Degenerated workers' state
타락한 노동자 국가
Trotsky's characterisation of the Soviet Union under Stalin. Because the October Revolution had overthrown the bourgeoisie and nationalised the means of production, the USSR remained a workers' state, but the working class's democratic control had been usurped by a bureaucracy. Trotsky saw the bureaucracy not as a new ruling class but as a privileged "caste", and the USSR as a society transitional between capitalism and socialism that could move on to socialism or fall back into capitalism. The fullest statement is The Revolution Betrayed (1936).
In depth
Why a "workers' state"
According to Trotsky, Russia was a genuine workers' state from October 1917 until Stalin consolidated his power. When the revolution failed to spread to Germany and other industrial countries of Western Europe, and the civil war wore down the working class materially and politically, the state began to degenerate; but its economic basis, collective ownership of the means of production, remained. In chapter 9 of The Revolution Betrayed, "Is the bureaucracy a ruling class?", he argued that classes are defined by their place in the social system of economy, above all by their relation to the means of production, and that the bureaucracy, holding neither stocks nor bonds and unable to bequeath its position, was not a ruling class.
A transitional society
He called the USSR "a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism": its productive forces were still far from sufficient to give state property a socialist character; the urge to primitive accumulation born of want broke out through the pores of the planned economy; and norms of distribution of a bourgeois character were the basis of a new differentiation of society. Such a society could not last; it would move to socialism or fall back to capitalism, depending on whether the overthrow of the bureaucratic dictatorship was led by the organised working class. Hence he combined the call for a political revolution, removing the bureaucracy while keeping the property relations, with the defence of the USSR against imperialism and capitalist restoration.
"Degenerated" and "deformed"
"Degenerated workers' state" usually refers only to the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, Trotskyists of the Fourth International called states such as those of Eastern Europe and China, where the means of production were collectivised but the working class had never held political power directly, "deformed workers' states". Within Trotskyism, Tony Cliff rejected the formula and called the USSR bureaucratic state capitalism, and Max Shachtman and others called it "bureaucratic collectivism"; Ernest Mandel kept to the view of a bureaucratically degenerated workers' state.