Conclusions

Abstract

Trotsky’s analysis of the nature of the Soviet social formation and of its party-state bureaucracy, of which The Revolution Betrayed represents the most fully-formed exposition, continues to provide the most coherent framework for an understanding of the socioeconomic and political development of the first workers’ state since the October Revolution. His problematic of the ‘bureaucratically degenerated workers’ state’ is complemented by the insights developed by Preobrazhensky in The New Economics, in which he located the dominant contradiction of the transition period between capitalism and socialism in the ultimately irreconcilable dynamics of the plan and the market, which respectively correspond, in the last instance, to the antagonistic class interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This contradiction itself represents the immanent form of the underlying contradiction in the transitional social formation: the non-correspondence between the dominant social relations of production and the productive forces, whereby the inadequate development and still intrinsically ‘capitalist’ character of the latter continue to prevent their fully social appropriation and conscious setting in motion by the associated producers. Its resolution coincides with the suppression of the reproduction of all the conditions of existence of capitalist social relations, which can only be realised in the context of an authentic proletarian political practice intervening at all levels of the transitional social formation.¹