movement of science. But because it was only an anticipation, although by a genius, it received from Hegel an idealistic character. Hegel operated with ideological shadows as the ultimate reality. Marx demonstrated that the movement of these ideological shadows reflected nothing but the movement of material bodies.

We call our dialectic, materialist, since its roots are neither in heaven nor in the depths of our ‘free will,’ but in objective reality, in nature. Consciousness grew out of the unconscious, psychology out of physiology, the organic world out of the inorganic, the solar system out of the nebulae. On all the rungs of the ladder of development, the quantitative changes were transformed into the qualitative. Our thought, including dialectical thought, is only one of the forms of the expression of changing matter. There is place within this system for neither God, nor Devil, nor immortal soul, nor eternal norms of laws and morals. The dialectic of thinking, having grown out of the dialectic of nature, possesses consequently a thoroughly materialist character.^[2]

91. Shachtman asserted that no one had demonstrated “that agreement or disagreement on the more abstract doctrines of dialectical materialism necessarily affects today’s and tomorrow’s concrete political issues—and political parties, programs and struggles are based on such concrete issues.” Trotsky replied:

...What parties? What programs? What struggles? All parties and all programs are here lumped together. The party of the proletariat is a party unlike all the rest. It is not at all based upon “such concrete issues.” In its very foundation it is diametrically opposed to the parties of the bourgeois horse-traders and petty-bourgeois rag patchers. Its task is the preparation of a social revolution and the regeneration of mankind on new material and moral foundations. In order not to give way under the pressure of bourgeois public opinion and police repression, the proletarian revolutionist, a leader all the more, requires a clear, far-sighted, completely thought-out world outlook. Only upon the basis of a unified Marxist conception is it possible to correctly approach ‘concrete’ questions.^[3]