The only secure basis of building Socialism, and of establishing a Workers State, is for the working-class to establish itself as ruling class, not in the negative way that occurred in Russia, as a result of all other classes being liquidated, but positively, by forming itself as a class for itself, and exercising direct, democratic control over the socialised capital/means of production, and by extending that into other forms of workers' democracy, exerting control over all other aspects of life. Only then does the class as a whole create the conditions under which its vanguard, chosen as its political representatives, acts in conformance with its wishes, and thereby exercise control over the state.
But, the working class was never in that position, and the soviets were never a truly democratic representation of the class, as Trotsky's description of them attests. They were more a representation of those with the “sharpest elbows” able to lever their way on to them, whether they represented anyone or not, and in 1917, and after, that was increasingly the Bolsheviks themselves. And, instead of it being that workers control over production, on a day to day basis, fed through into workers representation on to the local soviets, the more it became the case that the flow was in the other direction, with the Bolsheviks exercising control over the soviets, which were then used to exercise control over the factories, transport and so on, and the element of direct workers' control and democracy was increasingly denuded, even where it had existed to begin with. What was created, therefore, was the same economic base of that German “modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation” - although as Lenin describes, actually the vast majority of the economy continued to be dominated by peasant production, and small scale petty-commodity production – with a Workers' State, but one that was increasingly separated from the working-class itself. It was a Workers State, in which the workers had little or no control, and in which the petty-bourgeois workers' bureaucracy were able to dip their fingers into the till, like a corrupt union baron, feathering their nest from the contributions of the union's members.
As Hal Draper put it,
“The distinction between the Bolshevik and social democratic variants of state socialism should not be ignored, but it is more a matter of degree than of substance. The 'degeneration' of the Russian Revolution was not a matter of Lenin's intolerance, nor of Trotsky's militarism, nor of Stalin's personality, nor of the economic backwardness nor of the relatively small size of the Russian working class, nor of the autocratic character of the Russian State, nor of the embattled position of the revolutionary regime, although all these factors played their part in determining the extent of the degeneration. The degeneration was already inherent in the class character of the revolution which underlay the statist conception of socialism which it adopted as its project.”
Indeed, for that reason the workers' state in Russia should really be described as deformed from the beginning, rather than “degenerated”.
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