PORCI-S Defend the

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the working class in Russia overthrew capitalism and established the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In the following years the key sections of the economy were taken out of the hands of private owners and the beginnings of a planned economy were established.

But a number of factors, the economic backwardness of Russia, its continuing isolation in a capitalist world after the failure of the postwar revolutionary upheavals in Europe, the virtual elimination of the already small proletariat in the Civil War and tamine, led to the rise to power of a conservative bureaucracy, intent on calling a halt to international revolution and opting instead for what it saw as a gradual path to socialism in a single country.

course of time the Part One. By lan Swindale bureaucracy deprived the working class of any control over the political, economic and foreign policies pursued by the Soviet Union.

All opposition was branded as counter-revolutionary and purged, and in conditions of acute scarcity, the bureaucracy creamed off a disproportionate share of the wealth that was being produced.

The question which confronted the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky, which arose in opposition to the growth of the bureaucracy, was whether the bureaucracy had succeeded in destroying all the gains of the October revolution (in which case the working class would have to start again) or whether some of the gains of the revolution still existed and therefore had to be defended against imperialist Class nature In order to answer this question it was necessar i to decide what was the lass nature of the Soviet state.

Did the dictatorship of the proletariat still hold sway in the Soviet Union or was the bureaucracy a new ruling class in a society where a counter-revolution had overturned the nationalised property relations established after 1917?

Massive defeats

Because the appalling crimes of Stalinism, all carried out in the name of socialism, were leading to the most massive defeats for the working class in one country after another in the late 1920s and 1930s, there were many in the revolutionary movement who wanted to declare that Russia was no longer a workers' state.

The dictatorship of the proletariat had been replaced, they argued, by the rise to power of a new class which had politically dispossessed the working class and which had established a state capitalist society.

Taking as their starting point the new depths of betrayal to which the Stalinist bureaucracy daily sank, these largely petty-bourgeois elements within the workers' movement, skated the surface of the real developments taking place in the Soviet Union, rather than base themselves on a class analysis of the USSR.

How did Trotsky answer his critics within the International Left Opposition and later, the Fourth Assessment He insisted that any understanding of developments in the Soviet Union must begin from an assessment of the objective class nature of the Soviet Union.

If a counter-revolution had taken place and the dictatorship of the proletariat overthrown, when did this happen?

"The Marxian thesis relating to the catastrophic character of the transfer of power from the hands of one class into the hands of another applies not only to revolutionary periods... but also to the periods of counter-revolution when society rolls backwards.

"He who asserts that the Soviet government has been gradually changed from proletarian to bourgeois is only, so to speak, running backwards the film of reformism"

No gradual return If there had not been a violent counter revolutionary overthrow of the proletarian dictatorship and if there could be no gradual return to bourgeois rule, what had in fact happened in the USSR?

Trotsky explains that social classes do not at all times rule directly. He shows how, for example, the capitalist class in a number of countries in the 1930s were forced to allow the fascists to rule on their behalf.

Heavy Consumer In many instances the bourgeoisie did not enthusiastically hand over power to the fascists because the fascists themselves formed their own bureaucracy which was a very heavy consumer of the wealth of capitalist society.

But at certain periods, this form of rule became necessary for the capitalists who were unable to preserve their private property through so-called democratic means, and despite the cost involvea, the fascists were allowed to defend capitalist property relations in their oen brutal way.

For Trotsky, the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia was a sick dictator-

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In October 1917, for the first time in history,