From The Colonial Revolution and the Deformed Workers States

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The central thesis is that the revolutionary overturns in the colonial and semi-colonial world after the Second World War have produced a specific type of state — the deformed workers' state, or proletarian Bonapartist state — which must be understood as a historically necessary aberration, not as a healthy workers' state on the model of Russia in 1917–23. Grant argues that where the bourgeoisie is incapable of carrying out the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and where the working class is too weak or passive to lead independently, radical sections of the officer caste and intelligentsia can seize power, expropriate landlordism and capitalism, and establish state ownership and planning. This represents a gigantic step forward compared to the old semi-feudal and colonial order, but it simultaneously installs a totalitarian bureaucratic dictatorship that represses workers' democracy. The article insists that these regimes — from China and Cuba to Ethiopia and Afghanistan — are fundamentally the same in class character, and that the sectarian squabbling over whether one is "healthy" and another "fascist" reveals a complete failure of Marxist method.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws centrally on Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, but extends it to account for the peculiar historical conditions of the post-war epoch. Grant argues that the classical model of permanent revolution — in which the proletariat leads the peasantry, completes the bourgeois-democratic tasks, and then passes immediately to socialist tasks — has been distorted by the dominance of Stalinism in the workers' movement and the delay of revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. The result is a "caricature of permanent revolution": the bourgeois-democratic tasks are accomplished, but by a Bonapartist elite rather than by the self-activity of the proletariat.

The article also draws heavily on Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy as a parasitic caste that develops the productive forces but at enormous cost, and on the distinction between a degenerated workers' state (where workers' democracy once existed and can in principle be restored) and a deformed workers' state (where it never existed and requires a political revolution to establish). Grant explicitly rejects the "state capitalist" characterisation of these regimes, insisting that state ownership and planning make them transitional economies between capitalism and socialism, however bureaucratically distorted.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was written in 1978, at a moment when a wave of colonial revolutions had produced deformed workers' states across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East — Vietnam, Laos, Kampuchea, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Syria. Grant directly addresses the armed conflicts between these states (the Sino-Soviet border clashes, the Vietnam-Kampuchea war) as confirmation of the analysis: nationalist bureaucracies, based on privilege and lacking workers' democracy, inevitably come into conflict with each other.

The article also examines the 1978 coup in Afghanistan, correctly predicting that the new "Communist" regime would move toward proletarian Bonapartism — expropriating landlordism, leaning on the peasantry, and establishing a totalitarian state. Grant notes that this would provoke a ferocious counter-revolution if the regime temporised, and that the only progressive way forward was the installation of a deformed workers' state. The subsequent Soviet invasion in December 1979 and the decade-long war that followed bear out the contradictions Grant identified.

The discussion of Ethiopia is particularly sharp: Grant defends the characterisation of Mengistu's regime as a deformed workers' state against those who called it "fascist," pointing out that every crime attributed to it — repression of independent unions, suppression of national minorities, one-party dictatorship — was committed a hundred times over by Stalin. The decisive question is not the political regime but the class basis of property relations: state ownership versus private ownership.

Where the Argument Continues

This article is the fourth section of a longer work, The Colonial Revolution and the Deformed Workers' States, which itself is part of the broader collection The Unbroken Thread. The argument continues in subsequent sections that address the relationship between these regimes and the world revolution, the question of political revolution, and the prospects for workers' democracy. Grant's analysis is further developed in later IDOM articles on the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the continuing revolutions in the Middle East. The theoretical framework is also elaborated in the Militant International Review articles from the 1970s and 1980s, and in the Against the Stream series on the colonial revolution.

Connections

The article stands in direct polemical opposition to the various "Trotskyist" sects that Grant accuses of eclecticism and formalism — particularly those that characterised Cuba as a healthy workers' state, China as state capitalist, or Ethiopia as fascist. It connects to Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed and his writings on the colonial question, as well as to Lenin's The State and Revolution and What is to Be Done? (the latter critically, for the "trade union consciousness" error). The analysis of Bonapartism draws on Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Readers should also consult Grant's earlier writings on the Sino-Soviet split and the character of the Chinese revolution, as well as the work of other Marxist theorists of the deformed workers' state, such as Ernest Mandel's Marxist Economic Theory (though Grant would reject Mandel's characterisation of Eastern Europe as state capitalist).

Key Quotes

1. "Only the Marxist tendency in Britain argued against the Stalinists and the alleged 'Trotskyist' sects and explained the inevitability of Mao's victory and the establishment of a deformed workers' state."

2. "The horrible caricature of workers' rule in Russia, China, and the other countries of deformed workers' states attracts them precisely because of the position of the 'intellectual' educated cadres of that society. What is repulsive to Marxism is what attracts the Stalinists."

3. "Not for nothing did Trotsky explain to the American Socialist Workers Party that, separated from state ownership of industry and the land, the political regime in Russia was fascist! There was nothing to distinguish the political regime of Stalin from that of Hitler except the decisive fact that one defended and had its privileges based on state ownership while the other had its privileges, power, income and prestige based on the defence of private property."

4. "The whole essence of Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution lies in the idea that the colonial bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie of the backward countries are incapable of carrying out the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution."

5. "All these proletarian Bonapartist regimes are temporary aberrations on the road of the world revolution. The excrescence which Stalinism represents will be eliminated almost in passing when the mighty proletariat of one of the advanced countries takes power in the West or the regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe are regenerated by the overthrow of bureaucracies."

6. "The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves. This is not because it is some kind of penance which the workers must do or because they are 'nice people'. It is because without this there is the inevitability of a small minority having a monopoly of culture they will then use — and inevitably abuse — against the interests of the workers and peasants and in their own interests."