- 'the dictatorship of the proletariat' - was to be a different type of state, for the first time representing the interests of the vast majority of the disappearance of class divisions made compulsion and repression ever less necessary. Though workers led by Lenin took power in the not what took place in the Soviet Union.
What went wrong? LENIN spelled out the perspective of a workers' state which would wither away through disuse, as the elimi nation of class divisions rendered it unnecessary.
This conclusion flowed from the analysis of the state as an organ of repression wielded by the dominant class against those it sought to oppress Once the "working class' -the overwhelming majority. became the ruling class, and the pressed minority, it was ob machine would have to be very different. As trotsky wrote summarising the theory in Rev. olution Betmuni "The regime of proletarian dictatorship from its very beginning thus ceases to be a 'state' in the old sense of the word - a special apparatus, that is, for the holding in subLENIN argued that the revolutionary workers' state the population. As it progressed towards socialism jection of the majority of the people. The material power, together with the weapons, goes over directly and imme diately into the hands of workers' organisations such as the soviets. The state as a bureaucratic apparatus begins to die away the first day of the proletarian dictatorship."
Of course this didn't happen in the USSR, as Trotsky "The bureaucracy not only has not disappeared, yielding its place to the masses, but has turned into an uncontrolled force dominating the masses. The army not only has not been laced by the armed people, but has given birth to privileged officers' caste .. bearers of he dictator pare while the f "the armed now forbidden in the Soviet Union to carry even non-ex plosive weapons."
Materialist view
What then was the key to this apparent refutation of Lenin's most essential theory? Trotsky returns for explanation Marx's materialist view of law and social relations.
He pinpoints the problem as the painfully inadequate econ omic growth of the post-revolutionary Soviet Union. The Botinherited the war-ravaged, backward peas. ant economy of the collapsed Tsarist empire, and then faced international isolation and blockade with the failure of revolutions elsewhere in Europe.
These were the material conditions that made socialism -the elimination of want - impossible, and communism- the eradication of class divisions -inconceivable.
Without this development of the material base for socialism, the related political develop ments were impossible. Trotsky quotes the early Marx from two years before the Communist Manifesto spelling out the painful truth that:
"A development of the productive forces is the absolutely necessary practical premise lof Communisml, because out it want is generalised, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap must revive."
Thirty vears later. Marx touched upon the same theme when he argued that:
"Law can never be higher than the economic structure and the cultural development of society conditioned by that structure."
How, then, did the rian state of October 1917 dexenerate into the bureaucratic parody of itself that Trotsky so ratnicosty dissected 20 years later?
Lenin. echoing Marx, ac cepted that until it could radically change the economy and eliminate shortages, the carly stages of the workers' state would 'inevitably bourgeois law in the allocation of insufficient supplies of commodities. Until it could generate sufficent wealth to equality it would havetodefend inequalities. He argued that:
"Bourgeois law in relation to the distribution of the objects was compelled to create a bourgeois type of instrument - that s the same old gendarme, al though in a new uniform."
The minority defended by this gendarme was no longer the bourgeoisie-long gone - but now the bureauAs the bureaucracy itself became entrenched, this led to a complete break from the meth. ods and programme of BolshevOf course the Soviet Union carried through a huge industrialisation programme that would have been inconceivable under coperarisa, which it would have languished in even greater backwaroness.
But Trotsky had little time for those apologists for slalinistn whoconsoled themselves on the lack of workers' democracy by marvelling at the cconomic ad Vances Canade under Stalin, comparing conditions in the 1930s with those of the old Tsarist regime.
The real comparison that counts, said Trotsky, is between living standards in the USSR and those in the advanced capi.
requires a higher