Repudiation (2014)

Book Review from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

State Capitalism and World Revolution. By CLR James. PM Press. 2013

CLR James will perhaps be better known for his book on the slave rebellion in Haiti during the French Revolution, The Black Jacobins, and for his writings on cricket, but at one time he was a leading Trotskyist.

Originally an internal document circulated in 1950 within the so-called ‘Fourth International’ which Trotsky and a handful of his followers had set up in 1938, State Capitalism and World Revolution was a contribution to a discussion on its future political orientation, and it has been republished here. The ‘orthodox’ majority wanted to stick to Trotsky’s own view that Russia was still a ‘workers state’ because of the state ownership and planned economy that existed there and so was better than capitalism and deserving of working class support.

James showed that state ownership and a planned economy was not socialism and that it was absurd to describe as belonging to the ‘workers’ a state in which the workers were oppressed and exploited. He went further and argued that this type of state capitalism was the future of capitalism and that in supporting it the orthodox Trotskyists were in effect supporting capitalism. This was true then and it is still true today.

James was wrong about full state capitalism being the next stage of capitalism (but in the 1940s he was not alone in making this mistake) and also  about still regarding the Bolshevik coup as a ’proletarian revolution’. In the preface to the 1956 re-edition (reproduced here), however, he explained:

  The political conclusions of this economic analysis can be summed up in its total repudiation of the Leninist theory and practice of the Vanguard Party for our era.

State Capitalism and Revolution is in fact a total repudiation of Trotskyism and worth reading for that.

Adam Buick