As Trotsky sets out, elsewhere, a workers' state is inconceivable without soviets, because a workers state is a soviet state, with a soviet government, but a workers' revolution, is conceivable without the existence of soviets. It is possible on the basis of factory committees. This debate has been taken up, in a confused manner, by Mike Macnair, in the Weekly Worker, in looking back to the events fifty years ago in Chile. In the process, he confuses the vital difference between the Popular Front, and United Front. He says,
“Trotskyist authors place great emphasis on the fact that UP was (as its name tells us) a popular front. But the question posed is: would a united front government, of the SP and CP alone, have been any better? The answer is quite plainly not. I have quoted above the delusions in the Chilean constitutional order promoted both by Allende and Luis Corvalan.”
But, there is no such thing as a “United Front” government, because the concept of the United Front is precisely as an extra-parliamentary formation, of rank and file workers, formed for the specific purpose of practical action, in which a sizeable revolutionary party seeks to break workers, still clinging to reformism, from their existing party leaders.
Both the factory committees, and the soviets represent the highest form of such a United Front. Trotsky, describes the way, however, when it comes to the revolution, the soviet is the best designed for that function, as against the factory committee. He explains why he had argued for the creation of soviets in Germany, at the point of the initial rise in the revolutionary wave, but against it, later, when the factory committees had already established themselves, and the question of insurrection was on the table. To have raised the question of soviets at that point, was to cause confusion, and inevitable delay, because real soviets, as against the bureaucratic Stalinist constructs, take time to prepare, to educate the workers in their nature, and to organise elections to them. It would be to switch horses midstream. Trotsky continues,
“Under the conditions mentioned above in broad outline, now especially characteristic of Germany, dual power in the country can develop precisely from workers’ control as its main source. One must dwell upon this fact, if only to reject that fetishism of the soviet form which the epigones in the Comintern have put into circulation.”
(Workers Control of Production)
As Marx describes, in his Inaugural Address, the worker cooperatives show, in practice, that the workers do not need the capitalists, nor their appointed Directors, and, thereby, illustrates the basis of workers control, as a revolutionary demand. But, the bourgeoisie will only concede that when forced to do so by the workers themselves, arms in hand. As Trotsky describes, workers may only arrive at this recognition of the need for that workers' control after the experience of long strikes for pay, or to defend jobs etc., as the bourgeoisie responds to them.
That, again, demonstrates the requirement for the soviet, during this period, when the workers are going through this period of prolonged strikes, and the development of their class consciousness. The soviet can only arise out of that process, and feed back into it. They develop the revolutionary consciousness of the workers, enabling increasing degrees of workers' self-government, and workers' power, as a condition of dual power arising in society. They are the means of creating revolutionary workers' defence squads and militia.
Yet, the Stalinists claimed that soviets could only be established after the bourgeois revolution had been completed, and the proletarian revolution was at hand. As the above demonstrates, even where the bourgeois revolution has been accomplished, the Stalinist account is wrong. Soviets can only be developed as revolutionary organs when the class struggle has reached a certain level, i.e. when the revolutionary wave is rising. But, that necessarily means before a period of dual-power exists, let alone the eve of insurrection. In the case of countries still needing to carry through the bourgeois revolution, and where that process, on the basis of permanent revolution, i.e. a leading role played by a revolutionary proletariat and its party, the Stalinists argument is even more wrong.
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